Dev Transmission (March 2023)
Hi everyone, here’s what we’ve been up to recently:
Physical Demo!
As we had several events we were attending at the end of March, the majority of our time was focused on polishing and bug-fixing a physical demo we were putting together.
This involved watching a lot of local people play the game, making notes and carrying out improvements, then repeating the process until we had to catch our flights ๐
New Level!
We felt like a new level with a lot of windows would be a good thing for demo-players to enjoy, so we created “Fuel Exchange”.ย
The image on the left is a work-in-progress screenshot from within our editor, while the one on the right is after an additional week’s worth of work (including an art pass).
It’s not quite finished yet as we’d like to do an additional art pass, but it worked well for the purposes of the demo.
New Enemies!
ย We had four enemies planned for the demo, and last month took two of these to the right level of quality. This month we took the additional two – nicknamed “Dog” and “Leech” – to that same level. Their behaviour is quite different from the bipedal enemies we’ve made thus far, so it provides a good mix in combat. We love making enemies, we’ve got loads more in-progress that we’ll continue adding later!
Other Stuff!
- We added gamepad support! Doing this meant including a bunch of gamepad specific controls to adjust to do with deadzones, look acceleration, aim assist and more.
- We set up auto-control switching so it’s easy to switch between control methods
- We also expanded some other settings for the visuals plus keyboard & mouse.
And just for fun!
The events I mentioned earlier included two press-focused ones at GDC in San Francisco across the 20th and 21st March:
One of them had a feature on Steam which got us a load of Wishlists, which is always good ๐
Then on Wednesday the 22nd I flew to meet our artist Alex in Boston. We set up our booth ready to commence PAX East the following day:
This was four amazing days of players enjoying the demo and we even got to meet a few from our Discord which was a personal highlight. People loved how the game felt and the venting was a big hit! It was exhausting though, you can see from the image above on the right-hand side what our booth looked like across Thursday to Sunday:
Being selected by judges to gain entry to the GDC events plus the PAX Rising Showcase was really cool to have our hard work recognised ๐
Once PAX East finished on Sunday we caught an overnight flight back to the UK, had a couple of days working before heading to WASD (a 3-day event in London) so we’re pretty tired!
WASD is part of the larger London Games Festival and we’re honoured to have been selected as part of the “Best of British” category:
We hope you enjoyed this latest update, if you like what you see don’t forget to Wishlist us!
Also weโre active on the following platforms if you want to see sneak peeks or reach out to us:
See you next month!