Haven't had this productive week in a long time! Nilsson made new mechanics and new tools and I concentrated on art, which is my favorite.
We're less than one month away from releasing in Early Access (finally!), and I can feel it in my bones, and you can witness the effects in the amount of content we added this week.
Also, last week and the week before that I promised that I'd make the village peaceable set the next week. I'll stop promising that now.
The container + vending machine outpost look was getting old. I made new outpost art last weekend, which obviously did not make the last week's devlog! Here are pictures of an example starter outpost
Daytime
Night
Once we finish creating the starter outpost areas, you'll be locked to one starter outpost based on your SteamID, which I talked about last week. This feature is working but disabled until we finish the rest of the outposts.
Warehouse Art
Teo
[previewyoutube="S0j68AWJYjk;full"] The world was, and still is lacking in points of interest. Places where you can loot containers and encounter other players doing the same thing. We did have the hangars and random containers here and there, but they were boring and outdated, and they will eventually be replaced by new, better-quality areas.
These warehouses I worked on this week are the first step in making the POIs more interesting. They are a mid-size building with varying amounts of loot. In the coming weeks, I'll be adding more buildings sizes that share the same theme as the warehouses you see here, and Nilsson will start placing them around and creating the actual POI areas!
Red variant, no rust. Right now there are 6 color variants in total.
Grey, rust variant. I made a shader to adjust the rust amount dynamically, which allows us to have varying amounts of rust on each warehouse building if we so choose.
Warehouse rack, 1 of 3
Some cute cardboard boxes
Cute boxes on a pallet
Pallets on pallets
Barrel and boxes on a pallet
Boat Travel Cutscene
Teo
I ran out of time last week, but this Monday I finished the boat travel cutscene. I added the tail part of a track I composed for Longvinter a couple of weeks ago called 'Sail' to the sequence too. Here's a video of it: [previewyoutube="ZtknUBG-CUs;full"]
Lot of UI additions
Nilsson
This week I focused on UI to finish up all the prepared mechanics that are now ready for testing.
New UI for status effects
I wanted the buff effect UI to the same standard that we have on all others. For a recap, the buff is a temporary or permanent status effect on your character that affects certain actions. For example, Blackberry jam reduces incoming damage, and Rasberry jam makes you take less damage when you walk on snow.
You can also view additional information about the topic when you hover your mouse cursor over the icon longer.
Status effects are visible on top of the energy bar.
Code lock for opening houses
I finished the final UI change that was needed for the new house feature to fully work. Now when you try to enter a house, it asks for a code that the homeowner set when they made the house.
You only have to input the correct code once to each door.
Basic Generator
We threw ideas around with Teo about making the land around the player's tent/cabin more utilized. We came up with an idea about generators that would generate electricity or some other resource when you added fuel to them. I finished up the groundwork for these new types of placeables.
Here is the UI for adding fuel to a basic generator.
Bird random encounters
Nilsson
Originally we wanted to have two types of birds. Ones that would be standing in the field and others that came out running from the bushes.
This week I implemented the latter. Every time you walk by the bush a rare type of bird can jump out and you better try to catch it because good loot is just waiting for takers.
Other changes
Added the rest of the achievements to the game. Now a total of 28
Fixed chat bugs
Moved most of the weapon effects to client-side, where they belong
Lowered bunch of texture resolutions for better performance
Friday Devlog #2
This week's devlog is a little light in terms of new content since both of us had to be away from home for a couple of days, but don't worry, I'll be working through the weekend which means that in the next week's devlog we'll see more new content added!
I'll most probably work on the village placeable set this weekend, which I promised last week, so that is something you can expect to see next week! :)
You can now fast travel between outposts and other locations via interacting with the new boat that is located in multiple different outposts around the map.
You can travel to your starter outpost, which is tied to your SteamID free of charge, but all the other locations cost X amount of MK. Traveling to the WIP location called 'Hamari Village' will cost the least amount of MK of all available locations, since we want this to be a central hub where players can find their friends, get help and tools, and socialize.
Every available location displays the following information on the 'Boat Travel' window:
Location name
Available services
PVP / Safe, turret protected
Coordinates
Is the location in the snow
Price
Use this new feature to travel according to your wealth. When you know you enough MK to buy new tools for better money-making methods, find out the vendor which has those tools for sale and that buys the resources you gather with the tool and travel to it!
Swimming Animations
Nilsson
We have the game finally at the stage where we can start to give some love to features that have been the same as when Teo first created them one year ago. Swimming never had its own animation but the player character would just walk in the water. In my opinion, this worked surprisingly well but it's was now time to create dedicated swimming animations.
Animations are created inside the engine to make it easier for implementation. Teo also added some nice sound effects. Check out the quick video below.
[previewyoutube="zLW87NKkWVE;full"]
Chat command: /Roll
Teo
Players can now generate a random number between two integers, by default 1-100. This is useful if a member of a group of equal players wants to claim something—such as a chest or a rare plant—they will roll for it.
Players can roll a random number using the following slash commands:
"/roll" returns a number between 1 and 100. "/roll 50-200" returns a number between given min. and max. values, in this example 50-200.
Getting Started Guide
Teo
Since there is no info anywhere on what you should do in Longvinter, I added a new button in the main menu for beginners that opens a window that tells you what to do to get started in the game. Will be updated frequently to match the questions and problems players will have once we have more people playing the game!
Quality of Life & Localization
Nilsson
During this week I focused a bit more on playing the game and finding different problems and bugs. We had a bug where one of the functions that were responsible for switching the player stance when the player started aiming was not set as network reliable and this caused the gun models to flicker and not be set visible.
There were a number of other bugs fixed, see the list below!
Fixed bugs
When the player unequipped the fishing rod after catching the fish the fishing rod would reappear in the player's backpack unintentionally.
The bird AI would not reset its walking destination after it had been killed. This would cause the bird to walk in weird locations after it respawned. Fixed this by resetting the target destination after respawn.
Fixed a bug where inventory would become unresponsive if you would right-click(drop) item in the crafting menu.
Sometimes player would shoot itself if the network connection was bad.
Localization support!
The Unreal Engine has a simple built-in feature for detecting translatable text in-game, which enables us to add different cultures from translators. I just had to convert a couple of item names to use the "Text" variable and this auto-generated the files that can be used to fill in translations. If you are interested in translating the game texts for your native language please contact us in Discord!
Other changes
Added a new SMG
Projectiles now have damage drop off depending on the weapon
