the week has gone by in a split second so it’s time to inform you what was going on with our game and what was not. In a nutshell - as for the graphics improvements, there’s no progress yet, we are finishing the reworks of grenades behavior and the overall environment. And a few other smaller changes, such as the new teaser model, bigger power-up radius or the adjustment of explode time.
#2
Grenades: Okay, let’s analyze the grenades first. In the last post I mentioned that we changed the grenade launchers magazines, this week we did some other changes related also to power-ups. We have removed the global time speed-up completely (as a power-up) and it will only remain as an event for the Madness mod (the mod we plan to release in two months approx., no promises). This power-up was originally meant to maintain the tempo of the gameplay, but it was too hectic in the last minutes of the round. It was just too much confusing.
So we decided to put this power-up on ice and we will replace it with a new one, that would hold on the original purpose of “maintaining the tempo”, but at the same time won’t be ruining the whole game. The "Quick Explosions" power-up will shorten the sticky grenade detonation time by 0.2 seconds of explosions after it sticks to surface. The default time before explosion is 1.8 seconds. This power-up is passive, not global, and it will not reset after you die. (we can change this eventually).
Furthermore, we are nearly finished with the Holy grenade. This is a weapon of massive destruction. But keep in mind that it’s not easy to get and it’s very easy to lose. The holy grenade has an infinite blast radius, as long as you are not in the cover. If you cover yourself behind a wall or a crate, the holy grenade won’t even tickle you. So the crate gun is becoming very useful in this case ;) If you die you loose all holy grenades so be careful!
Gun Upgrade: Let’s talk about the grenades a little bit more (onixpexted). The Gun Upgrade was a part of the original concept and was meant to add a special feature to grenade launchers. It would suck in grenades to itself and then fire them again from your own weapon (similar to gravity gun in Half-Life). However, because of the complicated implementation and risk of bugs, we came up with a substitute feature that would be a bit more helpful; the Predictor. A laser sight for grenades.
The gun upgrade that allows you to place barrels will have effect on grenade launchers too. There will be a special vision attached to the weapon that would show you the track of the grenade before you shot it. This laser vision won’t be 100% exact but it will surely help you.
Traits: This topic is just in its infancy, but I can tell you something about it. I would like to modify the functionality of the third weapon slot, which is now only for utilities / melee weapons. I would like to prioritize players preferences in this. They will get benefits based on their decisions. Basically i want to replace the third weapon slot with a trait. This will include for example faster explosions, bigger magazines (from the start of the round), more speed or some melee weapons. However this feature is not the priority now and will be included after we finish the madness mode.
Besides traits I would like to modify one detail that may influence the gameplay a lot. Right now you are able to change weapons whenever you want, but this doesn’t fit to the game design. The idea is that you would be able to change weapons after you die (before spawning). This sketch is showing how the feature could look like (technical preview)
There’s a lot of other things to tell you, but I don’t want these posts to get too long or boring. To sum the latest information: Besides the regular tuning of the power-up drops probability, we plan other changes, that would not be part of the 0.6 update. Such as the half-block (allowing you to protect yourself and attack at the same time) or a variable probability of power-up drops during the game round.
Ok, I really need to end this right now or nobody will ever read this to the end. As I promised you the last time I gave you more detailed information today to make myself as clear as I can and let you stay updated. If you have any questions, post them below this post and I will try to give you the exact answer. Thank you for reading this to the end and have a good luck at the arena!
Jouki // posted by Dzetro
Weekly news #1
Hey guys,
We have just told ourselves that we would like to communicate and interact with you more than before using the Steam announcements, so you know what’s going on right now, what we are working on and how are we (developers) doing overall…
Sometimes we would like to share what problems we are facing, what we are thinking about and to share some newbie developers experience with you, right?
We will try hard to make these announcments a weekly routine (new post every friday - sunday). In this first one, we would like to tell you more about the upcoming goals we want to finish ASAP before the release of update number 0.6 (it’s coming in June!)
#1
Okay so, maybe you noticed that we haven’t posted any news for a while. Don't worry, we are still wokring as hard as we can (we still have our daily jobs). Right now we are adding some new features and we are balancing the gameplay. Also we are reworking the power-ups. Some of them had already been changed and they are now divided by color to categories to make this more intuitive for you.
blue - active ability
purple - passive ability
orange - rare/special ability
red - negative ability (magnet)
green - Heal
grey - others (experience points)
We already made some little changes, for example the Fast Run power-up is now a passive ability and Detonation radius is twice more bigger than before.
Except power-ups we have reworked the magazine system of grenade launchers. We have to balance this a little bit to make the game playable even with 8 players online. Madness is real! Yeah we know... the game is called grenade madness but sometimes it’s a little bit too much mad and you know what we are talking about if you tried it.
Grenades are now renewed after they explode - in other words, a fired grenade is back in the magazine just after it explodes so you can just fire all grenades almost at once. However we will nerf the time before explosion because this change is great catalyst of crazy gameplay. We love all the booms and beams but still we have to keep the game playable and fun at the same time :)
We also updated the collision system of explosions. Now it won’t happen again that you will get hit through a crate or a wall.
As for the graphics, we have some plans but it’s not the priority right now since the game doesn't look ugly anymore. We will give you more details in the next post.
Well that's all for now. I will be more specific the next time (I will try), but you can comment your own suggestions and questions below and I will try to answer them in the next post. Thank you for reading this to the end.. Wish you a good luck when playing the game!
Patch notes 0.5.3
We’ve spent the last week date tuning up the gameplay, to make the game more fun and enjoyable. As we are getting feedback from players and youtubers, we focused on several important things.
Graphics
- Added spawn animation of crates with blue color effect
- Added animation of progress bars (Missions, Experience, etc)
- Noise over the screen with low HP is more visible now
Technical
- Number of players in game increased from 4 to 8 - The true madness's raising (ssssss BOOM)
- Number of bots in game increased from 4 to 8
- Removed limitation of "1 mission per game" (Now if you complete the mission, you'll get another right after that)
- In mission menu is now showed reward for individual mission
- Increased mouse sensitivity
- Game now will by default launch in fullscreen mode and with fantastic graphics settings
Sounds
- Flash grenade sound is a bit louder
Gameplay
- Slowdown powerup time duration reduced from 15s to 7,5s
- Barrels have increased radius of explosion (+100%) and damage (+100%) - It's much more dangerous!
- Spawn rate of barrels increased by 2%
- Frag grenade explodes after 3rd bounce (makes completely different weapon, try out that!)
- Some of missions give Madness Points as a reward. This is in test phase so it could be completely changed in future
Bugfixes
- Some adjustments of timestep physics that should prevent from walking throught the walls in specific cases.
- Repaired bug when players stayed near to eachother and killed themselves at once and then they couldn't respawn
The community forum
Have some suggestions about the game? Did you find a bug or just want to ask something?
We are ready to receive your feedback and answer all the questions on the community forum:
http://community.grenademadness.com
We will be answering under accounts [dev]Petr and [dev] Milan
The multi-pack bundles
We are receiving questions from the community whether there are going to be multi-packs for a better price (per copy) so you can purchase Grenade Madness together with your friends.
The fact is that this feature is not available for all developers in the steam store anymore. We are now doing our best to have those packs available for you.
