Update 1.3.1 is finally here, so Steam should digitally vomit it on to your computer shortly. Here's what's new:
----- THE COMPUTER SYSTEM -----
Once you've built an Electronics Workbench, you'll now have access to a new "Computer System" recipe, which lets you do a few different things:
- ONLINE BANKING
Via the wonders of the WrongWeb internet, you can transfer Coins from your inventory directly into an online bank balance, and back again. Don't ask me how it works. Magic, I assume.
- ONLINE SHOP
You can also use the Computer System to access an online shop, allowing you to both sell unwanted surplus supplies and buy exclusive furniture (which is 3D printed from the comfort of your own home).
- SELLING RESOURCES
The list of resources you can sell is fixed and never changes. The interface shows how many of each particular resource you'll need to exchange in order to have 1 Coin added directly to your bank balance. If you don't have enough of a particular resource in your inventory, the option to sell it will be greyed out. In the not-too-distant future, I'll probably roll out a similar system to the Crafting Menu, so it greys out recipes you don't have the resources for... That's been on my list of things to do forever! :)
- BUYING FURNITURE
The list of items you can buy is randomised every day at 6am. There'll be 5 random items for sale each day, so it's worth checking in daily if there's something in particular you want. I've done it this way to keep the available furniture a little more mysterious, and it also allows me to infinitely expand on this system in future without having to wrestle with a bloated user interface.
In Creative Mode, all of the furniture is available, all of the time, and it's free to purchase. So, it does indeed make the interface quite bloated, but at least people can really go to town and quickly create some epic mansions if they so choose!
- MORE COMPUTER SYSTEM INFO
If you start a new game, a few of these Computer Systems will be randomly dotted around the world, so you don't technically ever need to build one, but having one in your house would certainly make things a lot easier. And these randomly-spawned ones can't be moved either, so you won't be able to simply steal them like you can with some other structures :)
At the moment, all the furniture you can buy is completely and utterly pointless, and is purely decorative. However, in future, I plan to start adding specific uses to pieces of furniture (like an oven that can be used like a Cooking Pot, or a bed that actually lets you sleep in it). But, personally speaking, I've still been having a lot of fun with the pointless furniture as it is. If, like me, you're one of those people who spends hours fiddling around with their houses in games, slightly obsessively arranging things for no reason whatsoever, you'll probably appreciate this stuff, and you'll definitely appreciate this next part:
----- CONSTRUCTION MODE IMPROVEMENTS -----
Previously, Construction Mode (activated with "C" by default) allowed you to move structures around however you want, but you couldn't move pick-up-able items. If you wanted to move an item, you'd have to pick it up then drag it back out of your inventory, whereupon it'd be unceremoniously dumped back out into the world.
You can now use Construction Mode to drag items around however you want, which is pretty darn useful when you've just bought, say, a shiny new bookcase and want to put stuff on it. Just aim at the item in question, hold RMB, and move around however you want.
Using the power of physics, this new system also allows you to (very inaccurately) throw items around. Once I got this system up and running, I had a surprisingly large amount of fun filling up a bookcase with pies and then trying to knock them off by hurling things at them, coconut shy-style. I then started playing a game that I now refer to as "Bathketball", which involves attempting to throw a lump of coal into a bath in the distance. Next on my list of similarly pointless things: the creation of a bowling alley using potion bottles and stones :) I should probably add some kind of football or basketball-style models to make such silliness easier. Anyway, enough rambling...
I've also improved how items and structures are rotated (the default controls being "comma" and "period/full stop" while moving things) when in Construction Mode: Previously, structures simply rotated 5 degrees at a time, but that sometimes meant you couldn't align things exactly as you wanted. Now, things start rotating at 1 degree per tick, and it steady picks up speed until it's spinning stupidly fast. It should make precise alignment of things a little easier/possible. The rotation of structures that you've only just built and are selecting an initial location for still use the same, fixed-speed rotation as always; it's only the Construction Mode rotation system that has been altered. I imagine I'll end up standardising both those systems at some point in the near future, though, once I know for sure that the new Construction Mode rotation acceleration doesn't break everything!
Oh, also, the player now becomes transparent when using Construction Mode to move something, just so you can see exactly where you're positioning something, especially useful when moving small items.
----- A WORD ON COINS -----
Because Coins are now easier to get your hands via selling resources, I've removed the Refining recipe that allowed you to turn a Coin into a piece of Gold Ore. You can still turn a Gold Ore into a Coin using a Smelter, but not back again. It'd have unbalanced the value of Gold Ore, so the recipe has been removed.
In future, depending on feedback about the prices of the new furniture - and just feedback in general - I may also make Coins a more common drop from regular beasties. We shall see.
----- RANDOM UPDATES/FIXES -----
- Updated the Crafting Menu icon for the Probe Console (because I noticed it still showed the original version of the Console - the one with little Search and Home buttons physically on the front of it).
- Added a tip that appears after buying furniture to explain how to move it.
- Tweaked the horribly confusing and devastatingly ugly Gamepad Controls image, just to clarify that left/right D-pad will rotate things. I still plan to overhaul all the gamepad controls in general at some point soon-ish because I know they're not great!
Anyway, that's all for now. As always, if you have any feedback or encounter any problems, please do let me know. And feel free to come and say hello on the Wrongworld Discord.
MURGHLY CRIMMAAS!
Merry Christmas from all the beasties of Wrongworld! May you receive all of the interesting things you wished for! :)
Mac & Linux (Bad) News
After I got version 1.2 of Wrongworld live at the end of October, I decided it was finally time to fully focus on the Mac and Linux versions of the game. Even though I had no experience of Mac and Linux things in general, for some reason I was confident that I'd be able to get them both launched by the end of November. Oh, how wrong I was!
I shall begin by recounting The Epic Saga of November Linux Fails (in bullet point format):
- I spent about 4 days at the start of November wrestling with one of my test computers, desperately trying to rid it of Windows and install Ubuntu in its place. Mucho fiddling around with BIOS and bootables and other things that make me feel very uncomfortable, only to discover that the problem I had been baffled by for about 3-and-a-half days was in fact caused by a faulty USB port. Sigh!
- I then wasted a few more days trying to cross-compile the Linux version of the game from my main Windows machine, but discovered that it'd require me to do a few potentially scary things. I didn't want to accidentally mangle my beloved main computer, so I decided to get the Unreal Engine set up natively on my new Ubuntu machine instead.
- Spent several more days figuring out how to actually build the Unreal Engine in Ubuntu, but I got there in the end. Mostly.
- Booted it up, created a few test projects, discovered that the graphics were all messed up. "Probable graphics driver issues," I thought. "Should be easy to fix... I'll ignore that for now while I do this next thing..."
- Transferred the Wrongworld project over to the Ubuntu machine, tried to load it up, wouldn't load because of some third-party dependency issue that would've been easy to fix on either Windows or Mac due to the Epic Games launcher/marketplace, but that doesn't exist in the Linux version. Managed to fumble my way around that issue a bit - or, at least, I thought I had figured out how to fix it - but decided to ignore it for now, go back to the previous issue, and get the graphics drivers sorted out first instead.
- Utterly bricked my poor little Ubuntu machine by doing things I shouldn't have done in its all-powerful "Terminal"/Command Prompt.
- Smashed face against wall for a long while.
- Reinstalled Ubuntu... Back to square one. Maybe square two.
- Realised I'd ultimately need to go back to the "cross-compiling from Windows" method, but I needed a break from all things Linux before I went insane.
That sums up about the first two-thirds of November pretty well. With over half the month gone and nothing to show for it, I decided it was time for the Mac version. "That should be simpler," I thought. You can probably guess where this story is going...
- Installed the Unreal Engine on the Mac I have access to. It's actually my girlfriend's, so I had to tread carefully with it, especially when you consider that I had just completely mangled Ubuntu with my impressive lack of technical knowledge.
- The Mac's OS had recently been updated to "High Sierra".
- Important Facts: Wrongworld has been built in Unreal Engine version 4.14. If I upgrade the project to 4.15 or beyond, all manner of things stop working, so I'm effectively locked into 4.14. Which is fine, and to be expected: everything works, so no need to upgrade the project. Epic Games themselves (the lovely creators of the Unreal Engine) recommend keeping your projects locked down to a specific version, and only attempting upgrading if absolutely necessary.
- Anyway, I attempted to boot up the Unreal Engine for the first time on the Mac, and it almost instantly crashed. In case you're interested, here's somebody else reporting the problem.
- Long story short, it's an Unreal Engine bug... Epic Games' support say, "This is a known bug with High Sierra and unfortunately you will have to use a more recent version of UE (4.15 or upwards) or downgrade to Sierra 10.12."
4.15, you say? Please refer to the "Important Facts" above and my reliance on 4.14. Sad face time.
- I upgraded the Mac OS to "Mojave", just to see if it'd fix it. It didn't. Same crash occurs.
- I spent days trying to find away around this issue, but I had to accept I wasn't going to be able to in the end. Stupid computers.
- But all is not lost... I just need to downgrade the OS to regular "Sierra", not "High Sierra", and that might bypass the issue. Alas, you may remember that this is not my Mac to screw around with, and you also may remember that I had recently destroyed my new Ubuntu machine. In other words, I daren't touch computers at the moment, lest they explode or melt or burst into flames.
- Alternatively, I could attempt to bite the bullet and upgrade the project beyond UE 4.14 to bypass the Unreal/Mac bug, but, from my previous attempts to do that, I know it'll be a pretty darn time-consuming thing to do.
So, what does all this mean for the Mac and Linux versions? Well, it means they won't be landing any time soon, I'm afraid. I really am sad about that, and I promise I haven't given up; I will not let these other versions defeat me, but some things need to happen first:
1) I want to buy a new Windows machine in order to attempt the cross-compiling to Linux without putting my beloved (and pretty vital) main machine in harm's way. I know that may be overreacting a little, but I'm not feeling particularly confident in my techie skills at the moment, and I'd rather be safe than sorry.
2) I need to get my own Mac that I can poke around with and downgrade without worrying that I may kill my girlfriend's computer. She would probably be a little cross if I did. I fear she would set the Chihuahuas on me.
In other words, I need to buy myself two middle-of-the-road machines in order to continue plugging away at these other versions, and that means I need to save up some cash. Fingers crossed, I'll have the money by the end of January, but maybe not... January is when my annual tax bill punches me in the face, so it might have to wait until February.
But on the bright side, this does mean I can now just get my head down and crack on with developing new content again, and stop wrestling with various foreign operating systems for the time being. So, hopefully, I might have version 1.3 out in time for Christmas :)
Anyway, that's enough rambling from me for now. I just wanted to let everyone know what I've been doing for the last month, fully explain what's going with these other versions, and reassure anyone in the Mac/Linux camp that I have not - and will not - give up!
Update 1.2.2 (13th November)
I've just pushed out Update 1.2.2, but it's nothing to get particularly excited about... It's just a few minor fixes, all relating to the way house building works.
I've been aware of a bug for a while now that could potentially cause you to teleport up into the roof of your house after crafting a structure while indoors, generally resulting in you getting trapped and being unable to move, which was less than ideal! Well, I'm 99.9% sure I've finally got to the bottom of it, and this update should (hopefully) fix that issue once and for all. Hurray! :)
I'm still hard at work sorting out the Mac and Linux versions, but, as they were taking a little longer than expected, I didn't want to delay getting this fix live, so I thought I'd push out this update now instead, pathetically small and uninteresting though it is!
So, that's all for now. Fingers crossed, it won't be too long now until I get the Mac and Linux versions out and get back to working on new content, but, in the meantime, if you have any feedback or encounter any problems, please just let me know. And feel free to come and say hello on the Wrongworld Discord.
Update 1.2.1 (26th October)
Update 1.2.1 has arrived, so Steam should do its thing and download it for you soon. Here come the details:
----- CUSTOM GAME MODE -----
As well as the usual Easy/Normal/Hard/Creative modes, you'll now find a "Custom Mode" option when starting a new game.
In this mode, you can tweak a bunch of different settings before starting, like World Size, Day Length, the rate of Hunger Loss, whether Permadeath is enabled, and a bunch of other settings about the world, player and beasties.
If you keep Permadeath enabled but lower the difficulty using any of the other settings, you'll still be able to earn XP, but at a reduced rate.
I'll most likely be expanding on the range of customisable settings some more in future, but this hopefully gives a nice starting point.
----- INDOOR LAMP & CRAFTING TWEAKS -----
Once you've built an Electronics Workbench, you'll now be able to craft an Indoor Lamp to brighten up your home.
These lights will only work when placed in your house, and they will never cast shadows (for performance reasons).
A few other crafting recipes have been renamed:
- Spotlight > Security Spotlight (to help clarify it's designed to be an outdoor light that scares off Slug Beasts).
- Stone Wall > Garden Wall (to help clarify that it's an outdoor thing and is not designed to be used to wall-off a Modular House Tile... I've seen a few people do that before they realised they needed to use Construction Mode to add walls).
- Wooden Fence > Garden Fence (just to help bring it in line with the new name for the Stone/Garden Wall).
----- MOTION BLUR TOGGLE -----
You can now use the Settings > Graphics Menu to toggle Motion Blur independently from the other Post Processing settings.
----- HOUSE EDITING UPDATES -----
I've made a few changes to the way the house editing system works when using Construction Mode to interact with a Modular House Tile:
- While editing a tile, the walls will no longer block the camera (so you have a better view of the changes you're making).
- If you're stood on top of a tile when you rotate it, it will no longer rotate the player along with it... You'll remain in the same location/rotation instead.
- After making changes to a tile and closing the House Editing UI, the game will move you into the middle section of the tile if it detects you could might be potentially obstructed by a wall.
- I've extended the interaction range of Construction Mode, so you can stand a little further away things now.
I'm also aware of a rare intermittent bug that can cause you to teleport up into the roof of your house after building a structure inside your home, resulting in you being unable to move. While I continue to look into squishing that naughty bug, I've made it possible to open the House Editing UI by interacting with the flat roof section of your house, not just the floor tile. In other words, if you do end up trapped in the roof of your house, you can simply enable Construction Mode, look down, and edit the house, temporarily removing the roof as necessary to set yourself free!
Oh, and I've also fixed an issue that may have caused the windows to misbehave, remaining hidden when they should have been visible.
----- COMBAT LOCK-ON CHANGES -----
The style of the marker that highlights your lock-on target has been updated... It's now 4 little arrows surrounding the target rather than 1 above them. The arrows are now also visible through things, so you can keep track of your target even if it wanders behind scenery.
Also, there was previously a slight flaw in the logic used to determine which enemy to lock on to, meaning that it didn't always target the nearest enemy. That's been fixed now, so it should always reliably target the nearest enemy.
----- AUTO-COLLECT PROMPT -----
If the game detects that a player doesn't seem to be using the Auto-Collect system (holding RMB to automatically pick up nearby items), it'll pop up a new style of tip that should (hopefully) be impossible to ignore.
----- RANDOM UPDATES/FIXES -----
- Rabbit Beasts should be less inclined to lurk up on the roof of your house indefinitely now. They might still end up on a roof, but they'll be quick to teleport back down if they detect the player is outside and in range of their attacks but they don't have line of sight.
- When Trees/Rocks wobble while being harvested, they should be less likely to punt nearby items into the distance.
- Added a bit of text next to the Hotbar to help clarify it exists.
- Opening the Inventory/Crafting Menu now cancels Interacting (e.g. chopping a tree/smashing a rock/moving a structure via Construction Mode).
- Pressing LMB to confirm the location of a craftable structure while the Inventory/Crafting menu is open will now automatically close the UI.
- The stack size of items is now shown when targetting an item (e.g. "Grab 10 Wood").
- Reduced the potential maximum speed for vertical movement of the camera when the Inventory is open.
- Updated a few tips to explicitly state the control in question (e.g. "Hold Right Mouse" instead of "Hold Interact"), and refocused all tips to explain only keyboard controls (eventually, I'll have the game detect if a controller is being used, and update the tips accordingly).
- Added a few new tips and changed the timing of a couple more.
- Added a sound effect that plays when a Getting Started Tip appears.
- Fixed an issue that I added in the last update which may have caused equipment visibility issues the first time you equipped something.
- Fixed an issue that caused the crafting progress bar to disappear if you opened the Inventory or Crafting Menu while crafting something.
- Tweaked the way the ship controls work during the Credits (previously, the speed of the rotation of the ship changed depending on your frame rate, but it should now be the same across all frame rates. Also, I've changed the way the ship rotates towards the direction of the ship's velocity, because I've seen it freak out a little in various YouTube vids... I've never been able to recreate that myself, so I'm not sure if the changes I've made will make any difference, but it certainly shouldn't make things any worse! I'll have to keep an eye on any new videos to see if the problem crops up again).
- It is no longer possible to mount the Hamster while Contruction Mode is active. - Fixed an issue with the Jet Pack which may have prevented you from avoiding a face-plant by pressing Space if you had any fuel remaining. - The Jet Pack fuel now recharges much faster in Creative Mode, and the Teleporter recharges almost instantly too. - You can no longer stand on Boxy McBox's head. He didn't like it. - Fixed an issue that prevented the removal of the Robot's Room Status UI if he kicked you out of his lair. - Fixed an exploit with The Sword In The Slug (rapidly equipping/unequipping massively increased the chance of its special anti-Slug effect triggering). - Updated the collision of the Boxing Ring mesh to (hopefully) help prevent beasties from getting knocked through it. - Reduced the Health/Hunger penalty for quitting while in a boss lair/cave. - Fixed an issue that caused weapon effects to temporarily remain visible after boarding your ship and beginning the end-game cut-scene.
That's all for now! Next on my to-do list are Mac and Linux versions. I was initially planning to have those ready in time for this update, but the Custom Mode things took a little longer than expected. Fingers crossed, they should be ready in the next week or two.
After that, it's time for me to start work on 1.3, the main focus of which will be a big chunk of new content/events/POIs etc... I think :)
As always, if you have any feedback or encounter any problems, please do let me know. And feel free to come and say hello on the Wrongworld Discord.
TIGA Award Shortlist!
I'm absolutely honoured, humbled and completely overjoyed to have been shortlisted for a TIGA Games Industry Award in the category of "Best Start-Up".
I shall now be walking around with a ridiculously massive smile on my face for the foreseeable future :)
Update 1.1.2 has landed, but don't get too excited... It's mostly just minor tweaks and bug fixes!
----- BEASTIE PROJECTILE TWEAKS -----
Even though this update is mainly boring bug fixes, I thought I'd highlight a couple of the changes because they might actually affect the way you play, ever so slightly.
Previously, all of the projectile-firing beasties (that's the Acorn, Yeti, Rabbit and Slug Beasts) didn't care whether they could actually see you when deciding whether or not to launch a projectile at you. If you were within range, they were happy to lob things at you, regardless of whether they could actually see you. Originally, this was never really much of a problem, but since I added player housing, I realised it is kind of annoying/stupid when you've got a bunch of beasties outside your house, brainlessly throwing stuff into the walls, jabbering their silly sound effects constantly.
So, I've now added a line-of-sight check to them. They don't care about other beasties that might be in the way, but if you're stood behind a wall or tree or rock or whatever and they don't have direct line of sight, they'll decide against shooting and will continue moving towards you instead.
----- BEAST BURYING BLOCKING -----
Y'know how when you're digging there's a chance it might spawn a Snake Beast? Well, I bet I'm not the only person who, while trying to plant a bunch of crops or trees in a row, has accidentally clicked to interact with a dirt mound at the exact same time as a Snake popped up, resulting in a frantic fumbling moment of trying to close the Burying Menu so you can actually defend yourself against the Snake. Sound familiar? Well, this part of the update is for you! :)
You can no longer interact with a dirt mound if there's a beastie stood on top of it. This means if you're busy doing muscle-memory farming, planting a bunch of seeds, it should be impossible to open the Burying Menu if a Snake has spawned (until the vile beast has moved out of the way anyway).
----- RANDOM UPDATES/FIXES -----
- Fixed an exploit which provided access to an infinite number of caves if you saved/quit within a second of leaving a cave.
- You can no longer dig the floor of your house (in case you're interested, you couldn't actually dig things up in your house, but the act of digging caused the game to get a little confused). And the shovel target icon will also be hidden indoors.
- Added a tip that can appear early in the game when the "Inventory Full" message first appears, explaining that you can safely drop items on the floor and come back for them later.
- Added a tip that can appear early in the game when you first light a campfire, explaining that you need to use the Crafting Menu to cook food... Fingers crossed, nobody will be dropping their Meat directly on to a Campfire again! :)
- Changed that confusing "No Free Space" message you might've seen from time-to-time when trying to unequip an item by using the hotbar or by right-clicking on the equipped item. It now explains things a little more clearly: "Can't unequip... No space in Inventory".
- Meteors can no longer hurt you when you're indoors. - Fixed an issue with the Slug Statue, which made it possible to pull an infinite number of Swords out of it! - I recently found out about a player that had become stuck in the wall of their house. While I continue to research how the hell this might've happened, I've added a simple little workaround for now... If you do happen to get stuck in a wall, simply saving and reloading the game a few times should fix it. Each time you reload, the game will move the player upwards a little bit. Normally, gravity will do its thing so you won't notice the difference, but, if you're stuck in a wall and can't move, this means it'll eventually push you out of the top of the wall! Simple but effective :)
- Fixed an issue that caused things to go a bit weird if you switched equipment while in the middle of crafting something.
- Fixed an issue with the Smelter's collision, which made it possible for it to knock the player around while being placed/moved with Construction Mode.
- Oh, and I've also made the update notes on the Title Screen a tiny bit prettier.
That's all for now. Things might be a little quiet on the update front for a few weeks now while I prepare to exhibit the game at EGX here in the UK later this month, but it'll be business as usual once I get back. Speaking of which, if any of you are planning to attend EGX, please be sure to head over to the Tentacle Zone and say hello :)
As always, if you have any feedback or encounter any problems, please do let me know. And feel free to come and say hello on the Wrongworld Discord.
Update 1.1.1 (18th August)
Update 1.1.1 is (finally) here, so Steam should do its thing and download it for you shortly.
Here's what's new:
----- CAVES -----
Previous updates have generally focused on expanding existing game systems (like adding new items to craft, new biomes, more points of interest to discover, and more random events). With this update, I wanted to add an entirely new aspect to the game: Caves.
Cave entrances can now spawn around the world, and each one leads to a randomly generated cave for you to explore.
The contents of a cave are randomised, so some might be more interesting than others, but they'll all have at least one little treat for you to find (ranging from a few relatively boring crates/barrels to a selection of more interesting new items that I won't spoil here, and maybe even some shiny new unique gear).
Each cave will also be filled with rocks to mine, roots to chop, mushrooms to forage, and maybe a few other things, but they'll likely be guarded by a bunch of Slug Beasts too.
The addition of caves isn't going to radically alter the game - it's designed to be a new system that works alongside everything else, such as random events and the investigation of POIs. In a nutshell, it's designed to expand the game's repertoire of unexpected things it can throw at you, and it's another aspect that should help prevent the game from becoming too repetitive.
If you start a new game, 3 cave entrances should already be randomly spawned around the world, and new caves entrances can appear from time to time. There's a huge amount of randomness involved in this so expect some variance, but, on average, probability says a new cave entrance should spawn about once every 10 in-game days. Ish. But it varies... In one of my test sessions, I've seen two spawn by Day 6; in another, the first one didn't spawn until Day 22.
The probability of them spawning may need some tweaking in future, as might their contents, but your feedback should help guide that process. If I make them appear too often, I have to limit the amount of goodness each one can contain for the sake of balance, which in turn makes them less interesting. But if they appear less often, I can ramp up the amount of goodies they contain to make them more interesting without it becoming unbalanced, but of course, by virtue of them simply not spawning that often, it makes the game a little less interesting overall. It's a balancing act: finding the sweet spot between how often they appear to keep things interesting and what they might contain without them becoming overpowered by potentially providing too many rare resources. At the moment, I think they're at a good point: They're not too rare, and you should hopefully come away with at least some decent resources and probably a rare item each time you visit one.
The exact probabilities of a cave entrance spawning are as follows (this is a bit of a spoiler, but for the sake of feedback about how often they're spawning for you, I thought I should provide the exact probabilities so you know whether RNG is being kind to you or not):
- 1 in 50 chance when a Slug Beast spawns at night.
- 1 in 50 chance when you smash a rock.
- 1 in 150 chance when you dig with a shovel. Digs inside a Greenhouse can never spawn a cave entrance.
I'm tempted to make chopping trees also offer a slim chance to spawn a cave entrance too. I know that doesn't really make sense, but I like the idea that any everyday activity can have a chance of spawning one.
I do have plans to expand on this caving system some more in future too (more unique finds, secrets, and maybe a cave-dwelling boss), but this is hopefully a nice starting point.
If you've already played the game to death, you might want to wait until another update or two have trickled out first before diving back in, just so you've got more newness to experience.
----- COMBAT ROLL TWEAKS -----
Previously, you could only do a Combat Roll if you pressed Jump while an attack animation was playing. I've tweaked this a little, so you now have a 0.5 second window after completing an attack animation in which to press Space to trigger the Combat Roll.
Hopefully, this makes doing a roll a little less fiddly, and should help prevent accidental jumps mid-combat.
As has always been the case - or, at least, as has been the case since very early in early access - you can still only do a Combat Roll once every 1 second (this limitation is in place to prevent repeated, rapid-fire Combat Rolls being used as a form of fast travel).
----- NEW ACHIEVEMENT -----
There's a new cave-based achievement. Nothing that exciting really, but I thought I should mention it anyway!
----- RANDOM UPDATES/FIXES -----
- Tweaked the rock meshes a bit to make their visual size better represent the amount of stone you'll get from them.
- Lowered the spawn rate of Mushrooms a bit (partially because the world ended up being overrun by them, and partially because you can now find them in caves too).
- Trees now grow around 20% faster, although they have the potential to initially spawn in a new world a little smaller.
- Tweaked the Slug Beast loot table a tiny bit.
- Fixed an issue that may have prevented the Spring Beasts from moving when you weren't looking at them. - Fixed an issue that caused the Sword in the Slug to permanently vanish if you yanked it out of the statue while your inventory was full.
Next up, I plan to work on another brand new system rather than simply adding more stuff, but I haven't given up on expanding the existing crafting, events and POI systems either... It just might take another couple of updates before I get around to those :)
As always, if you have any feedback or encounter any problems, please do let me know. And feel free to come and say hello on the Wrongworld Discord.
Update 1.0.2 (30th June)
Update 1.0.2 is here, but it really is a tiny one this time - nothing to get excited about, really - just a few minor fixes that I thought I may as well push out now ahead of the much bigger July update (which is when new content will start to arrive).
So, what's new:
----- TRADING CARDS -----
I've just enabled Trading Card drops for Wrongworld. I'm not completely sure how this'll work for people who have already played the game, but I'm assume you'll be given cards retroactively based on your previous play time. We'll find out soon enough, I suppose!
Either way, there are now 7 cards, 5 profile backgrounds, and 5 emoticons to collect, if you like such things!
----- COMBAT LOCK-ON CHANGES -----
Previously, pressing Left Shift more than once would toggle the lock on between the two nearest targets, and to cancel it, you needed to press Escape or hold Left Shift for about 0.3 seconds. Personally, I rarely use the lock on system myself, but after watching other people struggle a little with that system, I realised it wasn't very intuitive!
So, the system now works a little differently, so it's hopefully less fiddly for people.
Now, press Left Shift once, and it'll lock on to a nearby enemy. Press it again, and it'll cancel the lock on. Simple, no more toggling between multiple nearby beasties, so hopefully less frustrating for players. While writing this, I've literally just realised that there's a potential flaw in the way it selects the target (perhaps not always selecting the nearest enemy, although it should do that in the vast majority of cases), but it'll be easy enough to improve on this again in future. D'oh.
Oh, also, the lock on will still automatically be cancelled if you move out of range of your target beastie.
----- RANDOM UPDATES/FIXES -----
- Tweaked the collision box for all the flowers, so the fearsome hamster mount should no longer be suddenly stopped in its tracks by puny petals. Must've had a pollen allergy. They can still get in your way a bit, but it should be better now, and less like riding straight into a brick wall! - Fixed a few issues with the Spring Beasts:
1) They should no longer be able to cheat by stealing your structures through walls.
2) They'll now bounce away from water when they have a structure in their mouth and you're chasing them.
3) They shouldn't be able to accidentally drop your structures under the sea.
4) You can now target them using the lock-on system.
5) Repulsion Turrets now destroy them (I decided this was better than launching them into the distance... That was less than ideal if they happened to have one of your structures on their mouth at the time!). - Tweaked the tooltip for the Post Processing graphics setting to help clarify that's what you'd need to change to disable Motion Blur.
Because this update is such a small, pathetic one in general, I also feel the need to explain why so little progress has been made over the last month, so here are a few other things I've been working on, which ultimately haven't panned out (yet):
Most of May was spent trying my best to do marketing and other launch-related things.
Early June, my brain finally melted from the rather insane level of work I've been doing over the last 18 months, so I decided to have a week or so away from my computer to recharge my batteries, which was very much needed! And it did me a lot of good!
After that, I spent a few days with the graphics settings system to try to separate Motion Blur from the other Post Processing settings, planning to add a toggle for that. Alas, I couldn't get it to work properly. The Unreal Engine lumps Motion Blur in with all the other Post Processing settings, and it's much more fiddly than you might imagine to affect only the Motion Blur! In the end, because there actually aren't that many other Post Processing effects, I decided to abandon that and crack on with other updates instead. With Post Processing set to "Low" (which disables Motion Blur), the only other thing you're really missing out on would be the light bloom from the sun, so hopefully that's something people can do without if it means they don't have to vomit on their computer due to motion sickness!
I then spent about 3 or 4 days wrestling with an indoor lighting system, but, in the end, I've had to abandon that idea for now. Which is annoying, because I would like it to be possible to craft lights for inside your house, but it caused a lot of problems. Some of you might already know that the game is completely dynamically lit, and that means that shadow-casting is probably the most performance-intensive thing in the whole game. For example, if your PC isn't amazing and you craft a bunch of Spotlights, you might notice things start to slow down a little, especially if some of those lights are overlapping. So, when it came to indoor lights, I wanted to develop a system that automatically toggled the lights' ability to cast shadows when they were too close together or if they were far enough from the player, but this caused its own set of problems, things I hadn't considered before attempting to develop it.
Let's say you put one of these lights in your house and it casts shadows... Great - it looks lovely from both inside and outside your house, and isn't too performance-guzzling! Now let's say to craft 5 of these lights inside your house, all overlapping each other, casting shadows all over the place... It looks very nice, but, on older computers, the game suffers a big loss of FPS. "Okay", I thought, "Not the end of the world. I'll be clever and tweak some of their shadow-casting and lighting depending on whether you're inside or outside your house, and how many are overlapping". Turning off some of their shadow-casting abilities just looks weird from inside your house, when some are casting shadows and others aren't, and from outside, it looks downright ridiculous. When I disable shadow-casting for a light and you're stood outside your house, the walls of your house no longer cast shadows, meaning that the light is free to travel through them, so your house has a glow around it and looks stupid! Another way around this would be to have indoor lights completely disabled when you're outside your house but, like the existing issues with the weather visibility toggling, that isn't ideal, because you could technically remove one of the walls of your house and see the lights toggling and it'd look silly, and probably be more distracting than it is pretty. Another option would be to simply prevent players from placing the lights too close to each other, but I can imagine that might add more frustration over the restrictions than it would add joy from being able to craft them in the first place!
Basically, I tried a bunch of different methods to get this working correctly, but, in the end, none of them were perfect, they all added their own problems, and, ultimately, they nearly caused my brain to explode in a fit of frustration. So, I drew a line under it all and moved on to developing something else instead! I might revisit this at some point, but I really want to work on adding big new fun things now instead, expanding the scope of the game in meaningful ways, rather than relatively minor things like this.
I also spent a few days playing around with a potential map/minimap system. I got a prototype version of this up and running, but it does really heavily suck the challenge out of navigating. Personally, I think it makes it too easy to just kind of go a bit brain-dead and rely on it all the time, no longer having to keep track of things yourself, using Flagpoles intelligently and things like that. If I do have another stab at a map system, I'm much more inclined to give you an in-game sheet of paper which you can draw on and attempt to sketch your own map. To me, that sounds like much more fun, and involves the player in a much more entertaining way than an automatic map system does. And, thanks to suggestions I've received, I'm also considering expanding on the Flagpole/Sign Post system so it offers a waypoint-style system, whereby you can label them however you want, then select one and the game will show an arrow guiding you to it. And some kind of craftable compass is still on the cards, too.
Oh, and once I realised Valve had given the game the green light to have Trading Cards, I spent a couple of days away from regular development while I designed the cards and backgrounds and stuff.
And, finally, I think I've got the Unreal Engine set up now in a way that will allow me to compile a Linux version of the game. Still much testing to be done on this front, but I just wanted to let Linux folk know that I haven't forgotten about you. I'm still aiming for a Mac version too at some point, but I need to save up for a decent Mac to compile on first, and I just can't spare the funds at the moment, unfortunately.
So, long story short, it's been a weird few weeks development-wise - lots of niggly little tasks, not a lot to show for it - but I think that's all over and done with now and I can get back to normal development (I have actually already started working on some other things that aren't mentioned here as well - new content stuff - but nothing that was ready in time for this update). I just wanted you guys to know that there are valid reasons for the slow-down in new content, and it doesn't reflect a change in my own dedication to the game at all! Honestly, I'm dying to get back to my normal development schedule and start firing out more regular updates again! Normal service shall resume shortly! :)
Anyway, enough rambling! As always, if you have any feedback or encounter any problems, please do let me know.
And feel free to come and say hello on the Wrongworld Discord. I haven't been using it much for the last month or so (so I could really focus on what I've been working on and avoid any potential procrastination), but I plan to start checking in more often again from now on. I miss speaking to the community!
Post-Launch Jibber-Jabber
Hello there! Just thought I'd give you guys a quick update on things, as I know I've been a little quiet since launch.
I'm aiming to have a minor update out later this month - just tiny tweaks and fixes, really... nothing too exciting - but I'll be back to adding new, more interesting content in July.
Basically, I ended up spending all of May dealing with launch-related shenanigans - marketing and press stuff mainly - and, at the start of June, I was beginning to feel a little burnt out, so I treated myself to a week or so away from my computer for the first time in a couple of years to recharge my batteries. And it's done me a world of good. I'm back up to full speed now, and I was hoping to have the first proper post-launch update out this month, but, now that we're out of early access, I think it's best if I focus on doing fewer but bigger updates from now on, ensuring that each one is packed with as much new stuff as possible, and really does expand the scope of the game in some meaningful way, rather than just being more craftable things, POIs or random events.
Anyway, I shall shush now. I realise this is a reasonably pointless ramble from me, but I just wanted to let you guys know that I haven't vanished from the face of the Earth. I'm still here, hard at work, and I've still got big plans to continue expanding the game in future!
As always, feel free to let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions about the game in the meantime. And huge thanks to everyone for the support, both of the game and to me personally. I massively appreciate it :)
