Dev Blog #5

We had an important meeting where we decided to focus on what makes our game unique.

StuBits already has awesome features and it is quite fun, but some things needed our attention. Our game has a bit of a big scope. Maybe a bit bigger than we would like right now. This means we were losing too much time fixing things, and not focusing on what makes our game unique. That is what we are going to do right now. We decided to put a STOP to adding features, and decided to focus on one single map, and on the core game mechanics. Doing this will give us more time to polish eveything, and also will present you guys with a better product on the alpha test. The map we chose is already tested and built, just needs art and some design, these will be our next steps. This next week we will do some pre production and solve most design issues we detected with our internal tests. Later we intend to polish and improve the overall mechanics. We will probably do that while playtesting with alpha testers, so stay tuned!

This last week I have worked on a more reliable hook. The entire system was a bit weird, based on the physics engine and relying on unreliable stuff. I changed all that to a more sensitive system that uses a sphere sweep cast. The hook now projects a detecting sphere forwards every frame, and scans for collisions with objects it reacts to. If that fails, the hook has a internal collider that detects collisions continuously to prevent tunneling through stuff.

It is funny how things you make while trying to fix something end up breaking it. This past week we focused on making object interpolation smooth on clients, which should already be happening, and realized that our own "fix" to odd and improbable cases was causing our trash to teleport and feel laggy. So we removed that, and it worked. Now we are just praying that those odd improbable cases never happen.