May 31, 2023

The Updated 2023 Content Roadmap Has Arrived!

Disney Dreamlight Valley - ryan.blanchard

Hey Valley Villagers!

It’s pretty wild to think that we’re almost halfway through the year already. From welcoming a bunch of familiar faces to the Valley and exploring The Lion King Realm, to celebrating Disney’s 100th Anniversary and our collective passion for Disney Parks, there’s already been a lot to love in Disney Dreamlight Valley this year. We really appreciate you joining us on this Early Access journey and can’t overstate the role this community has played in helping to shape where we are now.

Well, that was only the first half of the year and there’s a whole lot of 2023 left... Want your first peek at what’s coming just over the horizon? Today, we’re excited to share an updated roadmap of the content you can expect to arrive in the Valley over the next couple months.

Picking up after the release of The Remembering update in early June, we have two more updates to give you a sneak peek at, as well as your first hints at what the next chapter of Disney Dreamlight Valley will hold, coming later this year. Check it all out below:

Excited? So are we! To all of you who guessed that Vanellope von Schweetz was Valley-bound, you deserve a treat. Zooming ahead to our September update, she will be followed by the much-anticipated arrival of Belle, alongside a new realm to explore and immerse yourself in. Of course, there are other surprises to look forward to!

As you’ve likely come to expect from our updates, these new characters will be accompanied by a wealth of new content, features and improvements. We’re particularly excited about a certain brand-new feature that will come as part of our summer update. You’ve all gone to great lengths to share your creativity with us in the game, so we want to reward you for it! Look out for more on that very soon!

Of course, there are also Star Paths! Since launch, you’ve shared your most-wanted themes with us, and we think these are going to make a whole lot of you very happy. Not only will we be diving into The Wonder of Pixar to shine a spotlight on even more beloved Pixar films, but this Halloween season will provide ample opportunities to get in the holiday spirit and bring some darkness to the Valley.

Looking ahead to late 2023, as the mystery of The Forgetting and The Forgotten comes full circle in The Remembering, a new chapter will begin for Disney Dreamlight Valley. We aren’t sharing many details quite yet so we’ll leave you to speculate. Suffice to say, we have BIG plans for the game through the end of the year, into 2024, and beyond! Stay tuned in the coming weeks and months, as we continue to share more sneak peeks. There’s never been a better time to explore the Valley and we can’t wait to hear what you think about everything that lies on the horizon!

Want to stay up to date on all things Disney Dreamlight Valley? Sign up for newsletter updates here, bookmark our Trello Issue Tracker, and be sure to follow us on our social media channels:

Instagram: https://gmlft.co/DDV-Instagram
Twitter: https://gmlft.co/DDV-Twitter
Facebook: https://gmlft.co/DDV-Facebook
YouTube: https://gmlft.co/DDV-YouTube
Discord: https://gmlft.co/DDV-Discord
TikTok: https://gmlft.co/DDV-TikTok

May 31, 2023

A LOOK AT SOME OF THE NEW LEVEL-MAKING FEATURES FOR BRIGADOR KILLERS

Brigador Killers - dudeglove

For May’s update on Brigador Killers we’ve decided to talk about something many of Brigador’s modders will be familiar with: the debug panel.

For those not familiar, if you press F1 at any time in Brigador: Up-Armored Edition an overlay window appears that looks something like this.

In BK, the debug panel has had some work done to it…

…so we’re going to highlight three of its new features.

[For those wondering, yes, this is [url=https://www.dearimgui.com/]Dear ImGui[/url] by Omar “ocornut” Cornut, which is used by a lot of other game developers in their games though it’s typically not made accessible in the public versions of those games.]

Our usual caveat as ever: what you see is still a work in progress and not everything in this article’s screenshots are necessarily representative of the final product. If you're having trouble viewing the screenshots, try right clicking the image and opening it in a new tab (click here to view this post in your browser).

🔍Tile contents tooltip

Let’s say for instance we’ve laid out a level and need to edit the features of a particular structure (or “prop”) like this fenced-off enclosure in a Brigador Killers test map.

If this were our previous game and we didn’t know what the prop’s .json file was, we would typically refer to the version of the same level in Tiled, which is the editor we use to make levels in both Brigador and Brigador Killers. Over there we click the prop and it’ll show us its file path…

…And from there it’s just a matter of alt-tabbing back into the game to look up the same file path in the pack file tab, and then inspecting it via the data editor tab and we can set about configuring the prop to our needs.

Simple enough, but it can be a bit clunky, particularly if you have to work with multiple rotations of the same prop in order to, say, make sure the strength of a structure is unified across all variants of that asset. This could get a bit complicated when it came to what we call “prop stacking”, which is placing two props in the same tile but using different layers in the editor.

[Sidenote: this hasn’t historically been a huge problem for us, though it is one of those time wasters in game development that might seem tiny, but adds up as more and more assets get added to the game.]

The Tile contents tooltip provides a solution. By enabling it, a small tooltip window will appear whenever our mouse cursor moves over any prop in a level.

This window tells us what props are occupying that tile, what the prop path is and allows us to immediately look up the asset in the data editor by hitting End on our keyboard, which cuts out all that of alt-tabbing and manual typing mentioned above.

In addition, if we in fact have stacked two props on the same tile, the tooltip will still tell us! Let’s direct our tooltip’s attention to this set of light poles inside a topiary…

Mousing over with our tooltip and using the arrow keys will let us toggle between the props on that tile, showing us the details for both the topiary and the light pole.

From a development standpoint, this will save a huge amount of time because of the increased volume of props that we’re making for BK. Keen-eyed modders might also have noticed the green text that appears in the top right of the screenshot, which informs the user whether the moused-over tile is walkable or not.

🚓Patrol routes

In the Mech debug tab, two new radio buttons have been added:

Select patrol origin
Select patrol endpoint

In order to make use of it we select a mech (“mech” here means any NPC that has some kind of active AI state unlike a vehicle like a panel van), indicated by the green triangle underneath the placeholder Dave-with-a-cophead. If units are currently moving about we can pause the action with devmode enabled. With time frozen we can click the desired patrol origin and end point for the chosen mech within the game.

Inside the game we are limited to just a start and end point. Outside of the game we can set more complicated patrol routes via Tiled. If we click Force patrol AI state and unpause the game, our newly assigned mech will dutifully bounce between both points in the level, visualized here by the orange debug lines.

Unfortunately we can’t force this new patrol information permanently within the game. It has to be done outside of the game in Tiled, where we have to manually specify the patrol behavior for a placed unit. However, having the patrol feature immediately testable within the game let’s us:

See whether the mech can patrol to and from that point or not
Get the coordinates for those two points that we can take over to the Tiled version

As you might expect, this is going to allow us to create more interesting combat encounters, particularly in light of the third feature.

🚶‍♀️Civilian socializing

This one’s complicated, and this screenshot is probably not going to help either, but bear with us.

What you’re looking at is the debug draw of the social paths. Put simply, civilians have new socialize AI states. In the case of the above, the green hemispheres indicate areas of “socializing”, while the white lines indicate civilians searching for such areas and the path they’re taking to get to one.

When a mech enters the social state, it will randomly pick another mech, internally called its "friend". The friend's current position will be chosen as a meeting point (or green hemisphere) and it too will enter the socialization state. Futher mechs that enter a socialization state and choose either of the currently "socializing" mechs as a "friend" will converge to that meeting point. After an amount of time passes, these civilians will search for another place to socialize. In the process of writing out this post, we had left the level running a bit too long in the background and 99% of the test level civilians ended up all grouped together.

Civilians dynamically moving around in such a manner goes a long way to making levels seem more alive but it’s not the only thing. Not featured here is the ability to make props that are “socially interesting” and not just to civilians. Other on-foot NPCs like cops are also capable of the social AI state.

What does this potentially mean from a gameplay design standpoint? One possibility is it means we can place entities in levels that will draw the attention of NPCs and cause them to gather in particular spots. Maybe it’s a fast food restaurant, maybe it’s a police checkpoint, or maybe it’s something the player can use to create a diversion within a level…

Whatever form it ends up taking, we know we’re excited to see what our community of established modders gets up to with these features alone.

Did you know that Stellar Jockeys has a merchandise store? If you’d like to help fund our development, consider purchasing a pin, t-shirt or even an SNC Skull & Laurel Zippo™ lighter.

May 31, 2023

End of Month Progress Report: May

KAPITAL PUNISHMENT 22XX - MattB

Hi! It seems it’s already time for another end of month progress report!

Name Change

First things first. KOP KILLER 22XX is now KAPITAL PUNISHMENT 22XX! As much as we liked the original title, it didn’t lend itself to open discussion of the game. We were comfortable with taking the risk, but after a lot of discussion we came to realize not everyone’s in a position to do the same. We feel the new title solves that issue while aligning with the content and theme of the game even better. We hope you agree! KAPITAL PUNISHMENT 22XX is here to stay and reach new audiences!

ACT I on JUNE 8th!

Get hype! Story Mode Act I will debut on June 8th! Get ready to fight your way through 8 challenging, hand-crafted levels each with its own unique twist. Here’s a small preview:

Escape your nefarious captors through a gauntlet of platforming challenges.

Battle waves of foes as your fight to free your fellow prisoners.

Explore Homan Corrections with the help of your comrades.

Kill over 100 fascists.

We’ve been working overtime to get this release super polished. Beyond the new content we’ve added too many quality of life improvements to list here. We’ve got 2 rockin’ boss fights, revamped UI, full Spanish translation, and loads of secrets and surprises. We’ve improved comrade AI beyond what you’ve seen in Arcade Mode, and optimized things to run buttery smooth.

We’ll be putting the game on sale (33% off) for two weeks starting June 8th and need your help to spread the word! KAPITAL PUNISHMENT 22XX! Tell everyone! Gaming forums, twitter, Tik Tok, reddit. If you haven’t already, leave a review! Reviews help more than anything else. Finally you can join our discord and share your feedback on the game itself!

Thanks
Matt (MGS)
Dr. Shameless Cat (DSCG)

May 31, 2023

Beast Hour. №22. May 2023. Characters customization

Beast Hour - Сычен

Raiders and Beasts!

Today we'd like to talk about characters' skins – the feature we started working on not so long ago.

That's quite a frequent question on our social media, if we're planning to add customization in the game. And the answer is always - yes!

All multiplayer games have skins, which devs regularly add into the game. That brings more variety and personality, because you can not only play as your favorite character, but also change his or her appearance as you like.

For quite a time our artists have been designing different skins, that would fit perfectly into the overall atmosphere of the game. This includes radical re-coloring of the standard look, as well as new appearance that completely transforms the character. From time to time we share such arts on our social media. However, we started to implement the customization system in the game itself just recently.

Standard re-color

Raiders

It wasn't hard to come up with skins for Raiders: since they are humans in suits, we just have divided their outfits on 3 customizable parts – head, arms and body. That allows players to mix and match them, creating unique looks.

Combination of different sets

Beasts

But we've faced some obstacles with Beasts. As they are naked monsters we can't split customization into 3 parts as we did for Raiders. Otherwise they would have visible "seams". Still we needed 3 customization parts, so we decided to change the following:

1. body type - the whole "naked" body and its coloring, what solves the problem of seams between the parts;

2. suit - different variations in clothing and decorations below the head/neck;

3. head - things for the head/neck, like extra "hats", "collars" etc.

Various combinations for Beasts

First prototypes

We already have a fair number of sketches that could be put to work and added to the game. But for the sake of time saving and testing the whole system (and, if necessary, tweak the images at the idea stage), we first added a set of the simplest "stubs".

Skins prototypes

This is why most of the "skins" in the game now are very bright and colourful. It's no coincidence that we chose such a toxic palette - it makes it easier to find bugs and gives more insight into the system work.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading till the end. Which concept do you like best? Share your opinion in the comments!

Make sure to check our regular livestreams at YouTube and Twitch channels, since it's a great opportunity for us to talk with you!

Follow Beast Hour on social media, wishlist on Steam and support on Patreon – it does help our small indie team to bring the game to a next level!

Beast Hour needs your help to prepare Italian, Korean and Japanese translations! And if you know German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic or Portuguese – we have a bunch of texts waiting for you to proofread them! You can contact us via email: info@beasthour.com

If you want to discuss any form of cooperation with us, use this email: bizdev@beasthour.com

The Beast will come!