Preparing for YouTube Trailer Part 4 (Patreon)

I have a lot of changes today. Good content coming in.

Starting off with the small ones.

Firstly, I managed to improve the movement of players and characters. I noticed that there was a slight stutter when running and it made things very clucky feeling, this has been addressed and movement is now much smoother.

Also, chickens have better egg laying mechanics. You will have to capture them and then pet them for eggs.

They turn white like the old game versions. When they are brown they are wild chickens.

One big update I added was support for cube/box grabbing so props and custom items can now have box surfaces to grab onto.

This leads me to the first new big challenge for Viva. Basically, when you scavenge for materials and ingredients to make food and feed your characters, some items will be more difficult to acquire. Lemons will be a small challenge in which players will need to build small structures to reach high up places in trees. How you will build structures will be with the new hammer tool. The hammer tool works differently in VR and keyboard mode. If you are a keyboard player, the hammer will create a ghost item for you to place into the world. You can rotate it similar to the physics gun from Garry's Mod.

You can also "freeze" the prop so it's easier to handle once you have it in a certain desired rotation. This does open the possibility of being able to build medium sized structures like houses but I am carefully skipping over that rabbit hole because I don't want the game to focus entirely on generic survival building game mechanics. Regardless if you were to make a small house (and I mean very small), pathfinding for the characters will work just fine and they will be smart enough to accommodate their movement for it. Example:

As for VR, the hammer tool is WAY more fun. Basically you will spawn in some planks and if you hit it with your hammer 3 times, it will freeze in place. If you hit it with your hammer 3 times again, it will unfreeze. So it is very similar to keyboard mode but it has a VR physics spin.

There are hammer sounds and basic construction effects when you make your short structure. It is very fun. The new plank items make use of the new box grab support so you grab it realistically. Also anybody can mod in any other sort of prop item and add the "construction" attribute to it. With that they will be able to use that prop as a hammer-able prop.

This update as well as with some other updates including an extended map will be going out this Friday (or Saturday). I added some easter eggs that are hard to reach!

Stay tuned!