DEEP STATE NEWS - August Patreon Devlog

Hello & Happy Belated New Year

Hope you all got some time off to relax over the holidays. Things are going well over here, we just added two new programmers to the team. Very excited about that.

Here is the next Patreon devlog I'm reposting onto Steam, this ones from back in August - Its missing the first little bit because the first half was a video file that won't upload on Steam but 90% of the content made it over. If you want to access devlogs as soon as they drop feel free to become a Patron otherwise they'll end up on here after some time. I also have a public devlog on our Discord that I update on an almost daily basis if you want to check that out.

Cheers,

FrogmanDev

Patreon Devlog - August 2025 Hi again,

To continue on from the previous post... We've been recreating the player controller from the ground up and it's getting pretty close to being done.

You’ll notice there is still some jank where the arm IK and reload animations blend together, and the gun model and hands have some wobble/floaty-ness, we should have those fixed soon. We are holding off on fine tuning the various player controller settings until all the features are implemented, so everything will eventually look and feel quite a bit smoother than these examples.

Features we’ve implemented so far:

Walk, Run, Crouch, and Prone Stances

• Each stance has a multiplier that influences the players speed and weapon characteristics (recoil, sway, etc.). More sway/less accuracy when moving, less sway/more accurate when prone and stationary etc. etc.

• Unique footstep SFX for walk, run, crouch, and prone

• Proper slope interaction for player collider

^ Walk, crouch-walk, and crawl. Transitions still need better blending.

^ We can now set the maximum slope the player can climb before they start to slide

Hip-fire and ADS free-aim zone (red) and deadzone (purple)

• Size and shape of zones can be customized per weapon

• Cursor/gun rotation speed can be set independently of player camera rotation

• Dead-zone (no camera rotation) is currently on ADS only

^ Example of the ADS zones, still needs a lot of fine tuning.

Dynamic lean & barrel offsets

• Weapon offsets dynamically from nearby surfaces to avoid clipping when leaning into walls

• Bullet spawn location at barrel tip dynamically offsets in a backward direction so bullets can’t fire through walls when standing straight up against them

^ Dynamic lean offset

^ Dynamic barrel offset, visuals still need polish

Weapon Characteristics

• Real world bullet velocity and mass

• Bullet damage, mag size, weapon sway, recoil etc.

• Tracer FX, muzzle flash FX, SFX

• Fire modes: Semi-auto, Automatic, Burst, and Cluster

• Pistol/Smg, Rifle, and Shotgun shell ejection visuals with customizable force and torque

^ Example of realistic bullet mass and velocity, really hard to see but its there

Animations

• All arm movement is animated procedurally using IK except for:

  • Keyframed animations for EmptyMag and HalfMag reloads

  • Keyframed animations for prone/crawl

  • Unique animator for cancel-able reloads (shotguns, revolvers)

  • Unique animator for controlling weapon slides (slide pops back on fire/empty mag)

Guns set up so far

• Mk27 (pistol)

• MP5 (smg)

• AK47 (ar)

• XM177 (ar)

• Spas12 (shotgun)

Once we fix the remaining jank and get the audio system up and running i'll post some clips of all the weapons so far along with music and SFX. Stoked for those to finally come together.

Features we still need to implement:

• Muzzle Climb

• Head Bob

• Arm-IK influence on keyframed animations (arms follow cursor while reloading)

• Better dev tooling for quickly adding new weapons

• Smoother transitions between stances and animations

The player controller has been trickier than expected to put together, it's a surprisingly complicated system and definitely not standard to the FPS genre. Once it's done though I think it'll be pretty awesome.

Thanks so much again to everyone supporting on here, we really appreciate you guys.

Cheers,

FrogmanDev