Devlog TR Log - Lobby Redesign and Finished Soundtrack!

This week in Trench Run news - some clarification on our current direction with the lobby!

Over the week we’ve had a big discussion about what we really want to get out of the lobbies - and decided that it should be a social as well as functional place for players of a similar level to gather. To that end, we’ve reduced the number and variation in lobbies immensely from what was planned. This has meant scrapping some previous work, but we feel like the new direction is much more focussed and will make more sense for players in the long run.

Before we get into the new one, the previous plan was to have a lobby per-gamemode, as well as some minigame lobbies, and to swap between them with a menu. While this is an achievable and practical goal, it led to quite a large number of lobbies per region, with concerns about being able to reliably fill the lobbies each day, even at peak time. As we all know, a surefire way to ensure a game dies early is to split up the players.

Current concept sketch of the lobby plans, complete with VIP Bar!​

The current aim is to have Novice, Regular, and Master lobbies in each region, and to do gamemode selection (currently just skirmish/campaign) within that lobby. This makes it so you can see everyone who’s playing at your skill level in your region, and where they are playing their games. To accomplish this, we’ve had to create some new assets and still need to create new code to run and maintain the multi-gamemode lobbies, but we think it will be well worth it in the end.

The physical structure of the lobby is still in flux but the plan is to have a recreational area in the middle, initially featuring a bar, band and basketball hoop, and trucks at the sides that players can get into to join games. This gives quick, physical feedback on which gamemodes have faster queues, and allows easy switching between waiting for each mode - you just go and get in the other truck.

An early mock-up of the truck with players inside waiting for skirmish.​

Whatever ends up happening, the Novice lobby should feature an expanded help HUD to help new players understand the lobby system quickly. This would be absent in the Regular and Master lobbies as players there will already have an understanding of how the lobby works, meaning new players can learn quickly but old players dont get nagged by tooltips!

Let us know what you think of this lobby direction! It’s still in flux and your ideas could help shape the game for the better!

In other news, Paul has finished the bulk of the soundtrack, including the main theme and themes for each biome! We’re working on getting the new tracks in game asap and have been looping them in the background while we work. The soundtrack is the kind of music that gets into your head easily, you’ll be humming the tracks on the way to work or school we promise! We’re so happy with how easy the process has been and how nice Paul is to work with. Definitely a highlight of the week!

KAG news will be coming shortly as we’ll try to get a build out next week if all goes well; Norill’s work on menus may be released if everything tests well, but otherwise the impending changes are mainly bugfixes, balance changes and reversions.

Have Fun!

Max


Original: http://www.thd.vg/post/126072577275/tr-log-lobby-redesign-and-finished-soundtrack

 

Everyone has pretty amazing healthcare, there's constant medical drops with instructions for how to do all the fancy surgery etc. It's the Australian model ;)

TR is (in our headcanon) actually just a big campsite with "battles" fought over drunken wagers for laughs. Everyone comes back at the end for beer and wine, then argues and goes out again. The "War" theme is hopefully transparent enough to be like 75:25 nonsense:serious. ww1 references alongside portable guided rocket launchers. Worms style constant supply drops. Beer team and Wine team. And eventually, funny party banter.

I'm actually very glad you say the lobby has you more keen than the gameplay tbh; we feel that the gameplay is super strong, but that it'll only be half of what people come back for over and over. Persistent moneys and a place to idle and drink booze with friends between rounds? Master league to show how much better than johny you are? Swapping skins for dollars? Unfortunately that's the kind of thing people want to see these days. So we've built a fun couch game, now we have to build the bait to make people play, haha.


I kinda like the idea of helicopters but they sound both expensive for a campsite and expensive to animate nicely, haha. We're planning on having the trucks come and go along the map dropping people off at games and making particles, rumbling around etc.

 

Is that a basketpall pitch? Sports with simple 2d physics would be great for the lobby.

 

There's a preview of the main theme here for those keen to have a listen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvb62uFR2VA

Re: combat complexity - honestly I feel like there's more to the class interactions here than in KAG, and there'll be even more once there's teams involved. There aren't all the items to make things "complicated", but in terms of depth and mastery there's a lot of room for high level play - just thankfully, most new players get past the level of "waste of skin" much faster without so many different things to focus on.

Re: drinking, betting, air drops of spirits - the first two are already on the list, the latter could be fun for sure (for those without much coin to spare to still join in the party).

Re: groups - we don't have this planned currently as that'd require a lot of client-accessible backend work. All of the backend work so far has just been for the servers, so they can access the coins and stats and so on and pass them to the player. It should be quite easy to meet up with friends though as there isn't going to be nearly as much server separation as there is in KAG (in fact, no custom server support is planned initially, we'll only be opening that up after the full release of the game).

Re: basketball/2d physics games in the lobby - already done! it's terrible with 400 ping though, haha.

 

online? quite.
locally? pretty simple.

 

Re: Duels - we've got something like that planned for the master lobby :) We're not likely to put these sort of "hardcore" "high risk" options in other lobbies to avoid rustling johny's jimmies but I'd like to give more serious players something to get the blood pumping too (nothing like a wager where one of you is gonna be too poor to play with the big kids afterwards)

@Klokinator - the demo is a bit "out of date" now but gives a reasonable indication of at least the assault <-> sniper <-> commando interactions, at least if you play with other humans. A few people were playing it "online" with windows remote desktop if you dont have friends to play with irl ;)