Supraland
Update V1.23.7
+ Other small things
Supraland Six Inches Under OUT NOW!
End of 2021 Status - SIU Trailer - Supraworld Clip
Six Inches Under:
First of all, we put up the Six Inches Under Trailer today. If you want to not get spoiled at all, don't watch it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfXXy1cA8Ms
I'm very curious how new players will feel about the game. For oldskool Supralanders it is mostly familiar territory and for others it is a much more unique experience. It will also be interesting how those, who start with 'SIU', will react to Supraland 1 if they happen to play it afterwards.
I guess a while after release I'll also write a 'SIU'-Postmortem article, like I did with 'Crash'. There were a lot of lessons learned during the development and after the release we'll sure be made aware of more things to learn.
Here you can wishlist 'SIU':
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1522870/Supraland_Six_Inches_Under/
Supraland 1
Other good news is that Supraland 1 will be yet another year on Gamepass, which is a very significant thing to us.
Supraworld
In 2021 we worked with two teams basically. The core team was busy wrapping up 'SIU'. The art people were preparing lots of assets for Supraworld (formerly known as Supraland 2). We have so many fantastic looking objects and characters, it's gonna be beautiful. We also have a lot of newly written music for Supraworld by Daniel Sadowski and I'm eying having it recorded by a big orchestra. But it's expensive, so I'll have to wait for the 'SIU' sale numbers first before I make a decision.
Our art team did a fantastic job with the assets and Unreal Engine 5 makes it all look so beautiful, I can't believe it. I prepared a little 1 minute clip of Supraworld assets:
https://youtu.be/IF6YPgH_XY0
Be aware that this is barely gameplay; there is not really any functionality coded yet, it's mostly just visuals. You can only jump around and dash. The coding will start once the 'SIU' team wraps up completely.
With Supraworld we are making the jump to having every asset tailor made for the game. In Supraland 1 all the environment was made by us but I was using stock music and stock enemy models. In Crash and SIU we upgraded to our own music, but we still used stock enemies. But it's not like you just buy enemies from a store, put them in and it works. Nope, it's just the models and some animations. You need to create all the behaviour, sounds, AI, effects, interactions with other systems... it's a lot of complicated work you still need to do. That's also a thing we learned a lot about in the past year and it will just get better in Supraworld.
I expect that after the upcoming 'SIU'-Release it will take a couple of weeks of maintenance before we can all switch over.
While a lot about Supraworld is already pretty clear, there is still a lot of story and general game structure things we need to figure out and it's shaping up more and more every day.
I'm totally obsessed with Supraworld and pouring all my heart into it!
- David Münnich
Release Date - Six Inches Under
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1522870/Supraland_Six_Inches_Under/
This week we fixed the last important things in Supraland Six Inches Under, so we should be able to release it on 14. January '22 - 16h CET.
What's left to do is finishing up translations and the trailer video.
And some other little fluff here or there, like creating a presskit and so on.
We also consider making a demo version. We just can't agree yet where to end the demo. There are 3 moments up for debate. We sure wanna end the demo at a moment where you absolutely wanna continue. :)
The demo would once again smoothly carry over its save status to the main game.
Hit the like button to make sure the release date doesn't get delayed any further. I'm pretty sure it works like that.
- David Münnich
Update V1.23.6 and details about future games
- Improved NPC roaming code so it is much less demanding for the CPU
- Windowed mode is not borderless anymore
- Gun pickup not so bright anymore, which made the entire screen glitch for some people
- Fixed problem with gold nugget puzzle when you try to steal them
- Broken glass can now be shattered with giant steel balls
- Fixed getting stuck behind red kings house
- Fixed getting into Blue ville too soon with a complicated hack
- Changed appearance of closed pipes in Crash DLC where you can attach a purple pipe but people didn't realise they could
- Serbian Translation updated
- Optimised "sea of skulls" spawning procedure to maybe reduce crash likeliness for the rare ones affected
- Added SixInchesUnder reference to wheelie temple in Crash DLC
- Fixed other small details
Six Inches Under Supraland is in extensive testing by our crowdfunding backers and doing well. Expect the release in mid january! We would have released in late december, but releasing during a xmas sale is a very bad idea because you get zero visibility in the store.
Wishlist and follow here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1522870/Supraland_Six_Inches_Under/
Supraland 2 will be called Supraworld and I have two very early production screenshots
A very unfinished start village:
An egg that you very much want to open! (No more finding barrels!)
Don't ask about release dates for Supraworld. It's far away.
Six Inches Unders Beta testing
On 1. Oct 2021 we're releasing "Supraland Six Inches Under" into beta testing.
Testing
Today we start sending out beta keys to the crowdfunding backers from 2019.
We separated you into 2 groups. The first group will get the keys today; the 2nd group will get their keys in a few weeks, after the first group gave us a lot of feedback and we worked it into the game. This is to make sure we have fresh perspectives on a more polished state of the game lateron.
If you are a Tier2 backer and you don't have an email by tomorrow, check your spam folder.
Looking forward to your feedback and suggestions! The best way to stay up to date is being on the Supraland Discord
And no; you cannot become a backer anymore.
SIU Development
The making of Six Inches Under (SIU) has really been an odyssey because none of us were prepared for how big it became, but we ultimately ended up with something we're really confident about.
We did major changes multiple times because things just didn't feel good. I think the big changes were worth it and our early testers have been very positive and they had no preknowledge of the Supraland series.
Some of the big things we had to change:
We had this system with different kind of ores in the map and you could mine with your pickaxe. But it was simply not fun for anyone so we completely cut all of that and replaced it with a good old money system. It was bad because the mining process (or the inability to do so because of lacking pickaxe quality) was just annoying and it creates a big mess if you have 4 currencies. Now we're back to one currency.
The other big change was that halfway we noticed the no-enemies-approach of the game didn't feel right. So we designed a combat system with new enemy types from the ground up and integrated it for a long time. Without enemies you could not really reward the player with anything for finding the plenty secrets. Also the world felt pretty tension-less. The combat is far from perfect now, but it's taking a lot different direction from Supraland 1. I'm curious what you think.
The introduction of the abilities (which you mostly already know, but not all) were pretty short but since we swapped from DLC to Standalone we had to build new regions for these abilities with good introductions. Because now we can't expect all players to know them already. I guess most players of this game will never have played Supraland 1 before.
We also just weeks ago did a major change to core parts of the story because it was just too convoluted and weird. While you're making this stuff up everything seems obvious. But players never get that deep into it and won't really understand what's happening unless it's really simple and straight forward. I really like what we have now and it has a really bizarre twist that is so weird that I love it. And I don't think I'm spoiling much when I say: While Supraland solved racism and 'Crash' solved Flat Earthers, SIU solves capitalism :D
SL2
After those first two games will have solved three of the world's major problems, Supraworld (SL2) will probably not solve anything like that but it will be a gaming-satire most of all. A meta comment on generic gaming tropes, sort of.
Three of us having been working on Suprworld all year already creating assets and I've actually started building the world of the game recently.
When SIU is out of the door the rest of the team will join us on this project. I honestly love it so much already!
I can share some of the assets that we built. Three images are just asset tests, one image is actually from the game; in a very very early development stage.
https://imgur.com/a/HfECJ0d
Six Inches Under storepage is online
To receive further newsposts also "Follow" it, because I might not be posting more updates on the Supraland 1 news.
Just very briefly, because I keep getting asked about the SIU-development daily, we're doing a lot of testing and polishing and it's all going well. I think release is realistic in november/december. But it's done when it's done.
-David
Update V1.22.13
- Fixed landscape cracks at edges of screen
- Fixed default map controls for French keyboards
- Fixed some problems in French translation
- Fixed problem with battery respawns while they were electrified
- Fixed missing translation for when you pick up armor
- Fixed wrong player position in the giant kid's hand in Crash DLC
I hope this is the last update for the game. But if small things come up, we'll fix them for sure.
But I might upgrade the game to Unreal Engine 5, once the engine is production ready. It could improve visuals and performance drastically without too much effort.
Dev Blog May 2021 - Six Inches Under
World:
The game world with all the exploration and puzzles is more or less there and ready to go. We wanna add some little puzzles here or there, and maybe some more combat encounters, but nothing major.
We recently threw out an entire region because it wasn't fun and rebuilt that. The replacement region now feels like Supraland. Previously it was lacking motivation, direction and the puzzles were too fetch-questy, not supralandy.
We also came up with a new puzzle mechanic that I'm currently building a new world area for, and this one will be available only after the end credits. It uses physical mechanisms that might not be easy to understand for most people, that's why I decided to put it after the ending.
Balance:
The biggest thing left to do is balancing in terms of currency, upgrades and combat.
We recently removed an entire system from the game because it was creating more frustration than fun. It was basically a mining system where you could mine different kind of ores with different pickaxe upgrades. The two things that made this unfun were that you could not mine something you stood in front of, but your pickaxe wasn't buffed enough yet and you would have to memorize where exactly this was and come back to it later, which is not an interesting interaction at all; just a tedious one.
The other problem was, that we had so many currencies: coal, iron, diamonds, coins... it was really annoying. We're getting rid of all of that and limit it to just coins.
But currently we have no balance in the game at all in regards to how many coins you find, what upgrades cost, what upgrades you can buy at all. So that's coming soon.
Combat is equally unbalanced as some weapons and enemies are not fully done yet. We'll get to this soon, and it's the kind of thing that makes or breaks a game.
If combat is boring, too easy or too hard, and if the secret upgrades are not balanced well, the player won't be engaged. I felt that myself in my last playthrough where combat was way too easy and coins were useless. Which led to two things:
- I didn't care for secrets because I didn't need upgrades anyway
- I had no fun collecting coins, because I couldn't use them for anything.
Combat itself will be separate from puzzles. Some encounters are more puzzly though. There is no more one-fits-all weapon and most enemies need slightly different approaches. There are no more respawning enemies, but the encounters are mandatory and you cannot run past them. If you die during an encounter, it will get reset and you need to try again. The idea is that they are properly challenging but by finding lots of secret areas with upgrades, you can make them much easier.
Performance:
We're currently spending a lot of time optimising the code. It's the same problems that I recently fixed in Supraland 1. It's all about objects on the other side of the world being active while you're not even close.
There are 500 coins spinning in the world somewhere? The engine won't spin them because they are not visible, but it will ask the game on everyframe "should I spin? should I spin? should I spin?".
Same for NPCs that are roaming around in a far away region or the glowing sparks and bubbles rising out of a lava hole somewhere.
All of these things combined can take so long for the CPU to check that your FPS is cut in half. So we came up with a system that automatically disables all these things when they are out of range so the game won't even ask if they should do something. This saves a lot of CPU time and this system only gets pinged every few seconds, not every frame.
So when your FPS in Supraland was not great in the past, it was probably not a problem of your GPU. Drawing the image is easy peasy. But all the work the CPU had to do before drawing was what took so long. In Supraland 1 I fixed this in a more complicated way. But now we have this system which automates a lot and does most of the work for us.
Testing:
When we have an OK balance, we'll let some handpicked people play it with us watching.
In the next round it goes out to Tier 2 Crowdfunders.
Then we'll go either Early Access or Release right away, depending on how we feel about it at that point.
I have no dates for either of those steps, but upvoting this post surely speeds it up... probably.
-David
Update V1.22.8
- Added frequently requested Map upgrade
If you wanna get spoilered where to find the map: It can be found on top of the facility at the blue crystal. I think this is a great moment to get it, because it's the first moment in the game when players could get seriously lost sometimes.
It is an optional upgrade that can be found in the game world. It only shows you the regions you've already discovered, the rest is black until you go there.
You can freely paint anything on the map that you like.
So you can do what any self-respecting, mature person would do:
- Added DLSS support
DLSS is an AI upscaling feature that new graphic cards support. It allows to run the game in a lower resolution and the AI automatically scales it up to be sharp. Magic!
- FPS improvements
With a lot of little optimisation work done to the game, the CPU has to do much less work now. The GPU load should not be affected by this. My FPS went from ~60 up to ~120. So it can be really significant.
Please tell me about your experience in the comments.
- Added easy to use backup save system
We always saved backup files incase you needed to dial back time but it had to be done with manual file management. Now you can select backup savegames from the main menu.
- Huge kid is now animated instead of static
- Skeleton warrior now throws you back while parrying during sword combat
- Laptop puzzle is now less confusing
- Fixed rare bug where you would get robbed in Blue Ville again after loading
- Orange in color machine looks more orange than yellow now
- Fixed small problem with ammo-recharge number after loading game
- Fixed ammo-recharge speed; it was faster or slower depending on your FPS; now it's the same for all
- Fixed a way to glitch way up into the air with the cube + beam
- Cosmetic improvements here and there
- Lots of little improvements and fixes all over the place
Hotfix 1.22.9
- Fixed missing jumppads in Crash DLC
Hotfix 1.22.10 - 12.05.2021
- Fixed NPCs talking with wrong text color
- Made tiny adjustment to cube-on-rising-pillar puzzle in volcano area