Dev Blog #41 - Big game changes are coming! (Patreon)

Hello Patrons,

We’re gearing up for a big demo update so I want to take the opportunity to talk with you about it!

Testing

All active Patreon subscribers will get access to the Big Demo Update somewhere around November before anyone else does (because you're just that cool!). If all goes well and nobody has any issues to report, we open it up to our Discord Testing group for further testing. And then…Oh boy, we put the demo publicly on Steam and start promoting the update. Scary stuff, so we better make it snappy!

Keep an eye out on your inbox. We will be emailing you with a secret Steam code.

Big Demo changes

While we tinker away at the full game, there’s a lot of quality of life stuff being added as time goes on. Most of which will make its way into the upcoming Demo update. This update, unfortunately, will be the final update the demo is going to get. Not because the game is almost ready to ship, but because it is time for us to move on after this and set our sights upon the full game. Admirals will still get the Lab Experiments from soon, so you still have new playable content to look forward to once we get to that point. Lets discuss some changes!

1. Pacing changes

We’ve slowed Dawn’s running speed down. There! We ripped the band-aid straight off. This is a massive change for the game and one that requires a bit of explanation. If you’re not as interested in the reasoning, I'll include a short explaination.

Short version:

Selaco is still fast-paced, but we wanted the environments of Selaco to breathe a little more during exploration, so Dawn is no longer as fast as she used to be. Still fast, just not as fast.

Long version:

Back in the day when the project went under the name ‘Project Ominous’, the game was much slower compared to what it is today. It came closer to Doom 3 than, say, the original Doom as far as movement speed is concerned. When I decided to redo the entire game under the name Selaco a couple of years later, I decided it was time to make the protagonist a bit faster. The ‘boomer shooter’ revival was in full swing and, man, I missed how fun it was to play with a fast player character. “F.E.A.R.-like combat but fast-paced could be very interesting!’’ I said to myself. It was time to put it to the test. So roughly 2 years ago, I experimented with a much faster game.

Goddamn I was right. Everything in Selaco felt so much snappier compared to the slow-paced nature of Selaco that I could not wait to flush things out further. It required a ton of work because everything I wrote beforehand was designed around a slower player. With time, everything kept feeling better and I had gotten increasingly more confident in the direction of the game. The small dedicated group I did tests with, really enjoyed it as well. This was the way to go so I locked it in as a final decision. At least at the time..

With the movement being as snappy as it was, I started to feel like there was a conflict going on within the game itself. The immersive environments and the fast movement speed really did not bode well together. We put so much effort into the environments of the game; the lighting, the soundscapes, the little bits of interactivity in each and every corner.. Yet the game played like it wanted you to zoom straight past them. I was not the only one who noticed this problem, as feedback frequently brought this up as well confirming my suspicions. The past few months I messed around trying to find the right balance between speed and realism and I think we found the perfect balance now. Of course, slide jumps are still in, so you will be able to do crazy things in combat. This change took a while because everything suddenly needed rebalancing in order to work properly with the adjusted movement speed.

We're curious to hear your thoughts on this.

2. Gamepad Support

It’s finally in! This update will add Gamepad support along with Aim Assist.  There are still a couple of things we want to do here, like adding rumble support, bullet magnetism and a few other tweaks, but these will have to wait for the full release unfortunately.

Steam deck users: We are planning to improve support on the Steam Deck. Hopefully the controller update makes it more playable, but none of us currently own a Steam Deck which makes it really hard to test. In a few months I'll be getting my own Steam Deck so I can properly optimize things for the device. It's on my to-do list!

3. Enhanced gore

We’ve greatly improved our existing gore effects while adding a few new effects on top of that, like brain pieces. intestines and expanding slime pools. This might sound overly gruesome for Selaco, but trust us, we believe it works well and does not make the game too overly violent. The new effects will need to be earned however, so aim for the head or shoot them up close with the shotgun!

4. Performance Improvements

With the addition of multi-threaded asset loading, actor optimization and reworked game code, the game should perform better than ever! With the new version, we highly recommend everybody to keep an eye out for stutters and report their findings to us! Maybe switch back to the old Demo build from time to time and see how things hold up in comparison. We are excited for this one, largely because we fully believe we’ve made some good leaps here. We will discuss this better further along the blog post.

5. Sound/Effects pass

With our increase in budget, we have been reworking hundreds of (sound)effects! In the current demo, we had a limited amount of effects to use so we had to re-use a lot. Destroying a bunch of props would frequently result in the same (sound)effects playing for each of them. Not a problem, usually, but given our focus on immersion I really wanted to avoid repeating the same thing over and over. Once you get your hands on the assault rifle, go and shoot some things! You may notice the mayhem looks and sounds much better than before.

6. Level changes

This is another one that took quite a while. It’s a well known fact by now that the demo level is one of the few things that survived the move from Project Ominous to Selaco and it has been an ongoing struggle to revise the first level in such a way that it works tonally compared to the rest. Another reason why you should never do your first level first. Level 1-1 and Level 1-3 achieve this well, but Level 1-2 never did. The vibes there are vastly different than the other two demo levels and that always bothered me. Given my to-do list at the time, I never quite managed to find the time for it, but now with this upcoming update we really wanted to address that. And, probably the most important thing of all, we’ve added proper toilets to the level. The ones that can be destroyed!

7. Weapon rebalancing

We’ve rebalanced all the weapons, especially the Roaring Cricket (Magnum). This weapon has always been rather divisive and we needed to find a middle ground here and make sure both sides got what they wanted. I don't want this Patreon Blog to be a blog post, but I’ll make an exception for the Roaring Cricket. Let us know what you think of these changes!

Roaring Cricket [rework]:

While we always liked how much damage it dealt, its magazine capacity and recoil might have been too troublesome. We've made some changes to better balance this out and make it easier to use while still retaining its insane stopping power.

- Primary Fire Recoil reduced (1.5 -> 0.7). Alt Fire retains the same stats as the previous version

- Magazine capacity increased (9 -> 12)

- Damage per shot reduced (60 -> 48)

- Max ammo reserve increased (45 -> 48)

- Increased Roaring Cricket ammo pickup (9 -> 12)

- Roaring Cricket alt fire now works with less than 3 shots. It will just deplete the rest of the magazine instead.

- Swapping speed is now nearly instant, making this the ideal weapon to switch to when caught with an empty weapon during a fight.

- Particle trail is now instant between player and target. The previous version made the Roaring Cricket look like a projectile weapon instead of hitscan.

Prefer the old one? No problem! For the full game we have plans to add an unlockable alt fire (which can be swapped out in Safe Rooms) that brings it back to the previous version. I always loved the ‘’high skill high reward’’ behavior the gun used to have, but I can fully understand not everybody had the patience nor the interest to master a weapon this hard to use. Especially for such an integral weapon in your arsenal.

8. Improved AI

This is the obvious one, right? We’re always doing this! In the demo Engineers (shotgunners) always felt rather one-dimensional. They rush and they shoot. Now there’s a good chance the engineer will instead choose to lay down suppressive fire from a distance while another shotgunner is going to try and close the gap. Rifleman have much more intelligent strafe patterns and have an easier time navigating the area when you move around a lot.

9. A flashlight that isn’t ugly

We’ve shown this one off in the last blog post! We’ve gotten rid of the simple (and ugly) point light system, in favor of a cone-shaped flashlight that keeps things atmosphere

10. Quality of Life.

Translation support, proper camera interpolation, Safe Loading system, non-bulletproof plant leaf's… I can go on for hours about the quality of life changes that we’ve made. We will list them all in the changelog when the time comes!

11. We killed bugs!

We also eliminated a whole bunch of bugs and generally improved a large number of things, adding to the general level of polish.

Other stuff

That isn’t all! I want to show a couple of other things we’ve worked on.

DMR

We finally started animating the thing and it’s shaping up to be a damn powerful weapon. Take a look at the firing animation!

Shooting animation

Here is the same shooting animation, but in the dark because Brightmaps are cool!

We’re happy with how this weapon turns out and are confident it will end up satisfying a lot of you. I’m currently working on the reload animation for this thing!

Artwork

Mostly finished, so I’m keeping it low res for now. When it’s done (next blog post), I’ll give the high res version with no logo placement. We made this piece because we always want to include some original art whenever we announce something new and exciting. In this case, it's the announcement of a demo update launching.

Smart autosaves

One of the Quality of Life improvements in the upcoming update, is Smart Autosaving. While not the most common critique, a few players did experience a problem where they would softlock their progress because the game decided to autosave the game right before our hero got killed, this even got captured on a stream at some point. This could be because a bullet was about to hit Dawn in the face, or a grenade was about to go off right in front of the her with no way to escape. Dawn deserves a better checkpoint system, so we got to work.

The new saving system will check for danger and queue the autosave until the danger is eliminated. So, if the game wants to save a checkpoint but there's an active soldier close to you, the save will be rejected. Kill the soldier and the save will proceed automagically. 

This only applies to checkpoints by default, but on Admiral difficulty (the highest difficulty), quicksaving can no longer be done in combat. This requires players to beat the encounter or reach a safe destination before quick saving the game. This is done to combat the phenomena called 'Save Scumming', where players frequently save the game in combat in order to cheese it. This is fine for lower difficulties,  but Admiral is all about testing the player and their abilities, so the decision to add some additional rules to quick saving made sense to us.

Async Texture Loading

In our efforts to reduce the amount of hitches or stuttering in the game (hopefully to zero!) we have been adding asynchronous texture loading in addition to the audio loading that has already been implemented. This is a much larger project than audio however because it needs to be done both for OpenGL and Vulkan and requires a lot more changes to how the engine works.

Simply put, GZDoom was not built with anything like this in mind, as texture loading is practically an after-thought during the course of gameplay. Typically the engine gets to the point of rendering triangles before it ever bothers to check to see if a texture is loaded or not, and this is deep in the hardware renderer layer and not part of the game engine. This is making it very non-trivial to interrupt the normal process of rendering sprites BEFORE loading their associated images. In addition, I am both new to GZDoom and Vulkan so progress is a bit slower than it could be.

Some progress has been made however. As Vulkan is very friendly to threaded texture loading, and a framework for background resource loading was already created for audio, we have the beginnings of asynchronous texture loading working. Much refinement is needed, but this should allow us to eventually load most, if not all sprite textures on the fly without any framerate drops. These changes should improve framerate stability significantly, particularly during explosions and heated gunfights.

Another happy bonus to being able to load both audio and textures in the background is that we should be able to add animated loading screens between levels, which seems like a small thing but it would be nice if players didn't think their PC was frozen when a new level is loaded.

We hope to have texture loading testable soon. Especially for those players that have high end rigs but are still getting stuttering during gameplay, we expect this to make the framerate rock solid and can't wait to share the experience with you!

Conclusion

That’s it for that week! A lot of words, not much in the way of photos. We are slowly beginning work on the 4th level of Selaco which enters spoiler territory, so it will be increasingly difficulty to show stuff. But rest assured, we have plenty to still talk about.

If you plan on renewing next month, keep your eyes open on your inbox since a Steam Beta Password will be coming your way soon.

Again, thank you for sticking with us! See you in the next blog post!

Wesley de Waart