Devlog #6

I`ve been busy over the last couple of months working on the game and getting it ready for release. As a public release gets closer, I need to make sure all of the major bugs are fixed and tested. Some of the major bugs and improvements I`ve made are listed below.

• Update to unreal engine 4.27
– This is a stop gap before doing a full update to 5.x. Unfortunately, there were a lot of engine errors going straight to 5, so for now I decided to get it updated to 4.27, whilst working on other features for the game. I hope to be able to get the game updated to UE 5 as soon as possible, but I don’t want to risk breaking a ton of other things in the game in the process. As of now the 4.27 build works perfectly fine.

• Fixes to projectiles,
client and server side – this was a persistent issue in the game from the start. The original system was somewhat simple in its implementation. Arguably too simple. I have now created client side and server side projectiles, which means that the overall feeling of the gunplay is much smoother for clients, regardless of your latency in game. There was also a long running bug where some projectiles wouldn’t multicast their impact hits to all connected clients (which was driving me insane), but this has finally been fixed in the new system.

• Network improvements
– this isn’t really specific to any one change in the code, but over the last month I`ve been spending a lot of my time identifying where I can reduce network data usage during gameplay. This is important for me as I will be paying for all hosted servers out of my own pocket, so I want the servers to be as optimized as possible. This will result in better network performance for all players. One of the specific things I`ve been doing is using RepNotify bool variables to trigger events on all clients instead of multicast RPCs. This reduces data usage (for those events) by approximately 80%.

• Multiplayer text chat –
a simple thing, but required. Players are now free to communicate with each other in-game. Chat can be turned off from the control options sub menu.

• Cosmetic asset optimization
– all cosmetics now use soft object references in the game code. That means that the player character wont need to load all the assets into memory by default, and will only load the required asset as and when its required. This sounds like a no brainer (and it is, to be fair) but it required a re-work of quite a bit of the logic to make sure the game can handle loading and unloading the assets. The big trade off with soft object references is that you need to manually load and unload those assets from memory, and that can be a pain to get right.

• Gameplay balance!
– finally i`ve been able to start doing gameplay tests. Immediately after the test I wrote down a list of things to change and tweak according to the feedback of the testers. One of which is quite apparent in the gameplay video below, and that is the speed of the projectiles. All bullets in the game are actual physical projectiles flying through space, unlike hit scan weapons (like bullets in CS). After thorough play testing, I can safely say the bullet speed right now across the board can be about 2x faster. Also I`ve raised the damage levels of all bullets by about 25 – 30%. This will make gunplay with fast firing machine guns a little more lethal. As of now, explosive weapons like the bazooka, grenade launcher and grenades are definitely the most effective weapons.

• “The slime gun is too strong”
– this was funny in the last play test. I dunno, I kind of like having a gun that basically roots you to the ground and stops you from dashing. You know when your screen gets green, you`ll start to scream…

You can see some recent footage in the video below!