Hello friends,

Another update, just in time for the holidays. We hope you really enjoy this one with your friends and family.

Winter Theme

Tis the season, right? We implemented a special Christmas theme, a winter theme really with a few Christmasey bits. It was a fun experiment for us internally, while we reworked our whole art system to prepare for future updates.

As you may or may not have noticed, our in-game art is still quite rudimentary. While it fits our target vision (low-poly, playful), it’s still essentially prototype art cobbled together (some art we commissioned for our original Q1 2017 demo and various Unity asset store packs that we threw in whenever we needed something urgently). The end result is that our art repository was a complete mess.

We have recently started working with an art director to set the full vision of the game. But before we can commision new art, we needed to clean up what we have in place. Simply identifying which art assets we are using has been a massive challenge! We knew this release would involve a lot of internal work without much visibility, so our holiday theme was our main outlet for our creative itch in this update.

But what else?

OK, we didn’t just do the Christmas theme. We also made a bunch of gameplay improvements that we hope you will appreciate:

  • The newly added Bull Run has gone through a polish and balance iteration. It’s our most popular game mode in-house and we hope you find the improvements to be fun and provide a better balanced result.
  • We’ve addressed one big pain point with the vehicle controls: that objects block your view quite often. This should be much improved. We still have other areas to tackle (tank controls and aiming in general) but you’ll like this latest change.
  • Improved UI and feedback, especially on camera controls.

Please check out the full list of improvements and fixes below!

Cheers, Salmi Games

Changelog - Build 385

Improvements

  • Gameplay: Lots of improvements to the Bull Run mode added in the last update, including reducing cow max speed (could never be caught), fixing camera reset, fixing lookback behavior (right-stick click-in), removing unnaturally placed extra fences , lowered time limit to 2 minutes (controversial), improved AI reactions (they were just hanging around not making a bolt for the door)
  • Gameplay: Added several smaller hills and rock formations for bulls to hide behind and encourage use of the two side passages.
  • Power-ups: Disguise power-up now shows a preview of which disguise you will activate, so that you can blend in better. Also shows a countdown timer so you know when it will expire.
  • Power-ups: No longer show the vehicle power-ups in the VR view (was confusing to the VR player)
  • Power-ups: Removed disguise power-ups in deathmatch mode.
  • Controls: Camera automatically “pushes in” if there is a large object between the player and your vehicle.
  • Controls: Hide large objects that may obstruct your view of vehicle. We wanted to implement an awesome transparency that auto fades in and out as objects slide into view, but in spite of repeated efforts, this is not a trivial task and will require a big rework of our rendering system. Something for the future.
  • Controls: Improved plane controls with keyboard/mouse (in particular, camera should behave better when pitching up and down)
  • Controls: Improved camera reset behavior, including informing players how to trigger it. Better reset angle.
  • Special: Xmas mode and an date-based event system: snow particles, snow textures, some new audio, some UI tweaks and a few easter eggs. Enjoy!
  • UI: Better start info for the PC players in Bull Run
  • UI: Help Info no longer hides player UI
  • UI: Generally improved the presentation of the Start Info for the PC players (including nice concept art from our Art Director)
  • UI: When pause menu is shown, we do a better job of hiding objects that might obstruct your view (including explosions and smoke particles, player indicators, mountains, billboards, tutorial 3D text and tutorial helper controllers).
  • UI: Added localization support for almost all UI strings.
  • Internal: We restructured our entire assets folder. This has zero impact on you, but was a massive undertaking for us, which paves the way for new art to be easily integrated.
  • Internal: added a debug language for testing our localization system
  • Internal: if steam upload fails without correctly submitting exe, fail the whole build process (so we can avoid the Update 6 fiasco)
  • Internal: improved how our various scripts start up so it’s always in a deterministic order (this was the cause of a lot of bugs and should really improve our stability in the future).
  • Internal: reduced build by 16 MB (this time for real, no missing exe).

Fixes

  • Single player mission 1 was completely broken. The two different horde modes were somehow switched around and this caused all sorts of problems. Now fixed.
  • In deathmatch, PC UI always showed ‘20 / 20’ instead of the number of lives left.
  • Fixed free-floating camera controls.
  • Little NPC cars now bounce realistically when you throw them (instead of just sticking to the ground)
  • OpenVR no longer always shows “Game Paused” (gawd that was annoying)
  • Score and Gorilla health was overlappig with plane and tank axis toggle text. Fixed.
  • Plane had weird control lock issue when you flew straight up.
  • Keyboard tank axis toggle wasn’t working anymore. Or never worked? We’re not sure, but it’s fixed now.
  • Fixed eating so that it works even if one of your controllers is inactive.