Dec 21, 2022

Hostile Mars - theninjaturtle

The past 2 months have been extremely busy.

My second baby boy was born and my wife and I couldn't be happier with how well he and his older brother are doing. Despite some sleepless nights, progress on the game has been moving forward. There's a lot to share with everyone.

Unity X Havok

First I just want to mention that Hostile Mars was featured in Unity's latest blog post regarding the Havok Physics engine now being supported for production in Unity. I am flattered they thought Hostile Mars was the best game to showcase Havok Physics with Unity's DOTS system. We had an interview and they actually wrote a really awesome overview of the game. Check it out here: https://blog.unity.com/technology/havok-physics-now-supported-for-production

Mechanics Overhaul

Being in the pre-alpha stage, a lot of mechanics aren't polished to a point that is satisfying. I spent a good couple of weeks identifying the most performed actions in the early stages of the game and tried to focus on how to polish them up and make them more enjoyable actions to perform.

During this exercise, I took the focused mechanic into a completely new game build where it was just the mechanic itself, and I altered and adjusted until the mechanic was fun on its own. Thanks to Jason Storey for the guidance on what he thought was wrong with the game. Always feels good to have him tell you why the game you've worked on for 5 years isn't good :)

This led to a complete overhaul of the player harvesting nodes, the player adding ammo to turrets, and the craft bench.

PLAYER HARVESTING

Lots of changes here. No more single-button interaction into a set animation to harvest nodes. First of all, the hammer has been replaced with a mining gun. This electromagnet-driven spike gun breaks rocks apart with ease (and can be upgraded to break through more advanced materials as well)

When harvesting a node, the player now has complete control of each impact on the rock. As the player continues to mine more nodes, the weapon heats up and hits harder. There is a visual indicator for this in the form of a progress bar. As you string together more hits, the gun does more damage. It can be upgraded to unlock 5 different stages of increased damage.

Also introducing "Backpack Robot 1" (for lack of a clever name at the moment, any suggestions in the comments are welcome :) ). "Backpack Robots" opens up a whole new topic in the game and I will get to that next week, but for now, just know that backpacks will have multiple robots integrated into them and that they are used for various tasks to help you.

This bot will come out to collect any pickups or scraps you collect when mining or picking up items.

There are still a few finishing touches to add to the impacts and gun itself, but I'm happy with how it turned out and it feels really satisfying to collect resources from a group of harvest nodes.

TURRET LOADING

Another early game task that happens quite frequently is loading ammo into turrets. previously it was just a button press and a sound effect, nothing especially satisfying.

Like with the mining mechanic, I took the act of adding ammo to a turret in its own environment separate from the game, and tried to make it more satisfying. I messed with a few different things, like mini-games and delayed button holds, but anything that slowed the player down felt a little counter-productive as this act is mostly done while in combat, so sitting to reload a gun isn't satisfying at all, Instead, I added an animation with the ammo flying out of the backpack into the turret, which you can continue to do even if not still looking at the turret, which plays really nicely when trying to reload a bunch of turrets while enemies are on the way.

This way the player doesn't even have to stop to reload, he can pass by and hold the button down while continuing to run.

I added a small world space UI that shows the ammo amount that has been added, so you know how much ammo is in the turret when it is out of view.

WILDLIFE COMBAT

Combat with wildlife robots is the next mechanic that had yet to be happy with how it was playing. This was given some major attention in the form of new enemies with different behaviors, weapons, and attacks.

The current enemies that you find when exploring the martian surface were all pretty much the same. they would walk toward the player and either shock, blow up, or shoot projectiles. This is meant for some of the enemies, but it definitely doesn't allow for any interesting combat situations or any type of decision-making by the player. It's just "see an enemy and shoot it".

We've added a number of new scrap wildlife bots that have different attack types, distances, ranges, damages, and movements. The idea is to create interesting scenarios where the player must choose which enemies are the biggest threat in the environment they are fighting.

For example, there is a tank-like enemy that shoots a chaingun-like plasma weapon dealing damage through a hit-scan. In an open area, this would likely be a very large threat, as it almost never misses and a ton of bullets are fired in a short amount of time (after a significant charge-up sequence). The same enemy, if faced in a narrow corridor with a lot of objects to take cover behind, might be the least threatening enemy.

Another enemy shoots electric orbs at the player, almost like a grenade launcher, and would deal significant damage to players hiding or staying stationary. And another that is sort of a sniper class enemy that sits on the sides of cliffs. I hope you can see the dynamic combat that I hope this will create and make every scenario a little different.

Here are the new enemies:

Chaingun Tank

Ground Drone

Orb Launchers

Wall Jumpers

Flying Drone

Scrappers

These don't attack the player so I'm not really sure what they are doing... but there has to be something they're good for. Maybe you can figure it out.

HOME BASE CORES

This one is big. It dramatically changes how combat close to home base goes down. Previously, all enemies would attack one side of the Home Base when they were close enough to do so. Considering the massive amount of enemies that can be in a wave, this led to some serious mobs clumping up at home base which was very hard to recover from and many of them wouldn't have a clear site line to the target anyway so they would just be blasting away at their own bots.

There were a couple of problems with this method:

Hard to recover if many enemies made it to Home Base
Enemies would attack each other
not clear where the enemy was attacking
no penalty for killing the enemy once it arrived at home base besides damage to home base (which not many were doing)

I think the solution fixes all of these things. This is a Home Base Core:

It is the primary energy source of the Home Base and the attack point for the enemy. The difference is that they do not attack with their normal weapons as they do the player, they attempt to reach the core and initiate an overcharge sequence, blowing themselves up and doing damage to the core. So basically they will arrive 1 by 1 and damage the cores after a second or so of charging up.

This is much more in line with many other Tower Defense games where once the target reaches their destination, the damage is dealt.

There are 4 cores that surround Home Base, each with a certain amount of hitpoints. As you progress through the stages, more will pop up which gives more targets for the enemy to attack and destroy before Home Base is lost. So the further you progress, the more targets the enemy must destroy, which scales nicely with the massive wave counts in the late game.

CRAFT BENCH

The next thing that was "juiced up" was the Home Base Craft Bench. Before this machine acted like any other, a queue for creating multiple items would be stored in an output container, waiting for the player to return to pick up. This is no longer the case.

The Craft Bench now is a manually pressed machine that does not have the capability to queue up items in the input, so it is just for crafting items while the player is interacting with it. The UI is still being worked on for it but here is a peek at the button itself in action:

This isn't everything that has been done in the past weeks, and I'll leave you with a few notes about what will be discussed for next week's Update:

The main menu needed a complete overhaul to really get it to the quality level I feel it needed. Here is a quick peek at it (there are still a few finishing touches needed to improve visibility) :

As I mentioned before, the player backpack will be loaded up with multiple robots to help you out, I'll go into more detail next week about the backpack types.

Another big addition to the game involves a camp of (friendly?) robots that seem to be asking for a lot of items from the player, I wonder what they will give in return?

And the last concept to be discussed in next week's update: Robot Ranching.

That is all.

If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg

Take Care,
-Jake

Dec 21, 2022

Steam Deck OS 3.4 Update

Steam Deck - Jill

SteamOS 3.4 has just been released to the Stable channel as an update to all Deck users. The update contains the following changes, that were previously undergoing testing as the 3.4 OS Preview:

Rebased SteamOS on a newer snapshot of Arch Linux

This update pulls in the latest performance, security and stability fixes for the underlying packages that are the foundation for SteamOS
Most notably, this includes recent changes to KDE Plasma, Steam Deck's Desktop Mode. Full notes on these updates can be found on KDE's website here, here, and here. Here are a few of the highlights:
- New Overview view to see all open windows and virtual desktops
- Updates to KRunner, the built in assistant for searching and running tasks
- New touchscreen gestures
- New themes and wallpapers
- Updates to widgets

General

Fixed issues with sleep affecting a small number of titles, where specific games would be frozen or exhibit glitchy behavior after waking up
Fixed a performance issue that could cause 100ms hitches during gameplay if adaptive backlight was enabled
Fixed a graphics driver crash when interacting with the map in DEATH STRANDING DIRECTOR'S CUT
Fixed issue with opening file managers if the gamescope session has been restarted
Fixed GPU clock settings sometimes not sticking if set manually (thanks to user xperia64 for the amdgpu kernel patch backport)
Fixed an issue with fan controller excessive sensor polling causing sporadic fan behavior and higher SSD temps on some NVME drives
New firmware for Docking Station
- Fixes an issue where HDMI 2.0 displays are not detected during wake or boot up

Performance profiles

New option to allow Screen Tearing: at the cost of sometimes displaying partial frames, allows for lower average latency when VSync is disabled and the frame limiter is off,
Changed performance HUD level 2 to use a horizontal layout. It fits in the letterbox space for games running in a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Storage

Re-enabled TRIM for the internal drive as well as supported external storage devices, improving write performance
- This includes a workaround ensuring that TRIM operations are safe for SD cards that advertise discard support but do not support it
- Steam will periodically TRIM storage devices as needed
- New button in Settings → System → Advanced to run trim immediately
Added an eject option for removable drives in Settings → Storage
- This unmounts the removable drive, it does not physically eject it
External drives formatted as ext4 are now automatically mounted and available for use in Steam
- Disabled in 3.4.1, will be re-enabled in a future SteamOS update

Input

Disabled kernel DualShock 4 and DualSense trackpad → mouse emulation when Steam is running
Changed timing of virtual keypresses to improve game compatibility with on-screen keyboard
- Fixes input issues with apps such as Street Fighter V, EA app
Fixed Steam Input's action set switching based on cursor visibility in Game mode
Re-enabled the built-in hid-steam kernel gamepad driver when Steam is not running in desktop mode, and added rumble support to it
Added support for the 8BitDo Ultimate Wireless controller dongle
Fixed a USB crash when using certain controllers such as the Hori Fighting Stick α

Audio

Fixed a case where the default audio device would display "echo-cancel-sink" and audio controls would cease to work correctly
Fixed a case where some applications would output audio to the wrong device
Fixed an audio driver bug that could lead to on-board audio crackling in some situations

Note: This update was re-released as 3.4.1 to address a regression in how SD cards were handled, and again as 3.4.2 to fix an issue with HDMI/DisplayPort audio going to sleep after being idle on external displays.