State of the Game #214 : The struggle continues

As you can tell by the delay of this post, it’s been quite the week!

In the game I have been putting together the final touches to the loading screens, getting rid of all the last little hitches as you go from level to level. This was really important to me, as most unity games DON’T have this issue fixed and get a lot of hate for it online. The last thing I want is for MAV to seem like another ‘janky’ unity game. We also implemented realtime key binding reading for the loading screens to ensure the hints always tell you the right keys to press to do the actions it is informing you of.

There was some small random polish that happened to the rockets as well. I changed the rocket trails to not be white and instead they are a much more realistic gray color. With this, I also was convinced on stream to change the explosion VFX, which now matches the sound and damage output of the rockets a lot better.

Speaking of rockets, while playing the game I found a lot of the sounds could quickly get over whelming from a volume stand point, and a few people watching the streams agreed. I did a volume tuning pass on all the audio which now better balances out the sounds based on distance. I also updated the volume preferences to work with the new audio system as well.

Then there was a bit of touch up work to do in the main player profile menu. I changed all the colors to better match with the rest of the UI design and I added a spot to show your current rank emblem. Small stuff, but it was missing and needed to be shown.

I also did some minor bug fixing and one major bug. There was an issue with my IK performance code which caused two big issues. First of all, if a players IK was turned off, they stopped making footprints. Might not seem like a big deal, but it could have gameplay implications and needed to be fixed. The next issue was that when the IK system had been turned off and it came back on, the legs would fly off in random directions, often taking the better part of a second to settle back down. You can see this happening in several dev streams. This issue, along with the footstep issue, has now been solved! I was also able to adjust a few settings to make the IK much more stable and not have the legs flying around when you are dropping or going over rough surfaces. Overall, it’s a big improvement to the visuals of the game.

Now, for some slightly bad news. Due to my personal life [my family never seeing me] along with some secrets I have for the next update, I will no longer be doing development streams on twitch. We have gotten a lot done together on the streams, but I feel we are at a point where I was spending more time trying to hide secrets and cherry pick stuff for the streams that it was no longer productive for me to be doing them. Coupling that with the tight deadlines I have set for myself and the lack of family time I was getting, it’s for the best they end for now. Once the update is out, they will start back up. I will still be participating the Sunday Fun day streams as much as possible. This week I had a scheduling conflict with some ‘official’ Bombdog business stuff so I had to unfortunately cancel. Good things should come from this meeting though and they are making quite the exception to meet with me this quickly and Sunday morning was the only time available.

In the mean time, you need to go to the forums and submit your best MMV build!