Hey, everyone. Welcome to our fourth regular monthly update. This update mostly improves existing elements. We spent a substantial amount of time on updating our internal tools (benefitting us as well as hopefully other people in the future), and the remaining time was spent on solving a few long-standing issues with NPC behaviours and pathfinding, for example.

Update Notes

Content

- improvements to mountain path and tower location - updated a few sound events - updated visuals for locked doors - updated some other scene assets - fixed some dialogue

Combat

- updated combat behaviors for standard human and mutant enemies, trying to fix them attacking all at the same time when fighting groups and them straight line walking towards enemy - updated melee targeting so targets immediately in front of the character to the left and right are included, too - added different melee hit visuals when hitting a target vs hitting none or multiple - changed how command driven characters try to melee attack big static characters like the Fleshkraken - prevent NPCs standing on spot and hitting with melee without pausing after a few hits - fixed potential issue with the order of Flesh Vermin actions - updated dog combat behavior

General Improvements

- refactored character commands and actions to fix any frame delay between NPC commands - allow stealth attacking animals - make idle NPCs not leave their current room when walking around a bit (fixes a few NPC issues) - added another move state inbetween walk and run for NPCs - added "kneel and use" animation for standard NPCs - changed getting damage while reloading etc.: rewind up to max 2 times, but after that follow through

Usability Improvements

- reordered inventory tabs - adjusted tutorial display to make it more obvious - show stealth attack not being possible on machines, e.g. turrets - fixed guards in Puke Bar not triggering weapon mode notification when warning player; and made weapon mode notification more obvious - fixed character look direction potentially influenced by getting pushed around - pathfinding: fixed failing on mini distances - pathfinding: fixed occasional fail directly after actions like dialogue - pathfinding: fixed struggling with using a moving object behind obstacles (e.g. Fleshworm with Animalism) - pathfinding: fixed a few player character commands not immediately triggering pathfinding - fixed some point and click melee attacks with movement failing around obstacles or room corners - made number 7 in default font more distinguishable from number 1 - non-standard mouse input setting for combat: make camera offset in melee targeting behave similar to the ranged camera - non-standard mouse input setting for combat: fixed occasional wrong player character weapon display - fixed some scenarios of point and click hovered scene object visuals remaining when switching to state without point and click - made action bar more obvious visually

Performance

- fixed some memory leaks - general performance improvements - additional performance improvements on world map - fixed some cursor hover mess-ups, possibly resulting in UI lag in inventory etc. - reduced memory usage on character commands

Framework Update

- large internal data changes to levels, dialogue, quests and behavior trees to support future features

General Bug Fixes

- fixed robots potentially cursing like humans - fixed a few rare crashes - fixed a few moments where it was possible to save but should not - fixed some issues with neutral NPCs reacting to player targeting them - fixed NPCs glitching out at locked doors when wanting to talk to other NPC - fixed spawned minions of Titans dropping loot - fixed item drop issues with boss character in tower location - fixed potential errors with faction assignment on dynamically spawned characters - fixed sound issue with new energy weapons - fixed some potential sound glitches on NPCs using weapons - fixed some sound events not getting interrupted when character gets interrupted - fixed some UI issues in inventory - fixed UI scaling issues at high resolution (regression in 0.8.2) - fixed a few other UI issues, mostly related to changes in the last months - co-op: fixed a few issues with camera and UI effects on shared screen - co-op: fixed issue that could make invulnerability be stuck on player character - fixed some visual glitches with the flamethrower - reduced or removed ground blood splashing for some weapons - fixed some possible input issues depending on mouse combat mode and input bindings - fixed a few issues related to being spawned as another character in another world - fixed mines getting triggered by slow flowing energy balls - fixed Deconstructor not having correct death animation depending on having claw or not - fixed a pixelart gap issue in the brown indoor tileset - fixed other small issues with some scene assets - fixed error handler not being interactable when error occurs during loading phase - additional small bug fixes and framework improvements

Thoughts

Indie game development is not a straight forward process. The plan for this month (work on content, get a smaller update out fast) was different to what actually happened. The reasons for short-term plan changes like that are manifold, but here it came down to: It's more productive to continue in the current workflow, e.g. programming, when similar tasks get added to the list. And the general goals for the game remain the same, but invidual tasks on how to reach these goals are still very dynamic. Thus the list of tasks changes sometimes. Partly due to incoming feedback, but mostly I think because it's the very nature of design work: The final design of the game is not fully known to us. We know parts of it, but the other parts we have to discover and work towards discovering them. This is not only true for the gameplay and story design but also, in parts, for the technical side of the game, as it's the carrier and interconnected with the whole experience of the game. It will be interesting to see how much this process will differ on future games we develop. If the process is more planned if building on an existing template instead of creating a new one. Regarding the NPC combat behaviours: We need to put in more work on making enemies more interesting. Specifically in enemy variety. But I hope that these latest changes already make fighting against groups of enemies more feasible and make individual encounters more interesting by not making melee enemies walk towards the player character in a frontal path.

Feedback Tools

As always, we appreciate any feedback on the changes we made to the game. Best way to give feedback is through the F1 in-game tool as it adds a bit of game context to every feedback item sent. We recently added a convenient shortcut if you just want to take a quick look at different things: Open the in-game console with Shift+F10 and enter Playtest to get a list of jump points to the existing content. This won't interfere with your existing save games. Thank you for your continued interest in Death Trash. Have a nice week! - Stephan