5 de outubro

South Africans: Announcing Table Realms Support

We just pushed a branch of VALA that'll make it possible to play with friends without needing extra controllers (by using your phone!).

Table Realms, the tech behind this, has just launched in limited early access open to South Africans. The VALA changes we've made won't effect you unless you switch to the TableRealms beta branch on Steam, detailed at the end of this post.

When I was a kid my parents would let me choose what to do each year on my birthday.
Every year I would choose exactly the same thing: Have friends over, rent a Playstation, and eat salt beef with a carrot stuck through it.
We couldn't afford our own console or TV Games, but the single video store in my small town had a Playstation 1 that we could rent for the day.

The video store had a memory card available to rent, however we weren't able to get that. I have both fond and terrifying memories of having to play Crash Bandicoot for the entire day without exiting because then we'd lose our progress. On one of the years we took a break for lunch and left the console on the carpet. When we came back we discovered that it had restarted, presumably because of overheating, and we had lost all progress.

They also had an extra controller on offer. However we always just got 1 controller and played in turns.
One year we were able to get a second, and playing Cool Boarders with each other was about the most amazing thing I'd ever done.

Fast forward to 2018 and a few things have changed, but having multiple controllers lying around for friends to play with is not one of them.
This was actually a big worry when we originally planned VALA, because we obviously wanted as many people to be able to enjoy it as possible.

Enter: Table Realms.



Put very simply, Table Realms is a fancy Android (and iOS soon) app that will turn your phone into a controller for VALA.

Here is a video about it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2R4C4GC8TM

At the bottom right of the main menu in VALA you'll now see a QR code


If you scan it with the Table Realms app then your phone will connect to the game (over the fast local network). We were even able to match the phone menus to the game. For instance, when you're selecting difficulty and District:


And then once you've dropped in, you get a controller:



If you happen to be at the rAge expo in South Africa this weekend, come try it out at our stand!
We also have sweet llama fridge magnets for anyone (well, until they run out) that buys the game at rAge!


To use TableRealms for the moment you'll need to switch to the VALA TableRealms branch in Steam. This is beacause Table Realms itself is in early access, and I'd consider our integration still beta.

Right Click on VALA in your Steam games list, then click Properties:


Then go to the Betas tab, and select tablerealms in the drop down:


After you close the window the game will update to be the version with Table Realms.


Now I'll end off with the worlds cheesiest photo for you to print out and put on pizza, stolen from the Table Realms site.

21 de junho

The Graphical Callamity Update

We've just pushed a 114MB update to Vicious Attack Llama Apocalypse, your favorite llama slaughter battle royale game!

At launch there was a particularly tricky graphical bug that slipped through the cracks. I got one of our artists to make an illustration of the situation to better explain:


The bug was that a few buildings didn't correctly fade as you walked behind them. Instead, they'd leave behind an ugly outline of some of the stickey-outey-bits (if that term goes over your head, don't worry, it is pretty technical).

It looked like this:



In coding and pest control, the nice bugs are the ones you can find. However this one was fairly tricky because it only reproduced in some cases, and it only happened in a final build (as oppose to in development where we would use fancy dev tools to see what is causing it).

By now you've guessed correctly that this is fixed, so, well done for ruining the end of the story I guess.

At the same time we did a significant update of the underlying game engine. This fixes a few bugs, but more importantly the game will now run even smoother than before, and be a bit more optimized (yo, hit me up PUBG corp).

I also got our artist to make an illustration to better explain what a game engine update is:


Finally, we also fixed a few other bugs we've picked up, and balanced a few weapons.

Go forth and murder!
(like, only in the game plz)