Hey all! Jason here. It’s been a long time since we’ve touched base with everyone following Grit Paintball, so I figured it’s time to drop an update of what we’ve been up to.
Progress of a side project is always dependent on what real life is doing, and we’ve both had a fair bit of real life to deal with recently - for example, a few months back I bought my first home with my partner and it’s about 70 years old, so there’s been a fair bit of maintenance to deal with in my spare time. BUT, although it might seem like it, we haven’t been sitting on our hands!
As you may already know, I developed Grit during the initial Covid lockdown in 2020 without any prior game development experience, and just a small amount of programming experience. As such, my code was functional, but pretty terrible for anything or anyone other than exactly what it was designed for. When we formed Infima Labs, one of the first things we needed to address was redoing the code base to make future updates easier to integrate. Anthony has initially spent quite some time actually decoding what I’d done, and then set to work doing part one of his programming wizardry, compartmentalising different areas of the game - a few steps sideways to allow us to run forwards in the future.
The biggest advantage to this approach is what we’re internally calling “Arena Core” - basically, it’s the part of Grit that holds the basic engine of our software, including input and file management, multi and cross-platform functionality, and development tools such as auto testing and building. Arena Core also includes all of the multiplayer functionality, and there has been heaps of work going on to build this foundation as well. It will support high resolution data transfer and storage, so matches will be able to be saved and archived in small files, while optimising network traffic with a proprietary addressing system that will minimise latency and network traffic without sacrificing any of the feel of VR, and possibly automatically prioritise Grit’s network data if there are issues with the internet - basically, we’re hoping to make multiplayer faster and smoother than pretty much any game available today, which is obviously a big deal in the fast paced world of paintball.
Although Arena Core is also being built as a base to Grit, it’s development is in parallel as almost a standalone game protocol within Unity - meaning all the network optimisation may be available as a Unity asset in the future, and would allow anyone to build software with blazing fast multiplayer. But that will be a while away - the first test bed for Arena Core will be a Grit exclusive.
Other notable, but less important background work includes:
Constantly keeping updated with the latest Unity builds, asset updates, and XR developments
Rebuilt non-vital models to reduce poly counts between 40-70% to improve performance on all platforms while maintaining good visual fidelity
Multiple user modes to support players, spectators, coaches and broadcast modes
We’ve also been discussing exactly how we’re going to price Grit in the future. We’re considering sponsors and advertising within Grit, but whatever we do, we’re committed to making it non-intrusive, and only have advertising in areas that you would expect to see in real life, along fencelines or tents for example. The main benefits to this would be allowing paintball companies to get more involved in the virtual world, and could also help us hit one of our goals - to make Grit free to use for some game modes. It may be training/field walking mode, the field editor, or possibly even free multiplayer; there’s a lot to unpack in this area but it’s something we are actively looking into!
We still have a bit to achieve before the next release of Grit, mostly due to the multiple platforms that we will be developing and supporting from here on. Creating the ability to work as on standalone VR hardware (ie. Meta Quest) means we also have to redesign the entire menu and interaction system as there’s no external mouse and keyboard to rely on, but it also needs to be integrated well enough that we don’t have to create different UI’s for each platform every time for first person and VR builds. This next release will be a Steam only Beta to test out all the back-end functionality, and then when this looks stable we’ll start looking into releasing for the other platforms.
As always, thanks so much for your support as we work through this project - incredibly our sales have been steady, or even increasing month on month, and this is all directly attributed to our fantastic community spreading the word. Cheers for sticking with us!
New portal for feedback suggestions and updates
Hi folks! We've just incorporated a feedback system for Grit Paintball that's directly linked to our internal issue-tracking system and code-versioning tool -- please use it, and let us know what does or does not work! https://infimalabs.com/feedback/ https://infimalabs.com/updates/
Change of Ownership
Today is a big day for Deadbolt Custom Works and my long term project, Grit Paintball.
I started developing Grit as a way to occupy my time during the 2020 Covid lockdown, and it quickly became a passion project. I knew nothing about game development, but thanks to a short video where I managed to get a real paintball gun working in Virtual Reality, and the massively positive reception the video got from the paintball community, I got stuck in. I was smashing out 60+ hour weeks during my time at home going down the rabbit hole of coding and software development, and learning a hell of a lot along the way. I'm super proud of what I've managed to achieve from a blank slate, and blown away with the some of the success stories I've heard that have stemmed from using Grit as a training tool. I've always been honest about my goals with Grit, what I wanted to achieve, and how much that I'd personally be able to accomplish with my homeschooled game development skills. As Grit got more and more complex, I knew I had to bring on specialist developers to really take Grit to another level. What I got was substantially different.
As of December 1st, 2022, Deadbolt Custom Works no longer owns the rights or any intellectual property related to Grit Paintball.
From here on in, development of Grit is in the hands of a brand new game development studio - introducing Infima Labs!
Infima Labs is the brainchild of C Anthony Risinger, a Software Developer from the United States. He approached me early this year about possibly purchasing Grit with the aim of pushing Grit's development forward quickly, and trying to create the best multiplayer experience of not just a paintball game, but trying to grow virtual paintball into a more mainstream game that is still true to the sport. After chatting to him for months, I was seriously impressed with his enthusiasm for taking Grit to that next level that I would never have been able to accomplish on my own... But it was SO hard to let go of something that I've poured countless hours into.
So I didn't.
Anthony and I have formed Infima Labs together. From here on in, Anthony is going to be working his substantial coding wizardry on optimising what exists and pushing out new features, while I take a technical back seat and focus on project management, asset design, marketing, social media and steering the metaphorical ship.
It's exciting to be announcing this to the world after working towards it for the last 8 months, but even more exciting that Grit now has the chance to become what I've always wanted it to be, and so much more.
On Steam, Infima Labs will soon be the developer, but not much else will change, so keep track as we push forward and make Grit even better.
Follow the progress of Grit Paintball at the new Infima Labs social media pages - www.infimalabs.com twitter.com/infimalabs instagram.com/infimalabs discord.gg/GTjR8VBqRA (Infima Labs discord) discord.gg/v4SPA3GQ (Grit Paintball discord) linkedin.com/company/infimalabs
Minor patch
Fixed a bunker rotation issue with the new 'wing' bunkers - these bunkers on some custom layouts may need to rotated in the field editor
Fixed an issue where the screenshot white background and grid wasn't showing up
NXL 2022 Update
Haven't heard of any issues from users running the Beta branch, so time to make this build the main one!
Updates include: - 2022 NXL Bunkers - 2020 and 2021 NXL and NXL Europe layouts - Option to turn off the loader display in Game Preferences - Improved bunker toolbox with a tidier UI, with different orientations of certain bunkers grouped together - A help menu in the field editor - A system that auto resets the player to the start position in case the player falls through the ground - Started implementing VR Joystick Movement - very basic so far but kinda functional. Default controls for Oculus and Index will be updated in the next patch, but they can be manually assigned in this build
Screenshot Patch!
PATCH NOTES
v.21032 - Auto layout maps! When a layout is saved, it will automatically generate 4 different Screenshots of the field (Blank top down view, Full colour top down, corner and end on views). Exports to My Documents\Grit Paintball\Exported Layouts\*layout name*
- Changed the bunker colours! The white wasn't obvious enough in the screenshot so they've switched to Orange and Blue for now. Plans to choose your own colours are in the mix.
- Fix in Layout Dropdown menu where you had to deselect and reselect if you wanted to load the first displayed layout.
- Cleared the 'Saved!' text when saving a layout and replaced it with an icon. Will hopefully prevent those file names that end in "Saved! Saved! Saved!.json"
v.21031 - Added a Player Position Reset button in the case of player falling through the ground until restart. Currently it's 'Backspace'.
Screenshot Patch!
PATCH NOTES
v.21032 - Auto layout maps! When a layout is saved, it will automatically generate 4 different Screenshots of the field (Blank top down view, Full colour top down, corner and end on views). Exports to My Documents\Grit Paintball\Exported Layouts\*layout name*
- Changed the bunker colours! The white wasn't obvious enough in the screenshot so they've switched to Orange and Blue for now. Plans to choose your own colours are in the mix.
- Fix in Layout Dropdown menu where you had to deselect and reselect if you wanted to load the first displayed layout.
- Cleared the 'Saved!' text when saving a layout and replaced it with an icon. Will hopefully prevent those file names that end in "Saved! Saved! Saved!.json"
v.21031 - Added a Player Position Reset button in the case of player falling through the ground until restart. Currently it's 'Backspace'.
Screenshot Patch!
v.21032 - Auto layout maps! When a layout is saved, it will automatically generate 4 different Screenshots of the field (Blank top down view, Full colour top down, corner and end on views). Exports to My Documents\Grit Paintball\Exported Layouts\*layout name*
- Changed the bunker colours! The white wasn't obvious enough in the screenshot so they've switched to Orange and Blue for now. Plans to choose your own colours are in the mix.
- Fix in Layout Dropdown menu where you had to deselect and reselect if you wanted to load the first displayed layout.
- Cleared the 'Saved!' text when saving a layout and replaced it with an icon. Will hopefully prevent those file names that end in "Saved! Saved! Saved!.json"
v.21031 - Added a Player Position Reset button in the case of player falling through the ground until restart. Currently it's 'Backspace'.
