2:17am

Pre-Alpha 0.3.10: Destroy the Evidence in Flames

Cairns Playtest - dont eat pagpag

When i was adding a non-unique story-related item, it felt kind of strange for it to have no use outside the story. The item felt forced and out of place. Since it was a food themed item, i decided to add the planned food system into the game. And because i dislike the idea of right-click use items (or overloading right-click functionalities), i made it so you get a dialog at any campfire and can only eat foods there. A typical food buff is basically like wearing an extra piece of equipment for about 8 minutes.

To reduce food waste, buffs can now be saved to the save file. This also enables other buffs, like potion poison and a new story buff, to be preserved when exiting and restarting the game.

Many works have been done on npc, story, dialog, and world maps. It feels like playtesting the main game build is only a few patches away.

Fixes & Improvements

migrated to a new pathing backend. movements are snappier and path finding performance is improved (not that it was a problem)
implemented a better way to update the pathing graph when loading new maps. updates are now properly queued and no internal errors will be thrown
deferred map instantiation across frames
updated how npc are presented. with the new animated sprite, they can move around and play animation clips during dialog in a scripted manner
shops can now have multiple “entrance” interactables. the same shop can be opened by an npc shopkeeper dialog or props around them
added food items and eating at campfires
allowed buffs to be saved to and load from the save file
fixed bare hand damage, balance, and crit chance miscalculation

2:05am

Concerning statistics

STALCRAFT: X - Unskill

The Zone’s been busy this past month — and by “busy” we mean deeply concerning.

Over 655 165 hello's were shouted across the Zone’s wasteland. Most were probably ignored, but it’s the thought that counts. Approvals still outnumber disapprovals, proving that basic manners survive in the Zone… until the bullets fly.

The auction pushed past 290 million in trades. The economy is up, sanity is down.

Then there’s gravity — still undefeated: 121 970 stalkers somehow found a way to lose a one-on-one with the ground. Who knew the earth could be so dangerous?

Who says learning from mistakes is boring? 88 762 players tested grenades on themselves. Spoiler: bad idea.

Lemonade? 23 161 lemons were eaten this month. Apparently when life gives you lemons — STALCRAFT: X players eat all of them at once.

Up North, 1 932 stalkers were slain by rats. Yes, really. No, we don’t get it either.

Despite the Zone being mostly mud and misery, 465 players still found a way to drown. It’s impressive given how little water the Zone actually has.

And lastly, we have the artefact enthusiasts. Hundreds managed to die inside safezones thanks to their own creative builds:

352 — psy;
386 — radiation;
330 — bio;
88 — thermal.

Turns out “inner protection” isn’t infinite. Nothing like being vaporised by your own min-maxing.

The Zone continues its eternal cycle: greet, trade, explode, fall, eat a lemon, and occasionally disintegrate in a safezone. Business as usual.

1:57am

Keyboard Soldier 1.2.37

Keyboard Soldier - Rogis

Enemy balancing :

1. Made waves more difficult from the start. Some of you said the starting point was too easy. It now scales way more the further you go.

2. Enemies are faster. Spawn rate increased.

3. Reduced the amount of rubbish enemies to a maximum of 3 per wave.

4. Increases chances of ore difficult words to appear by 10%

Mud shop item balancing:

1. Increase the starting slow from 7%*level to 8%*level

Shop appearance balancing:

1. Increased the starting change from 27% to 33% + any level up increases.

2. If a shop did not appear for 4 days it will appear no matter the chance.

Achievements update:

1.Updated the top 1 leaderboard achievement to be top 100.

1:56am

[DevLog] Pathfinding System

Frostory - Team OOPArts

Hello!

Today, we'd like to introduce our game's pathfinding system.

Our first system was a simple tile‑grid approach.
With the A* algorithm, it explores the terrain in eight directions: north, south, east, west, and the four diagonals.

In the early game the terrain was simple, but in the new levels ropes and humans appear.
So we thought AI should also be able to make use of ropes.

To make pathfinding efficient, we needed to incorporate these features into the system.
We decided to build a navigation mesh to store such points.

Navigation Mesh

Here is the navigation mesh we completed after lots of coding.
For debugging, additional detailed information is shown in the editor.

Ropes are mapped as shown above.
We calculate positions where you can jump onto a rope to connect the terrain.

Based on this, we run pathfinding.
Each path contains information about different movement modes such as walking, jumping, and riding a rope, depending on the node type.
The navigator, described below, makes use of this information.

Navigator

If the navigation mesh is the terrain data, the navigator is the module that follows the path based on that information.
We implemented various sub‑modules to ensure correct path following.

Path Simplification Module

A path that simply connects nodes can be inefficient or look awkward.
To address this, we keep the movement within node bounds while straightening the path as much as possible.

This runs in real time.

Wall Collision Avoidance Module

If the AI unexpectedly touches a wall, simply moving along the planned path causes it to rub against the wall, which looks unnatural.

To prevent this, when the AI touches a wall we slightly turn its movement direction to keep motion natural.

Fall Prevention Module

Because our game uses a physics‑based movement system, the AI might accidentally run off a cliff.

To prevent this, the AI computes dangerous movement angle ranges within its current node that could lead to a fall.

Obstacle Handling Module

This module detects and gets past dynamic obstacles that block the path.

For these local searches we reuse the grid‑based pathfinding we previously built.

If it’s a small obstacle, we pick it up and move it aside.

Wrapping Up

Finally, here’s the AI chasing while using a rope.

Thanks for reading!