Devlog Weekly Log - TR Art, KAG Editor and Modding

Original: http://www.thd.vg/post/129540419180/weekly-log-tr-art-kag-editor-and-modding

Last week was a quiet one for progress we can share, but I’ll go over the details of what is shareable. Apologies for the post coming after the weekend again!

Trench Run News:

We’ve committed to the new art style. I’ll spend the next few weeks to a month getting the new graphics in-game, and refining any issues with them. It’s important to understand that this is not just a simple palette swap. The new art both expands the colours available and involves a lot of tile and sprite rework. We’re focusing on improving readability; as an example we’re having team colours on the characters - something that was impossible with the 8 colour art.

Team colours help immediately tell friend from foe!​

On the gameplay side of things we’re making a few small changes to improve the reliability of game times. Endless stalemates from balanced teams are an issue in KAG; that’s something we’d like to avoid in TR. MM will spend this week swapping the Run mode over to a “Best-of” format. He’ll use the testing group to ensure this works out as intended. This change should shorten wait times and ease player fatigue.

KAG News:

Skinney has got some work done on the editor, “Cartographer”. He’s mocking up a few possible interfaces at the moment. It is not only a tool for creating maps, but also a moderator tool to help admins combat griefers and hackers. Cartographer should also help with building and testing clever mechanism layouts.

Verra has got some optimisation work under way, addressing how KAG interfaces with Angelscript. He has also fixed the “endless downloading” bug that prevented joining some modded servers. This turned out to be two separate bugs on different operating systems. On Linux, the bug was a file permissions issue. On Windows, it was misuse of a system function. Both issues caused the same symptom in different ways, and Verra managed to fix both. This should make the experience joining modded servers more enjoyable, to say the least!

Stay tuned for more!
Max

 

They are indeed close, but are actually only present in Skirmish. Run (the main team mode) has only red (wine) and yellow (beer) teams.

 

At the moment we dont plan to update the demo before some sort of prerelease version is out. We're not going to do the "constant, rolling builds" approach that we did with early KAG if we can help it, as we actually don't want constant, per build feedback from everyone - it's like a mosquito in our ear and a huge time sink :)

We'll get a new playable version out as soon as the new art is done and the online stuff is finalised, as we'll need to stress test the backend, etc, but we dont want to have to maintain more public versions as that will slow the development down a lot!

I understand this is frustrating for non-testers but we hope you'll be patient. If you want to play a new build of the game you can head to pixel heaven in warsaw this weekend and play with MM ;)

@Fellere825 - perhaps :) We're aiming to write specific characters for both wine and beer team; the extra colours are just a skirmish thing, but we definitely need more exposition on the setting and the like.

 

This is exactly the kind of stuff that could be easily enough added to the moderator tools as part of the editor (the keg could also just be outright deleted and the owner of it frozen and teleported above the tent or something) - either way, @Skinney is the one to talk to about this stuff :)

 

We might use this idea of nations (Likely Red Wine and Gold Beer, the latter something bogans from queensland will understand more than some) and produce some spoofy propaganda for the nations to use for promo and in-game decor too :)

Sidenote: I know a few guys who are an unironic mimicry of your Beer Nation description.

 

"When war is fought over booze nothing is constant." :D
Fellere825: good stuff! We might use this.