We are back with another big content Update for Late For Work. Just in time for the spooooookiest time of the year. This is actually one of our biggest updates yet, a lot has changed under the hood. Let’s dive in!
New Art
Everything is new! Well not quite everything but we’ve finally been working with professional artists to not only set a clear direction but rebuild all our 3d models and texture to fit with the overall 50s low-poly style we are aiming for. Improvements includes:
New Humans! Now with a multitude of facial expressions, skin colors and clothes! Hundreds of beautiful variations. No more programmer-art humans.
New Cars with a new, slick design that fits our 50s theme waaaay more
New Buildings! Having 300% more colors and details!
New Enemy Tanks & Planes! Looking more realistic and threatening.
and much more. We updated the look of almost every object in the game and can honestly say that we love the new look of the game. We hope you do too.
We also streamlined our pipeline and processes for updating our art assets, so expect further visual improvements over the next few updates.
New Halloween Content
It’s the spookiest time of the year and we couldn’t help but have a little bit of fun with it. We’ve implemented a bunch of truly horrifying Halloween content. We’ve added spooky lighting. We’ve messed the humans and zombified / vampirified / mummified / skeletonified them. We’ve also scattered a bunch of jack o’ lanterns and other special items across the game. The gorilla dressed up for the occasion and witches may or may not abduct some cows.
These features will be around for the whole scary season, just like our Christmas special. We hope they won’t spook you too much.
New Game Mode - The Bodyguard
Adding a new game mode was on our wishlist for this Update. Our latest addition to the roster is “Bodyguard” (in a nod to our favorite Kevin Costner movie). The flat players take control of regular-looking humans and have to kill a handful of VIPs that the gorilla in turn is trying to protect. It’s their job to blend into the crowd and assassinate the VIPs without detection, while the gorilla has to keep a close eye on the targets to identify who is friend and who is foe.
This game mode idea originated directly from conversations with fans in our Discord channel. Thank you to @Pontus for some great feedback. We hope you’ll also join our Discord and help us make the best possible VR party game.
We’ve tested this game mode in-house for a while and found it to be very fun. It still needs some balancing, especially for very high or very low player numbers, but it is quite enjoyable. Let us know what you think! We’ve got lots of little ideas on how to enhance it, little modifiers like smoke bombs or one-time weapons but we want to hear from you.
And that concludes our Halloween Update. We’d love to hear your opinion on the game and the new changes. To reach us directly and get special insider infos on upcoming updates, make sure to join our Discord.
Cheers,
Salmi Games
Changelog - Build 540
Improvements
Gameplay: balanced UFO game mode based on the number of flat players. Time limit and kill target are dynamically adjusted.
Gameplay: new game mode “Bodyguard”. VR player defends VIPs, flat players must kill them without being noticed
Gameplay: new “vehicle” control type: human mode
Gameplay: in the tutorial, flat players can now respawn after they die
Gameplay: re-balance the time limits of Last Man Standing and Hide n Seek based on the number of opponents. Army wave timing also change based on number of opponents
AI: improved cow pathfinding
AI: improve AI hiding behavior in Last Man Standing
Art: implement new models for humans, with different body parts that can be easily swapped out, dynamically generated
Art: implemented new models and textures for all houses and buildings with a new system to dynamically mix and match house combinations for a different look on each playthrough
UI: improved helper text and tips for how to use freelook camera for various vehicles
UI: show multiplayer menu first instead of single player
Physics: reworked grabbing objects, collision system, throwing system for more stability and more accurate controls (for example, you can now reliably stack objects or grab compound objects without breaking them)
Physics: improved vehicle flipping (after they’ve been knocked over). Should work much more reliably both for flat players and AI
Physics: prevent gorilla’s head from entering solid objects like the mountains. If gorilla’s head makes contact with such solid objects, movement is stopped.
Architecture: reworked all our game mode management to make it easier to add new game modes (and new game types)
Architecture: reworked out entire build process to make it easier to build and upload new builds of various games
Architecture: improved our localization system to catch and report missing localization strings during the build process. Also made it much easier to add new strings on the fly while building up content.
Architecture: general performance improvements across the board, on physics, on script updates
Visuals: improve the snow map to make it look less yellow-brown in certain lighting and to make the snowmen stick out more
Debug: added internal mode to reduce framerate in order to easily reproduce framerate related physics bugs
Language: added Korean language support (thank you Nat and Gina!)
Halloween: added event highlights in the menu
Halloween: spooky lighting and fog settings
Halloween: generate halloween characters (zombies, vampires, mummies, ghosts, skeletons, witches) during halloween instead of the normal humans
Prevent rare issue where player could end up out of bounds if they were moving around during loading of the map.
Removed rotating objects being shown in result screen for Hide and Seek
Cow rotation speed is no longer framerate dependent
Fixed rare issue with localization breaking the tutorial and the menu labels
“Boost” UI hint only appeared after you used the boost once.
Was incorrectly showing keyboard tips when playing with gamepad
Sneak Peak of our Upcoming Halloween Update
Hello friends!
A new update for Late For Work is just around the corner, stay tuned late next week for update 11! We want to give you a sneak peak of what’s coming up in this pretty darn big update.
New Art
Since last we’ve spoken, we’ve finally started working with a real life professional 3D modeler. This means we’ve got lots of new art to work with. Real art. Real models.New models for all of our houses, humans and cars with more on the way!
We’re slowly replacing out all our hodgepodge soup of early artwork and bringing models with a more uniform and better designed look. With the new art, we uniformed our style which really improves the overall aesthetics.
Halloween Content
It’s that time of the year, the season of tricking and treating and naturally we couldn’t resist. LFW is taking part in the festivities. We’re adding all sorts of spooky scary monstrosities to our event system. It’s our spooookiest update yet!
New Game Mode
Last but not least we have a new game mode in the works. We would share more details, but we are not sure entirely sure of the final form yet ourselves. We do know that it will involve the flat players controlling humans for the first time and hiding from the gorilla by blending into the crowd. We’re still working doing a lot of balancing and experimentation but we hope it will be an enjoyable game mode for all.
One week to go!
If you ever want to chat with some of the dev team or join a community of like minded fans of Late For Work, stop by at our Discord: https://discord.gg/salmigames
Cheers,
Salmi Games
Summer Break and Upcoming Updates
Hello friends,
We've been a bit quiet during these long hot summer months but fear not, we are still hard at work behind the scenes. Update 11 is taking longer than usual but we plan to release it some time in September, so please stay tuned.
In the meantime, we're excited to announce that we are working on a new game, set in the same universe. It’s a roguelite-like, in which you’re an unemployed giant gorilla living in 1950s suburban America (sound familiar?).
You must take on as many odd jobs as possible to support your family without wrecking havoc on the town. Think of it as a Singleplayer campaign companion to Late For Work, taken to a whole new level.
Enjoy ultra realistic dog walking experiences in VR
If you want to find out more, get access to a free demo and tons more, then make sure to join our Discord channel. We'll be unveiling new elements of the game every week, with special events, dev posts, behind the scenes look and much much more.
What about Late For Work?
We will continue to work on Late For Work as we bring it to a 1.0 release. We'll be updating with more details in the next update.
What's more, all the work we're investing in the new game will also benefit Late For Work as we're using the same code base. New arts, new physics, new mechanics, improved UI and so much more.
Finally, as a thank you to you, our earliest supporters, we will be giving a special surprise to all owners of Late For Work. Thank you for believing in us and investing in us.
We're excited to bring you Update 10, our special Spring Cleaning edition. It's the proverbial 'tock' to our tick-tock release strategy of delivering new gameplay one update and improving core systems the next. We did a lot under the hood and a lot in preparation for future updates (and new unannounced projects). Read on for more details.
Performance
We did a big pass on performance. As you know, we not only render in VR but also up to four separate views in splitscreen. This has a fairly big impact on performance and we keep a close eye on it. We did a major pass on performance (our third since we launched in Early Access) and made a lot of improvements. We shaved off roughly 3ms off an average frame. Considering we aim for 90fps, we only have ~11ms to play with, so we're pretty happy with this improvement.
New Language Support
Thanks to the awesome @Mr.Stump we now have language support for Ukrainian and Russian. As a reminder, we are willing to add support for any language, if you're willing to help us translate it. Find out how on this thread.
Gameplay Balancing
We took another run at the UFO mode in the forest. The map was way too big and open, making it super difficult for the VR player. Too much land to cover and fast moving UFOs makes for exhausted unhappy players. We've tweaked the AI as well as they were a bit to hardcore. We experimented with changing the number of lives but didn't love any new values so left it as it is for now.
Let us know what you think!
Bug Fixes
We found and fixed a litany of bugs. The full list is available in the changelog below. We hope this new build feels a lot more stable.
What's Next?
We're slowly working towards a 1.0 release. We haven't finalized what will be in it, but we're working on that. We should have more news over the summer, stay tuned and let us know what you would like to see.
Please read on for the full changelog for this update. We hope you enjoy it!
Changelog - Build 443
Improvements
Language: added support for Russian and Ukrainian, a very big thank you to @Mr.Stump
Language: auto-sync on latest language file on start
Controls: Mouse Freelook when holding Alt key for UFO (vertical-only), Planes, Trucks
Controls: fix tank lock-on behavior and range-check
Controls: tweak tank gamepad aiming sensitivity, a bit more precision
Performance: smooth plane controls, less jitters
Performance: improved render batching
Performance: improved "Update Step" performance of various components, lots of cleanup of unnecessary updates.
Performance: spread performance intensive queries (such as raycasts) over multiple update frames
UI: don't show "Reset camera" message as agressively
Camera: refactored freelook camera system, with consistent controls everywhere
Camera: no longer visually cull garages when you drive in to them to hide
Camera: improved death camera behavior, disable control during vehicle switch so that you're not flying around wildly as soon as you die.
Camera: broke then fixed UFO camera controls, added alt freelook support
Gameplay: balance the UFO game mode in the Forest map, group cows and humans more, block off an area to restrict playspace
Gameplay: in Hide 'n Seek, tweak the gorilla health (120 base + 60 per opponent)
Visuals: improved models for power-ups (ammo and attack level up)
Controls: reworked right joystick camera-control. Now rotates in proportion to how far you push your stick left/right and snaps back on release
Physics: better collision shapes for the tanks and the power-ups
AI: improved cow AI
AI: improved UFO flee behavior, make less cautious
Internal: refactored camera and freelook system
Internal: refactored sound system
Internal: integrated Steam Audio, now used by default
Internal: refactored input system
Internal: refactored airplane control system, much smoother update loop
Internal: refactored GOAP AI system, with general AI improvements
Internal: add new system to support color palette switching
Internal: improve build process for some secret stuff
Internal: remove a build expiry that somehow slipped into last update
Internal: disable unity analytics and hardware reporting
Internal: improved log system
Fixes
UX: Height auto-readjust now works during intro screen using OculusVR
UX: MP deathmatch was playable with zero players, now show a helpful message
UX: Instant join broke, player wouldn't spawn
UX: tank camera reset was broken during refactor, fixed
UI: intro text for Hide 'n Seek mode on flat screen exceeded bounding box, looked bad
UI: Player icons (like AI1, AI2, etc) appeared before the player's vehicle, now both appear together
UI: AI Bots setting was inconsistently saved between sessions
Controls: Plane acceleration was broken, A button works again.
Oops: for the last 10 months it's been possible to adjust the gorilla's health with the G and H keys on the keyboard
AI: cars not controlled by any player or AI bots (possible in hide n seek) would boost out of gorilla's hand
Stability: fixed crash bug that randomly occured when using OculusVR
Stability: fixed a bunch of null exceptions that caused weirdness
AI: humans were not running around anymore, fixed
Tutorial: humans were running around, which makes it hard to see their instructions
City map: fixed broken textures on bottom of houses
Port map: fix missing graphics for some of the containers
Port map: had plane ammo power-ups on the ground, no longer
Port map: NPC car start positions were all broken, traffic is back
Gameplay: single player mission 2 matched against 4 bots instead of 2. 3rd mission wouldn't unlock.
Tank: backwards driving and vehicle flipping was no longer working
Single player: in horde modes, flat players could no longer join, now works again
Single player: make sure target kill count is correctly scaled to the number of enemies
Physics: multiple bugs leading to tanks falling through the ground
Credits screen: improved the banner, humans were jumping around for no reason, had a weird hand grabbing animation issue
Update 9 - Alien Invasion
Hello friends,
Today we are super excited to release one of our biggest updates yet to our local multiplayer asymmetric party game. We've got a new exciting fast-paced game mode that had our student intern sweating and out of breath from all mad dash efforts to protect the local populace (and cattle) from being abducted by mysterious visitors from worlds beyond. Read on for more details!
New UFO Game Mode
This is the first game mode where we had concept art influence gameplay ideas. I mean, we've toyed with a lot of gameplay ideas, but our excellent concept artist drew the art work above a few months ago. In January, when reviewing what chunky new gameplay we could bring to LFW, we settled on the UFO mode. It sounded so fun and we already had all the art.
This game mode features a brand new aerial vehicle with 3D translation movement, i.e. you can fly in all directions. And an abduction beam. Your goal? Why of course, the traditional alien invader job: to abduct all humans and cows. The gorilla cannot stand idly by and see his fellow countrymen ripped away from their lives to end up who knows where.
This mode is not final, we will keep tweaking it. But our early tests have led to quite few hilarious moments. We're also thinking about new possible weapons and power-ups we can add. We'd love to hear your feedback and impressions.
New Tutorial
A brand new Tutorial: our old tutorial was not bad, but a bit limited and some players would occasionally get stuck. Our goal is that our games are so intuitive and well guided that you can always pick it up on your own. We're not satisfied until we can just hand over controls to players and just step out of the way.
So we rebuilt it from the ground up, including little humans guiding you through your tasks and providing feedback. We leveraged a system we built for an internal prototype of something new (shhhhh, can't comment on this just yet).
It's still not perfect and will need further tweaking. We also would like to add a whole second part to the tutorial, as well as some mini-tutorials for the non-vr players.
Tank Auto-aim
In our never ending efforts to make the tanks more fun and easy to control, we've added an auto-aim lock mode. Using the left trigger you can now lock onto the gorilla and fire (nearly) perfect shots. This will hopefully come in handy for players who struggle with the dual stick controls. Feedback is very welcome. We are worried this makes the tanks too easy to play with now.
Multiplayer Menu
We redesigned the multiplayer menu screen. Our single page multiplayer was quickly becoming limiting as we added more game modes and maps. We've now implemented some long-desired changes. Creating a new round requires one or two clicks more, but we can now preview the game mode and map and easily restart a new round. This also lays the ground work for multi-round based local multiplayer games.
What's Next
Our next update is going to focus on two things:
Balancing and Gameplay improvements: we're going to refrain from implementing new game modes and maps and focus instead on improving the balance and fun of the current game modes. We have a lot of ideas on how to make the current game modes more fun and dynamics, with new power-ups (including for the Gorilla!), new goals and challenges.
Internal cleanup and refactoring: the last few weeks have revealed a number of systems built on shaky foundations and a clear set of behaviors we need to improve. We will spend time to stabilize these to make it easier to continue adding new maps, game modes and features to the game.
Of note: we did a major upgrade to our underlying engine (more details in the changelist below) and we have noticed a few difficult-to-reproduce issues, including an occasional crash. If you run into any issues please do let us know either here in the comments or in our forums. Thank you!
Changelog - Build 416
Improvements
UFO: added a UFO vehicle, with a new camera angle, an abduction behavior and vertical movement
UFO: allow camera to be pitched up and down with snapback behavior
UFO: small particle effect when abductees are absorbed
UFO: result screen, show kills and abductions
UFO: adapted the forest map and the town map as locations for the game mode
UFO: implemented basic AI behavior (target, abduct, flee from gorilla)
UFO: sound effects!
UFO: disable occlusion preventer for UFO vehicles (the behavior that hides objects that obstruct your view when controlling tanks/cars/cows)
UFO: gorilla can rescue abductees as they are being abducted
UFO: UI tips when you're out of range and control instructions
Tutorial: re-implemented from scratch, with extra animated billboards and little human helpers
Tutorial: teach how to destroy tanks, recover health and reinforce "good" movement controls. Also making it clear you can change your control settings
Tutorial: added dynamic speech bubbles, with image and translation support
Internal: implement a proper freecam to capture nicer screenshots
Internal: updated from Unity 2017.1 to 2017.3. This fundamentally broke the physics and we had to rebalance everything
Internal: did a performance pass as overall framerate seemed to have been negatively affected by the Unity upgrade
Internal: improved our build scripts to make sure our Steam builds don't contain artifacts from older builds
Internal: build scripts do more checks for missing tools (like git)
Physics: did a big pass on all the vehicle behaviors to be sure they are not framerate dependent. This has fixed a lot of stuttering problems
Physics: set physics timestep to 1/45
Gameplay: adjusted the punching strength to be more uniform (trees were flying a bit too far)
Controls: disabled mouse look with planes. Was too confusing, might add it back in in a future update, if we find a good system (ALT look?)
Controls: implement a proper mouse lock so that the game works ok with multi-monitor setups
Controls: reworked the y-axis invert toggles on the dpad. Now the left dpad toggles the left stick and the right dpad toggles the right stick
AI: prevent two bots from going for the same powerup.
AI: correct usage of homing missile => just shoot it straight up!
AI: rework cost functions to better balance difficulty and fun
UI: all map preview icons are updated to look nicer.
UI: updated our credits screen/scene, adding more of our friends!
Fixes
Airplane Billboard in Bull Run was not being updated
Now correctly show a "Waiting for End of Round" when you join a game late or you've run out of lives
Selecting "Start" in the menu or the intro screen no longer flexes the gorilla hand
You can no longer punch your own hands
Sometimes if you played a round with a couple humans and AI and then kicked out the AI, in the next round you would have extra vehicles that shouldn't be there
Sometimes after playing certain game modes, your camera would get stuck in weird angles in the next round
Fixed a lot of null references (ArcaadeCarController, ArcadeCowController, GetShootButton, AI GOAP system)
You can now abduct humans even if they are hopping away
Lampposts would not turn on at night, even though you could see the illuminated areas on the ground
Fixed a bunch of missing model issues with the disguide power-ups
Fixed missing particle effects for the guided missile
Fixed a whole bunch of inconsistent input issues: sometimes the non-VR player could control the gorilla with their gamepad. Sometimes the gorilla fist would stay closed after release, and so on
Fixed issue that a player-controlled would auto-boost when grabbed by the gorilla, flying out of the gorilla's hand
Prevent two tanks from spawning at the same position
Fixed a bad ground collision isssue in the Town map.
Planes had a weird offset angle on their shots, one shot would fly off in an offset direction.
Can no longer go through the mountain in the Valley map
Sunsetting our Early Access Launch Price
Hello everyone,
We are about to release another major update to Late For Work. This time we’re expanding the game with a new, hilarious stop-aliens-from-capturing-cows game mode as well as the usual barrage of smaller improvements and bug fixes (sneak peak here: https://i.imgur.com/8mqDhku.png ).
With this update we will also raise the price for the first time since our Early Access launch last summer. This decision has been subject to a lot of internal back and forth discussion. In the end, we feel that the original $10/10€ price point is no longer representative of the content and quality of our game.
Obviously as poor indie developers we depend on our sales to put food on the table (you may shed a tear for us here), but we also want to be fair in the amount we charge players. We have added a lot of content over the past 9 months, with new game modes, maps, gameplay improvements, balancing fixes. More importantly (in my view) we've fixed a lot of bugs, improved stability and focused a lot of efforts on easy of use and comfort.
However we also want to be transparent about the process, so that’s why we’re letting you know beforehand. The irony is that most people who will read this post already own the game. Let your friends know! Help us keep making this game.
Thanks for reading. We are happy to answer any questions you may have in the comments. We appreciate all your support.
Cheers,
Salmi Games
Update 8 - Finding a Balance (Part 1 / X)
We hope you had a great start to the new year. I can't believe it's already February. What happened to January? And to Christmas?
One of the most common feedback we get is that the game is not balanced. Unfortunately, Late For Work is really hard to balance, for several reasons:
You can play against 1, 2, 3 or 4 players!
Those players could be humans or AI.
As our game is quite accessible, you have a wide variety of combinations of players (sometimes within the same play session!): Kids in VR against siblings and parents. Parents against Kids. Experienced against casual and vice-versa
Multiple vehicles with different controls, easy of use, etc.
Just to illustrate the challenge on our hand: here are back to back comments in our feedback thread where one player says the vehicles are OP, then the next is surprised because they feel the gorilla is OP. And they're both right!
We've been listening to your feedback and brainstorming a lot of ideas to try, including improvements to controls and aiming, scaling health and damage, tuning the AIs and dynamically adapting to difficulties. We're not going to implement everything in one go. Some are more ambitious. But our overall, long-term goal is to create a balanced experience for everyone without requiring difficulty/balance sliders (it's annoying having to tune settings every time you change the VR player).
Tank Aiming
First major improvement we've made this year is with the tank aiming. This time we focused on the reticule itself. Instead of lining up the arc of your shot, now where you look is where you will fire. We think it feels and looks much better. We've removed a level of indirection. The aiming reticule also adjust size (based on distance to your target object) as well as color (based on object type).
We are really curious what you think? Do you like it better or worse than before? Would you still like to see a dotted line of the arc your shot will take?
This update, we focused our balancing changes to Deathmatch:
Number of player lives = Number of players
5. So when you play against two vehicles, they have 10 lives. Previously 1v1 games would drag on quite a bit because one side had 20 lives.
Gorilla health is also scaled by the number of vehicles. When you face off against 4 players, you have 4 times the base health.
Human Tank Damage is increased by 50%. AI Tank Damage stays the same.
Tank AI Shot Cooldown is doubled. The AI was shooting way too often previously. It was a constant barrage. Now you have a little time to breath.
Reviews
The last 7 months have been an interesting adventure, developing this game in the open. We really appreciate all your feedback. Heck, if you're reading this far into our updates note, then you must really like our game and that means so much to us. Thank you.
Writing a review for our game has a higher impact than you can imagine. It validates our efforts and belief that it was worthwhile to invest building this game and motivates us to take it further.
Changelog - Build 394
Improvements
Controls: New Tank Aiming System
Controls: Reduced the range where planes auto-brake/accel. Gives more control back to the player.
Controls: mouse control of plane rotation feels much, much better. Works the same vertically as horizontally. Is now consistent with mouse control of other objects
Controls: Disabled object avoidance for freelook camera.
UI: Deathmatch intro correctly reflects how many players you are facing and the number of kills you need to win
UI: Better feedback and tips on how to accelerate and brake with the planes. Changed auto-break/accel ranges so you notice things more.
Performance: removed unused models, collioders and animations
Performance: combined meshes and materials
Performance: reduced vertex count of various objects to help dynamic batching
Performance: reduced texture size in memory by rescaling for better compression (DXT5)
Tech: Made the build 30 MB smaller! I know, we also don't get it.
Physics: Small NPC Cars behave more realistically when thrown/hit. They no longer just slide on the ground but bounce and tumble as expected.
Internal: developed a tool to track down unused art assets
Internal: developed a tool to track down unused art assets
Gameplay: Balanced Deathmatch game mode
Gameplay: can no longer pick up the health power-up if you are full health
Fixes
Fixed missing model for special tanks in Mission 7 of the Single Player
Gorilla hand no longer twitches when you select a map
Day Jobs: fixed black screen at the end
Day Jobs: fixed duplicate arrows
UI: "Reset camera" message was off-screen when playing 2-player split-screen.
Fixed missing tank chassis (was disappearing after taking damage)
Gorilla can no longer move outside allowed bounds during hide n seek countdown
Fixed a couple issues in city map (a lamppost was falling down on start, a tree was jittering)
Fixed LOD model of blue houses
Till next time!
Update 7 - A Very Merry Christmas
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!
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.
phew, that turned out longer than I expected!
Dev Diary 3 (Bull Run) and some Thanks
Hey everyone, we recorded another dev diary, breaking down our new game mode Bull Run. If you haven't tried this game mode yet, I urge you to. It's quite different from the other ones and quite fun. More details in the video!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1232064995
If there are specific areas you would like to see covered in a future dev diary, please let us know in the comments!
Some Thanks
Also, something pretty crazy happened recently. We won "Best VR Game" at the German Developer Awards!!! It was really quite a surprise to us all, especially since we are still in Early Access but we are incredibly honored. I know this sounds cliche, but I don't think it would have been possible without all the feedback we've received from all you players.
When we launched in EA in July, we had a vision of where we wanted to take LFW over the next 6 months, but looking back at the changes we've made, I would say that easily 50% of our efforts have gone into addressing the feedback we've received, so please keep it coming. It really helps us make a better game.
Thank you.
P.S. Check out some of the pictures from the evening and the flabbergasted faces of my colleagues :)
https://www.facebook.com/christopher.wulf/posts/1939838282698182
Update 6 - Running of the Bulls
Hello, hello!
Welcome to another massive update to our humble VR party rumble. These past few weeks we've focused on implementing new multiplayer game modes.
Game Mode - Bull Run
In Bull Run, the non-VR players take controls of a bull milling up about in a grass enclosure full of other bulls. The player-controlled bulls have to make their way back to the barn without getting discovered by the Gorilla. The Gorilla has to identify (and eat) the rebel bulls before they make it home. Hide in the crowd, cause a little chaos and then bull rush your way to the exit before you get eaten!
We designed a new map (The Forest) just for this game mode, with a simple clear design. Bull Run really strips the game down to its core elements. It's just cows, a gorilla and a lot of trees for cover. Cows can charge to clear obstacles (trees, fences, other cows) out of their way. You can also use the "motivate" action to drive a portion of the herd forward in your direction. This can be an effective way to create a bit of chaos, but also draws attention to you.
This game mode (like the rest of the game) is still in development and we would love your feedback. We think this game mode really works well in 1v1 situations and we're working hard to improve balancing when more player-controlled cows are present.
Mooooooooooo
Game Mode - Cross the City
Cross the City is our second new game mode in this update, where the non-VR players have to cross the city (from bridge to tunnel) while the Gorilla tries to prevent them. It's not as "finished" as the Bull Run, but it's allowed us to take steps forward in building more complex, mission-driven game modes. You can find this new game mode in the Experiments tab. We want to expand this game mode to include more complex tasks and find a better way of balancing it.
Balancing our game is a constant challenge. Something that works 1v1 won't necessarily be balanced 4v1. If we force all paths to cross then the gorilla can just stand in one spot and wait for the cars to come to them. If we have too many possible paths then the gorilla has no chance to stop the flow of cars. But we're working on it, and as always, listening to your feedback.
This is just a small taste of the changes and improvements that have gone into this update. Just implementing Bull Run required numerous changes (new map, new controls, new game mode, animations, better AI) that touch almost every part of the game. But each update makes our core better and lets us add new features faster. A full list of changes follows below.
Thanks for playing!
Changelog - Build 369
Improvements
New Game Mode: Bull Run (see above for details).
New map - Forest - currently used just for Bull Run. Will be explored further.
New Experimental Game Mode: Cross the City (still a work in progress).
Improved the atmospheric effects for the morning/dawn period.
Fog density is now dynamic based on time of day.
More "obstructions" are hidden when game is paused and menu is shown (still not all are hidden, but we'll get there).
You can now properly cancel starting a new game mode (this previously broke a loooot of things, like despawning AI units). Is this a new feature or a bug fix....?
AI: planes now pickup ammunition when needed.
AI: units generally pick up power ups.
Do not "join" the keyboard player if the F1-F12 keys are pressed. Or if the Alt key is pressed.
Boosting is now framerate independent (you could boost much further if the framerate was low). In general worked to improve our vehicle controls so that they are framerate independent.
UI: help info is much more prominent, bigger.
UI; improved About page, provide better way for players to reach us to give us feedback.
UI: added a better boost icon, which fills up over time to better indicate when it's available.
UI: highlight new features, maps and gamemodes in updates.
Automatically reconnect a controller to the same player if it disconnects and reconnects. We noticed the problem that if your controller got disconnected (like when the battery dies) and you reconnect, it would join a new player.
Controls: improved turning behavior of cars, should feel much better. Vehicles still move forward even for low values of acceleration. They would sometimes awkwardly not move forward anymore if you tried to turn hard.
Controls: right-click has been re-purposed for power-up activation. Q switches units. E toggles the headlights.
Internal: upgraded to Unity 2017.1 - this really has no visible impact but it was a pain in the ass. We first upgraded to 2017.2, which broke everything (why do we never learn the lesson to NOT upgrade before a couple patches have been released for new unity versions....) and then back down to 2017.1, which broke a few things but also improved other things.
Internal: added the ability to quickly change the rate of time change to make it easier to capture cool time-lapse videos.
Internal: drastically improved our build process. so much easier to build and deploy a new build.
Internal: make sure the local changes in our test machine don't make it into release builds.
Internal: full restructured our GameMode setup to make it easier to isolate behavior, objects and features to specific game modes and to improve our development process for new game modes. This had quite a few unintended side-effects that had to be fixed up.
Tested support for Windows Mixed Reality headsets...hand tracking is inaccurate enough to not be super fun.
Randomly shrunk the game by 10 MB!
Fixes
Red "selection" dot now stays red in all cases (including when fog is overlaid at start of game modes.
Fixed: selection sound sometimes stopped working.
Random human in tutorial and credits scenes removed.
Timer didn't expire in Last Man Standing. Now shows "Expired".
Drop down menus now close properly when clicking outside or clicking another drop down menu.
Fixed: when retrying mission 6, the kill goal got reset to 20 (from 10).
Fixed: if you grabbed an object with one hand, then grabbed with the other (without releasing with the first one), you were then in a "moving" state.
Fixed: you could punch things during the starting countdown in "Hide and Seek" and "Last Man Standing".
Fixed some menu font issues due to the 2017.1 unity upgrade.
When you join a running game using a gamepad, you no longer boost on start.
Fixed: first time you played Last Man Standing in the Valley, the AI wouldn't spawn. This was a tricky issue that only happened in compiled builds. Fun to track down!
Our previous Beta Post for this update is here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/623540/announcements/detail/2469524850258267734
