State of the Game #141: No Man’s Pass Alpha

Welcome back for an exciting State of the Game update!

This week, I have been solely focused on finishing up the alpha version of No Man’s Pass V2. There were two snapshots this week, one on Saturday and one yesterday, with playable versions of the map in it.

The first version of the map was met with positive reviews, but had a few spots in it that allowed you to get stuck or fall into a hole. The updated version addressed some of the gameplay issues I saw while playing with real people and fixed up as many of the bugs as I could find.

Overall, it seems people are enjoying it.

At this point in time I would be sending parts of the level out for art, but unfortunately the artist I had contacted before had to take another gig and will be unavailableĀ for the next six months. I do have back up artists and have also posted a job listing and have been reviewing new candidates. I hope to have an artist on board and starting work before the next state of the game.

While I wait, I have started work on a few things. One of the was to get a dev environment step with unity 4.5, to test migration strategies to the newer versions of the engine, as was as using some new tools to create better shaders for the current engine. I have an excellent tool called Shader Forge, but it can sadly only be used in unity 4.5. [I can’t upgrade past unity 4.2 because they changed the compile system in unity 4.3 and M.A.V. is too big for the 32 bit editor, cashing a crash when I try and compile a new build] My hope is to use the tool to create the shader in unity 4.5 and then pull it backwards into unity 4.2.

Also, I have started up some more part creation. I don’t want to flood out too many parts before the unlock system is in place as I don’t want to overwhelm players. [There are already 325 parts] I do feel that there are some parts that need to be in place, at least in some form, to get a better idea of how the whole meta game will play out and how maps are designed. I will let you speculate what those parts are šŸ˜‰

Do expect a LOT of parts with the social update though.

That is all for this week! Thanks for your support!

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