March 2023 Development Update

Welcome back, Rock Hoppers! I'm here to fill you in on what we've been up to over the last month. I think I mentioned last month that I was going to start working on the NPC overhaul. That did not happen.

Instead, I spent much of the month fixing bugs. It ain't glamorous, and it doesn't write up quite as well for blog posts, but we're far enough along in the development cycle that I can longer put paying off tech debt and making the multiplayer in particular more robust.

That does not mean to say I haven't been busy - besides a dozen new debug builds, I have added a few features and visible improvements. For starters, there's a new vehicle recovery bay. One of the issues we constantly ran into during testing is that, when you die, your vehicle remains wherever you parked it last. That could be right around the corner from your respawn location, but let's be honest; nine times out of ten you parked it a hundred miles away and have no way to get back to it. Enter the VRB.

The VRB allows a player to instantly retrieve any vehicle they've previously operated, for a small price. The price depends on the distance to your vehicle. The bay can be built with the Vehicles skill or encountered in the wild, like the example pictured.

I've also improved the way worlds and saves are displayed in the UI. Now, when creating a world, you can provide both a friendly name and a short description, as illustrated below.

We also have new visual clutter, courtesy of Sara, and a few new world starting locations to provide different levels of challenge.

On the bug fixing front, one of my biggest pet peeves has been the way players move in full-g. In particular, I dislike the way they would come to an abrupt stop if they so much as brushed up against a wall. To finally fix this, I implemented a 'collide and slide' feature into the player motion controller. Instead of simply stopping a player, walls can now gently redirect players so they gracefully slide along walls. It's such a little thing, but it makes a huge difference for the overall feel of the game.

We've had a lot of new streamers check out a multiplayer alpha build of Rock Hoppers over the last month. That's surfaced new feature requests and bugs. Some of the small improvements this month include:

• A real privacy mode in the server select panel

• improvements to the assisted landing system

• Incursions now last the entire night instead of a fixed number of waves

• Players can now push each other and NPC who are blocking their way in multiplayer

That's all the visible stuff I have to report on, but the backend is much more stable than it was a month ago, and the improvements in gameplay and balance are noticeable. That counts for a lot. That said, I'm not going to make any predictions about next month's plans. I still have a big old list of things need fixing here, and I'm gonna work through those first.

Thanks for checking in. Remember that you can join us on Discord, follow us on twitter, and watch us play several times a week on twitch. Until next time, keep breathing!