It’s been some time since we’ve last touched base here on the ol’ dev blog.
A lot of things have changed in the last couple years, but the team at Giant Enemy Crab is still here, still kicking, still working on the game.
Some time ago, we stated that content patches may slow down and the team be less communicative in this time period while we worked on bigger changes behind the scenes. We appreciate your patience as we transition out of that time period and into a new chapter of the game’s development.
Now, let’s take a look at what’s going into our first major update this year.
Public Test Environment
The update will be launched on a new Public Test Environment (PTE) and will remain here until we are satisfied that it is ready to roll out on the live server.
Players will be able to connect to our PTE by simply owning the main game on Steam, and opting in with Steam’s beta selection menu in the game’s properties. Our test servers are exclusively on US Central and US East, so we apologize for any inconvenience users from certain regions may experience until the patch is live, where it will then be available to our normal server regions. Please be aware that we may still be encountering issues with our server providers.
Please note: the PTE may not contain all content listed here at all times! The first release of the PTE will contain Hitreg, Grenade changes, Ranked update, and Bots, with more content later on.
Hit Registration overhaul
Historically our hitreg has been… lackluster at best.
Our engineers have been hard at work, slaving away in the netcode mines looking for valuable minerals (netcode improvements) and it’s finally time to see the fruits of their labor. (reduction in no-reg induced fits of rage)
Refining hit registration is a complex endeavor, and this update took quite some time to see a release as some of you are aware. We feel it was best to refine this feature and bundle it with the rest of a bigger update. Quick, let me distract you with more of our historically terrible hitreg-
I think it’s safe to say, updating hitreg alone is going to make a world of a difference for the game. I suspect some of you might actually start picking up the MAWP or DL12 again.
Ranked Update
Our player base is incredibly diverse in respect to levels of experience, game knowledge, and FPS fundamentals. In a small community, matchmaking related problems are exacerbated. One such result of this is that players quickly tire of being on either the receiving or the giving end of total stomps.
Many players voiced that a more fulfilling ranked mode would encourage them to get back on the game and in a separate pool from our more casual audience - which is a win/win. Updating ranked to include new badges, a full blown Elo-style system, and better interfaces became a high priority thanks to this feedback. Please keep in mind all work on this branch, especially the ranked overhaul, is a work in progress. Hop in the ranked queue and get us the feedback we need to make the ranked mode you deserve.
[Work in progress] Placements, gaining rank points, and obtaining our highest rank: Executor. Pronounced: ig-ˈze-k(y)ə-tər
We know plenty of our players will immediately sink their teeth into a fresh ranked reset, but some of you are certainly curious as to whether or not tiebreakers are being developed for this update. (They are not.)
While tiebreakers might seem cool and can offer a highly exciting climax to a long and stressful match, the asymmetric nature of our game more often leads to them feeling disappointing or unfair in our experience.
In our community competitive league, the ‘DPL’, we saw teams go against each other multiple times a season, and with back to back matches played in a set. Tiebreakers were sometimes performed, but ultimately were only tolerable because of the communal and sportsmanlike environment that the DPL facilitated, most of the time.
Instead, our team is tracking how Elo gains feel to players, and we’ll be monitoring this closely as the engineers refine the system further. Personal performance factors into gains and losses, and like any good system we will assess how ‘earned’ a tie or a win was, and reward players for difficult matchups.
Additionally, competitive integrity is another target of the update. With this patch comes harsher penalties for players who abandon ranked matches, and increased rank penalties for leavers. The team has also implemented a matchmaking timeout feature which prevents leavers from requeuing for a period of time after abandoning a match. Repeat offenses will result in further increased penalties.
Exploits pertaining to dodging matches with no penalty, or joining games in progress have also been resolved.
At the launch of this update, we will have 15 ranks available for players to climb, along with a ladder reset of your previous rank.
Co-Op PVE Bots
What started as a fun side project from one of our devs has blossomed into a really cool little mode. Players will be able to queue up solo, or with a party of up to five and take on a series of challenging, tailor made levels. Each level will have selectable difficulties, and enemies will be randomized with a variety of factors.
Bot types
Bots have a variety of classes.
Standard Bots
Behaviors: Patrol, Pursue, Discover (check explosives/door kicks)
These bots will walk around the map and react to basic stimuli. They will actively try to hunt the player and ‘figure out’ what is going on in a round by rotating towards the action.
Ambusher
Behaviors: Ambush.
Ambushers are unique in that they will hold their ground until it’s their time to shine, or their position is compromised. Once an ambusher engages a player, they transition into operating as a pseudo-standard bot, inheriting some of their qualities. Flashbangs are best saved to deal with these enemies.
Snipers
Behaviors: Will attempt to rotate between various sniping positions in order to engage targets at specific chokepoints.
Much like ambushers, snipers are a dedicated role and will be quite lethal. Also like ambushers, their logic will change to be more like standard bots if the bomb is threatened in some way. Smoke grenades will be useful in cutting off their sightlines while you deal with nearby threats.
’Chokepoint’
Behaviors: Hold angles at chokepoints.
Bots do not spawn as ‘Chokepoint’ types, and are instead dynamically assigned the role based on a variety of factors. On high difficulties these enemies are extremely potent, and flashbangs will be necessary to flush them out of their positions.
We expect new players will rejoice in some breathing room to experiment with tools and weapons in a low-stakes mode, but we are also considering to expand the mode in future updates in order to introduce new challenge levels, and perhaps even combat puzzles.
Grenade & Deployable Rework
At some point in time, I sat down with our lead gameplay engineer and said something like “why must I karate chop my barbed wire.”
Old animation
Yeet
Everyone has seen it, or experienced it themselves; you hurled the barb wire towards a door and immediately realized it was deployed at your feet instead.
It just so happens that the team was making some cool quality of life changes to gear deployment around the same timeframe.
So we’re adding some new animations along with those, and I think that’s just nifty.
This is what we call ‘good animation’
Okay maybe not that one.
The game will now feature deployment ghosts for barbed wire and all deployable grenade-type gear. Here’s a quick all-in-one showcase.
There was no real reason for new players to have to struggle as much as they did with learning the ins and outs of deploying barbed wire correctly , or conversely landing necessarily precise frag grenades on a round-defining piece of said barbed wire.
These new ghosts and arcs are an elegant solution to these problems and can even elevate player strategy with opportunities to land some powerful rebounds.
A behind the scenes look at our animation rig for first person. Good job rig, look at him go.
Assorted Changes
Footstep audio has been adjusted. Footsteps are even more consistent than before thanks to changes we made to our netcode. In addition to consistency, drop sound audio which plays when the player lands from a given height is now triggered 50% higher than before. You won’t make a noise dropping if you stepped off a small object anymore. You’ll make sound if you drop off of something like Killhouse Stage.
When swapping weapons and gear, you can now select a different item to swap to before your character plays the unholster animation. This should make the inventory system feel more fluid and less awkward, and meshes well with the new deployable logic.
We’ve re-added the Join match in Progress (JiP) button to clients. It is now a more restricted version compared to the original implementation of this feature. You will need a friend in the match you want to join, and you won’t be able to join a team that already has more players than the other.
In development
All content described below is not final and subject to change. For all of our planned and desired content updates at a glance, you can find our roadmap here.
Shield & Player collision
The shield is actually real now, again. Here it is in-game, not just a card on our Trello.
It’s real. It’s really real.
Player collision is a prerequisite to the riot shield’s readdition. When the game launched into alpha, the early iteration of the shield was in the game, but collision wasn’t. Players could walk straight through the shield user and unload into the teammates behind them.
Not ideal.
Today we have real, functional player collision on our development builds. You’ll only collide with enemies, and of course that means we’ll need to spend some time testing both the technical issues that can be caused by colliding with laggy players, as well as the gameplay ramifications of standing in a doorframe with a shield.
We await all the excellent highlights that come out of this.
Director’s Cut
Coming in the near future, from Baard’s director’s cut we’ve got new weapon impact audio, which adds satisfying clinks, dinks, clacks, and cracks to various materials you might be shooting at.
Also from the director’s cut, we’ve got new ‘death animation chaining’. Shoot a guy, they die. Shoot them more, they die in funnier ways. Most noticeable on the auto shotgun. Careful spending all your ammo just to see people do cartwheels, it’s tempting, I know.
Director’s Cut is full of goodies we’ll be showing off in the future, including general audio improvements, hit sounds, and gunplay tweaks.
Bulletpoints from Baard
Introducing a new section of our devblog, Bulletpoints from Baard bookends our devblogs with comments from our creative director. In this devblog, Baard discusses changes he’s been making on his own personal development branch packed with QoL, balance, and aesthetic tweaks which he’s calling “The Director’s Cut.”
We've had to make a lot of compromises to the launch quality of the game in order to ship a stable product that we could develop over many years. Consequently, there are many parts of the game that still feel worse than the Alpha.
I've been working off and on† a sort of 'director's cut' to the game that restores some of the magic of the original game, along with some stuff that was never implemented in the alpha, but really ought to have been.
Features designed to improve the audiovisual feedback and thus satisfaction of shooting & killing have been pulled in from the Director's Cut branch to improve this update. Consider this as a preview of how the overall quality of the game will improve through the implementation of sorely-missing nuance.
Next up, I want to work on gun feel, recoil, and the oft-maligned 'sway,' feature*. I figured we'd wait until hitreg came in to separate that controversial feature from the underlying cause of why shooting in this game felt so shitty for so long.
† I have many other responsibilities to the project, unfortunately, besides the fun part of the job
* Jimmy, STFU
- Alexander Baard, CEO & Creative Director, Giant Enemy Crab
A handsome little feller, by Gallows
‘til next time
-rev