Gunsmith
The future!
I’ve had to take a break for a little while because we spent so long on Gunsmith before the launch that I’ve burned out quite hard. I was easily doing 16/18 hours a day to get it ready for launch. It wasn’t poor planning it was just trying to get the best product ready for you all with the time we had left.
That being said its super hard to be creative after smashing out a whole game over the course of 1.5 years to just keep coming up with fresh and exciting content. So basically I needed a rest and i'm sure Ed needed one too. We know you’re all super eager for what’s to come and im happy to tell you we have ALOT in store for Gunsmith over the next 6 months. I think it’s going to improve the game a tonne and make the gameplay much more diverse.
That takes time as we need to figure it out and get it right but when we are ready we will start deploying our major gameplay additions. We are listening to every comment you make and we are very actively implementing them. So if you have something in your mind that you think rocks, go ahead and put it in the forums or Discord!
Ideally I would like to get into a good sleeping / freetime structure again as the constant sitting at a PC is just not healthy for anyone. So more than likely means we will not be here on the weekends. Customer support is very important for me and making sure the game is good for you all is the top priority. But we do need to start having a life outside of game development as well. So for that reason unfortunately we might not be on hand as much over the weekends in the future. It’s not that we don’t care, but we need to rest as well.
For anyone who has got in touch regarding press keys, as I know there are quite a few. I am now setting up a custom email address for that and a we will post that soon. All press enquiries can go there from now on as I am getting overwhelmed with them.
There should be a small update next week with more fixes and some new content. Nothing major but still significant.
So yeah, we are going to be refueling for another round of heavy game dev over the next few weeks so thanks for being awesome with the support. Also, if anyone would be interested in Gunsmith merchandise let us know in the forums or Discord as thats something I am looking into.
All the best.
Rich!
Version 28!
Version 28!
Hello everyone! Rich here, version 28 is here! We have made a tonne of changes that I will list below. Mainly you’ll all be happy to hear that the bullet FPS situation is under control. We have been tirelessly trying to get the FPS sorted on that issue and we are happy to report significant improvements. For example, I had 13 bullet machines all outputting rounds earlier and made over 15000 individual rounds with a FPS of over 100. Not saying it will be perfect for everyone but we are confident that everyone will get significant improvements with this issue. It’s not the end we are still looking into improving that more. Secondly I have rebalanced the game a lot.
The main goal of this update was to reduce the very heavy uber micromanagement of the game as it was not fun. The objective was to allow you to set up a belt and manage it but not have to keep going back every minute. It becomes tedious and boring. So my goal was to change this with V28. For example. Gloves now will be made every second to increase the early game as no one wants to wait 15+ minutes to fulfill a glove order. Very very boring so now with 2 glove lines you can make 120 a minute easy peasy. We have also reduced the sewing level to just +1 on that line as the first product should never have a level 2 item, rookies… There is also a pretty massive change to the bullets. Bullets were outrageously overpriced, in some cases the player was bagging tens of thousands of dollars for bullets but it was also costing silly money to make them.
I have rebalanced this for V28 and you will notice the sale price for bullets have plummeted. Don’t panic. This was intentional. The profit you make on bullets should be much better. But we are trying to not have 100 bullets selling at $5000. Completely wacky prices. So now they are far more realistic. 1000 rounds of 9mm will be pretty cheap just like in real life. So it’s up to you to ramp up the production. I’m not saying this will be perfect there maybe more balances ahead but were putting this out for you all to give it ago. I actually worked out the amount of ammo you should make from a real industrial sized brass roll and it's in the region of 75 sheets and 75 rounds per sheet. So not to bore you too much but essentially now you can make 10k+ rounds with 1 brass roll. So now to maximise your profit it's about making your line efficient. It’s not about making a tonne of punchers like 30+ as you will just be making too much product.
Overall the game pace has increased which is good because there was far too much idling. Also Gunsmith is not just about making the factory. It’s going to be much wider than that so we needed to get it to a position where you can set up your bullet line and then you can leave it to do its thing give or take some adjustments.
It will be interesting to see what you make of the change. Personally I think it’s much better. We more than likely will change the bullets in some way in the near future depending on your feedback so let us know! Anyway enough talk. The change list is below. Go try it out! Once again the build is live in the beta branch for now and we will make it full game when we know theres no crazy issues! Best. Rich
Gunsmith Changelog V0.0.0.28
Major changes:
<*>New overall FPS improvements that should yield 40-80% better performance. It should be much better than it was, but, we’re still working to make it better and never become an issue.
<*>New changes and internal system additions to Orders so they are more focused towards the player’s manufacturing.
<*>We added internal systems that should make Orders tend more to the player’s current packaged items stock and their weekly manufacturing data.
<*>We also added scaling to the quantities asked for, they should be more in line with the manufacturing process and would scale up to a certain relative degree so players can still be able to sell their product even if they have thousands and thousands of packaged items ready to sell.
<*>Changed the crafting system so that Machine crafting is also tied to Power On / Off like Output is. If a machine is Off it won't craft until it is turned On.
<*>Added Order sorting with various options to the Active and Available Orders panels to allows for more efficient display of the orders depending on certain stats.
<*>More sorting options might come in the future depending on player needs and feedback.
<*>Addition of a new extension space to the warehouse. We also made the junction between the Main warehouse and the first extension an individual extension.
<*>Old saves should get this unlocked if they had already bought Extension 1.
<*>Made more balancing changes and tweaks to recipes, crafting requirements, output speeds and crafting speeds.
Minor changes:
<*>Increased the Autosave max interval to 30 minutes and default to 5 minutes. The default is only for first time launches, if you played the game before it’ll load what you had before.
<*>Added a section in the top bar for Research information so the player can easily see how much they’re spending daily, their current available research points and the daily research points they’re getting.
<*>Added a button in the Machine UI “Restock Contents” which restocks all machine contents back to the Inventory. This was a behaviour that was happening when you select a different output or delete the machine, and we felt the players wanted the ability to do this manually because they usually test ratios or machines.
<*>Added the key “O” as a hotkey for Orders. Controls settings will be coming soon in future patches.
<*>Increased the height of the hoover’s collision so people can hoover the crazy items on the factory beams… *looking at you crazy discord people :) *
Bug fixes:
<*>Fixed a bug where bullets didn’t move properly when coming out of the puncher.
<*>Fixed a bug where the brass roll in the Roll Dispenser either didn’t have proper rotation or flickered indefinitely.
<*>Fixed and improved the Achievement unlocking process. Achievements should trigger with no issue, it has been tested internally and all achievements triggered fine.
<*>If there is delay or non-unlocking, it might be an issue from Steam’s side.
Fixed a bug where Output speeds and Crafting speeds didn’t get set properly after loading saves.
New Official version.
Hello all, after much testing we are setting 0.26 as the current version. For many players this has fixed a tonne of issues and we feel its in a good place to push to all players. Few things.
We are still working on the bullet FPS issue. We have increased performance but we still need to work some more here.
The green screen Nvidia bug some people are encountering is being worked on. It is an extremely hard graphic bug that is not our game but a combination of Nvidia/UE4 and Windows configuration conflicts. We are trying to track it down though.
Erm, that's about it for now! Next week we will be working on localisation for more languages and look into changing the game up so the intro is not so slow!
Have a good weekend! Rich
Update 02! - More fixes!
Hi all Rich here again. Were been working hard and sorting out some common issues on the game and tonight im pushing out a second update. This time. called Gunsmith_Update_02 in your game Beta section.
Hoping this will be the last change before we make it live! Update_01 will turn off tomorrow if all is good and update_02 will become the main version of the game! Enjoy! List below for fixes!
V0.0.0.25
- Fixed an issue with bullet collision where they disappeared inside machines and belts.
- Added an experimental low FPS fix that should make machines output at
slower intervals when on low FPS. This should make machines outputs follow the slow down of low FPS and not create huge backlogs of items at output.
V0.0.0.26
Fixed a bug where fabric sheets would get stuck on belts and cause massive pile backs.
The issue with bullets getting stuck between belts or machines should be fixed now.
Market values don’t reset after switching Market Items.
Bullets that fall on the floor get killed after 3-5 seconds and have a 50% chance to be restocked.
Experimental Low FPS fix, changed it to have more relative intervals. Improvements to this will be coming soon to make it more reliable and less affected by unnoticed lag spikes.
Fixed the issue with the flickering brass roll
Fixed a rare issue with the Dispensers where their quantity wasn’t correct.
Fixed a bug where you could get more than 3 orders with items that aren’t researched yet, and reduced that max number to 2.
Fixed a small issue with the dispenser not properly moving items that are input directly on the center.
Update 01 - Fixes and Improvements!
Hello all, well what a crazy launch! Thank you all for your support on the game. So many of you seem to be really enjoying it! We have taken on board some concerns and some bugs so we have made some changes and are putting them in the beta section tonight. If all goes well we will make it official tomorrow!
List below!
Gunsmith Changelog V0.0.0.24
Improved the performance and FPS impact overall and especially with bullets. Framerate and performance should be much better than it was before. Even more improvements and tweaks will come soon.
Performed a round of tweaks and balancing to the costs and prices of our multitude crafting recipes, especially Bullets to make their profit margin more balanced.
Changed the Market to not reset the quantity after buying or selling.
Changed the Market to have a maximum buy and sell quantity of 50k instead of the previous 10k.
Added a red material to the locked placing sections of the warehouse. The area flashes red when the players hovers the ghost placer over the area as to notify them the area is locked.
Added the display of the Crafting speed of machines alongside their Output speed and reworked that part of the UI.
Bug fixes:
Fixed a bug where Dispensers didn’t properly update their internal quantity, resulting in them stopping.
Fixed a bug with the default placement of Power Utilities. It wasn’t possible to place them where they originally were.
Fixed a bug with the Rack stacking 6 where it had the wrong prerequisite setup. Now Tier 6 requires Tier 5.
Fixed a bug in the Cookbook where the .45 ACP tree had Primed setup instead of the Topper.
Fixed a couple spelling errors in the Tutorial.
Fixed a bug with the collision of the Plastic Former where it wasn’t possible to place it flush with other machine or the Dispenser on one of its sides.
Improved the stocking code of the End of Line and the Recycling bin, they should perform better and not miss items anymore.
Fixed a bug with the collision of the Bullet Puncher where placing a belt too close under the output caused collision issues with the bullets.
Fixed a bug with the Detailed Order panel where the fulfillment notification image after fulfilling an order didn’t get hidden properly, which made it impossible to click what is under it.
Fixed a bug with the collision of the Merger where feeding it items too close to the side made them fall before going inside of it. Now the Merger properly centers and moves items.
24 HOURS UNTIL LAUNCH!!!
So we launch tomorrow at 6PM London UK Time. This will be respective around the world so wherever you are right now. 6PM London UK Time equivalent will be your launch time. For example West Coast USA will be 10am if I am correct.
We have balanced the game again tonight after playing it as we realised it was pretty hard. Sorry Youtubers who have played it and got smashed. Also sorry if any of you went bankrupt because we just realised the bankrupt screen button to return to the main menu does not work. Our bad... However… We hope the version you get tomorrow won't be as brutal. Apart from these few things the game seems in a pretty good state. 500 people played like I said above and no crazy failures so were really chuffed. That being said IF that does happen tomorrow. We are both here and we are both ready to fix massive issues immediately. Honestly though it looks pretty good. * Insert memes here when game crashes for everyone *.
But on a serious note. A big big thank you to our community in our discord that have been helping us get bugs or test the game and generally just cheering us on. Secondly a big thank you to the people who run other Discords. Kev from Stalker, Ramsis from Rimworld, HOI Iron Curtain, Frosty, Lokei and all the others that have helped. Sorry if I forgot anyone! Thank you all for joining us on the very first stage of our game development. We hope you enjoy tomorrow and we hope it's a success so we can keep working on the game for you all!
Hope you all enjoy the game tomorrow.
All the best.
Rich and Ed
PS For all press and Youtubers the fixes above will be live within the hour.
SEE YOU TOMORROW!!!!
GUNSMITH Play Test FRIDAY 20TH APRIL - Just join discord!
IF YOU WANT TO PLAY GUNSMITH FOR FREE FOR 4 DAYS AND TEST IT FOR US ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS JOIN THE DISCORD!
https://discord.gg/8VYspjg
We will be running our play test session from these dates;
FRIDAY 20TH APRIL AT APPROXIMATELY 4:20 PM
UNTIL
TUESDAY 24TH APRIL AT APPROXIMATELY 4:20 PM
( we may allow longer if you are lucky )
First Post - Welcome!
Hello all , I'm Richard, the designer of Gunsmith, and previously Prospekt. Just wanted to put this post up to say welcome to you all! The group for the game is nearing 200 members already and I have not put up anything to say hello, how rude! Myself and Ed ( the game's programmer ) can be found in the game's Discord.
We welcome you to the game and hope you can help us develop it on our jouney to make a great game!
We are working hard on getting a Pre-Alpha version out for you all to test before we actually release into Early Access, we feel this will give us a great way to get the game in the right direction before we launch.
Just join the Discord if you would like to take part in this, link is below.
Discord Link Here
We are also in IndieDB if you would like to check us out there! This is also linked below. There is more in depth stuff about the game development here.
IndieDB Link Here
Thanks so far, the support has been great and it seems that people are really looking forward to this game and its concept!
We will keep you posted but feel free to start a discussion here on in the Discord as that is what we want!
See you soon!
Rich