Previous Week in Overgrowth - Mid August

Project Status:

The previous week has been particularly full of progress on all fronts.

We finished an initial test pass on Beta 5. We will have it ready early this week on the 'advanced_testing' Steam branch, for the community to test out before making it live for everyone.

We have determined almost all of the scope we want to include in Beta 6 -- it might be the last Beta before we leave early access.

We continued to make improvements to the new Overgrowth campaign, many of which were in response to the feedback we've received during over-the-shoulder gameplay testing.

Per-usual, here's our change log. All of these changes are available in the Steam "internal_testing" build. At this point, almost all of this work will appear in Beta 6, and will not be present in Beta 5.

Gameplay:

• Made leg cannon take velocity into account a little bit when choosing targets
• Made it so enemies can't trigger a dodge while they're rolling
• Added the ability to throw startled or unaware dogs and disarm them
• Made moving through water produce more noise, so you are more likely to alert enemies
• Increased frequency of weapon-on-ground shine hint
• Experimenting with removing the player in-water velocity cap
• Added five second timeout for enemies trying to get to or grab nearby weapons (in case they can't reach them)
• Made it so you can still enter an NPC dialogue if enemies are on patrol for you, but don't see you yet

Graphics:

• Added rat-specific choke out animation
• Got rid of character shadow "skipping" by simply getting rid of character shadows when past a certain radius
• Transferred lighting from the Overgrowth campaign version of Magma Arena to arena mode version of map
• Made weapon-on-ground flare scale brightness based on the level's HDR white point
• Improved formatting of loading screen text
• Fixed single weird animation frame when level ends, after transitioning out of a dialogue
• Fixed an issue with animation when entering a dialogue while flipping or rolling

Modding/editor enhancements:

• Added "Throw Trainer" NPC script param, which makes an enemy impossible to kill unless you use throws
• Made invisible block objects now show up in collision painting so they can be collision painted
• Made ReadCharacterFromID no longer crash the game/invoke fatalerror when the character with the given id can't be found

Performance changes:

• Added GPU particles/custom shaders check boxes in the main settings window (no longer just top bar)
• Moved experimental probe lighting (tet mesh, etc) and GPU skinning options to debug settings menu

General improvements and bug fixes:

• Dropped the default music volume from 80% to 40%
• Fixed sleeping rabbit who had ended up inside the ground in Lugaru campaign's raider camp level
• Possible fix for bug where you could teleport an enemy to you if you threw one enemy, then quickly moved the cursor over a different one
• Made UI properly resize when resolution is changed through the settings menu (instead of just when dragging the window)
• Fixed crash bug in the tutorial
• Fixed rats ending up dead in Bayou cutscene if they're left in the water after you defeat them
• Fixed ascii bell/beep sound that was in console when logging lines were too long
• Added extra error logging when script throws an error to show which script context it came from

New Overgrowth campaign:

• Most/All levels: Added Depth of Field camera effects to parts of dialogues
• Most/All levels: Worked on sheathing weapons in cutscenes so characters don't appear to impale themselves
• White Flags Village: Added NPC-kill hotspot below village, fixed collision on ramp, and fixed issue with music
• Watchtower: Added cliffs to keep the player in bounds, and fixed some cases where a key dialogue isn't played
• Beach: Fixed some floating objects and collision issues. Also gave player a sword on respawn in the last two checkpoints
• Dog Base: Fixed one dog accidentally being respawned after failing the boss fight
• Dog Patrol: Fixed issues with dogs seeing you if you don't hold duck at beginning
• Rebel Base: Simplified last jump, improved collision, and added increased falling damage/checkpoints
• Tree Climb: Added checkpoints, increased falling damage, and fixed grabbable invisible block
• Bayou level: Improved hearing of enemies
• Magma Barracks: Made ending hotspot bigger, so you don't have a weird pause when you get to the exit
• Magma Arena: Added light to one the lava-falls where it was missing
• Rock Cave Arena: Moved detail objects so they are now visible (were made invisible when adding puddles before)
• Waterfall Arena: Tweaked crowd visuals
• Water Cave Escape: Fixed some issues with waterfalls
• Garden Duel: Fixed collision/climbing issues
• Sky Ark: Made player and last boss tougher, added some more guards, improved lighting in some places, fixed a hole in the bottom of a pool, did some physics painting, fixed some visual anomalies/made some visual tweaks, and removed placeholder dialogue hotspots that are not going to be used