Version 0.2.0 Progress

Let's talk about the upcoming update, new features and some related news.

Animation Overhaul

To start with, I completely overhauled the game's animation system and changed how animations are controlled under the hood. The old animation system relied on a fixed animation tree and signals from various other systems to transition states, then it would wait for animations to play before sending signals back to those systems to trigger gameplay events. This didn't scale well with the complexity of the game at all and was prone to causing a lot of spaghetti code and gamebreaking bugs. It also came with some major limitations that were preventing the implementation of more advanced combat features. As such I replaced it with a new implementation where all gameplay functionality runs completely independent of animations and the animation state merely reflects what's going on internally. Code is separated much more cleanly, making it easier to debug and build complex features on it.

Some of those features include animations for drawing and holstering of weapons, animated weapon sway to give a visual indication of how steady a shooter can hold their gun, sped up/slowed down work animations to indicate overall work speed, improved stance transitions and attacking on the move. Survivors now have the ability to aim and fire their gun while moving and I've added a new "overwatch" command that allows you to set a character to face a certain direction, for example when rounding a corner or clearing a room through a window. There's also a new prone stance in addition to crouching that provides a lower profile and increased accuracy at the cost of movement speed.

The animations themselves were reworked to make much more effective use of animation blending, cutting down significantly on the amount of assets required to animate a single rig. This reduces the amount of time needed for maintenance and makes it easier to implement new rigs for different animals and other animated entities. In addition, the different weapon poses were reworked to improve readability. Each weapon type now has a unique silhouette that prominently displays the weapon itself and allows you to tell at a glance what sort of weapon is equipped from the body pose.

Improved Character Management

Survivors received a major overhaul in this update. Character attributes have been removed since they were largely non-interactive, didn't feel particularly interesting and generally annoying to micro-manage. Instead most of their effects have been rolled into character traits. Traits themselves have also received a major expansion, the previous handful of placeholders was replaced with several dozen new traits with various gameplay effects. The needs system has been fleshed out with new needs and penalties for non-fulfillment. Certain events and actions can now apply temporary mood modifiers, and the skill list has been expanded with several new additions like cooking and tailoring. Additionally I've done some work on the apparel rendering to fix a series of clipping problems and allow for better looking armor and cloak models.

Starting Customization and UI Improvements

Probably the first thing you'll notice when starting a new game are the new starting customization menus. They allow you to freely configure your starting items and survivors to create custom scenarios and specific characters, so you can get creative.

Other UI additions include a new resource summary window displaying an overview of your current stockpiles, as well as a pinned resource display where you can set certain resources to be displayed permanently as part of the main UI. The info menu has been massively overhauled to be cleaner and more comprehensive, tooltips have been improved and expanded upon, the UI for looting items on expedition has been given a tune-up along with a myriad of other, smaller improvements.

Mod Support

Another new addition is a basic mod manager with support for player-made addons. This first implementation supports three types of custom content:

• Custom XML and XML patching. Modders can use these to add or modify items, stats, parameters and so on.

• User-created parcels. Made using the game's built-in parcel editor, these will automatically be used when generating expedition maps.

• User-made plugins and code in the form of DLL's. These can be used by advanced modders to add new functionality or modify existing code.

I also want to support custom asset loading (3D models, textures, etc.) in the future, but that will require some major changes to the game's rendering, so I've decided to leave it for another update.

What's Next

As I'm currently putting the finishing touches on this update it should be ready to go into beta-testing very soon. That said there are also some major changes coming on the production end. Up until now I've been working essentially as a solo developer in part-time on this project. While I would like to dedicate more time, the economic and political climate in my current location was never particularly conducive to small startups and recent increases in cost of living and tax burdens have been nothing short of suffocating. Since going full-time in the current situation is simply not viable, I will be leaving the country later this year and relocating to a more suitable location. While the move is still a few months out, once it is complete I should be able to focus completely on the game and get future content out a lot faster as a result.

That’s it for today. Until next time, stay safe and keep surviving!