Party Animals News

Maps

[h3]0. Last Stand - Strong Wind Warning[/h3]



Fight inside a wind tunnel.

When the wind starts blowing at its full force, animals not hiding behind wind barriers will be blown away and eliminated. Players need to manually raise the barriers and hide behind them.

Note: the handles for the wind barrier may break as they get used many times.


[h3]1. Team Score -Electroball[/h3]



This is a completely different type of scoring map from the previously shown Lollipop Factory or the Train: it is a ball game.

The goal of all ball games is to get the ball into your opponent's gate. The first team to reach 6 points wins.

Electroball is a bit like basketball for humans: aim, shoot.



Note: do not hold the ball simultaneously with another player. The ball will explode.


[h3]2. Arcade - Winter Bar[/h3]



Players are split into two teams. You need to throw your opponents out of the bar into the snowy outside to eliminate them.

The difference between Arcade and Last Stand is that you keep respawning back in Arcade mode, until all your team's respawn opportunities run out.

This is pretty much a standard Death Match map.

Sound System

Most games' sound effects are based on the sound triggering mechanism of the event state machine. If a button is pressed, an animation will be triggered and a sound will be played.

Party Animals is different. We use full dynamics-driven animations instead of traditional state machines, which results in smooth, immersive character animations. However, the uncertainty and uncontrollability of the movements made the audio team no longer able to solve the audio problem in the traditional way.

We developed a new physical sound system.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This audio system can simulate the different sounds of dragging, scrolling, and collision. And the sonud is affected by all physical factors such as size, weight, material, speed, and the speed of time passing.

Q&A

Q：Why is the default 4 teams with 2 players per team instead of the default 8 teams with 1 player per team as before?

A：Because a game with 1 player per team can theoretically take up to 17 rounds. Even at 3 minutes per round, it can take up to 50 minutes of game time. 8 teams has a median time of more than 20 minutes. The reason for changing the default to 4 teams is that we want to have shorter games, with a median of around 10 minutes and a uppper limit of 30 minutes or less.


Q：What will you do about cheaters？

A：Our developers are considering adding an anti-cheat programs, but all anti-cheat will negatively influence game performance. We have added the a report button and we will have a support team to deal with cheaters.


Q：Can I play solo against AIs？

A：Yes. Just create your own lobby and add AIs.


Q：Will the game support Steam Deck？

A：Look！




Q：I don't think split screen is a good choice because it provides a narrower view.

A：It's a compromise made to accommodate larger maps. Also, without split screen, all local players will not be able to rotate the camera independently. This is a status quo in game development: we have to make compromises. We will try to improve the split-screen experience in the future.


Q：Personal opinion, could the UI maybe be designed a little cuter?

A：I have informed our designer about this. This particular designer has been doing UI for mobile OS before, that mobile company has since went bankrupt...... It's like a failed Thor fighter jet designer, unemployed and came back to design plush toys, it takes some time, hope you can understand :)

Maps

[h3]0. Game Modes[/h3]
Party Animals will have around 12 maps at launch and will continue to update new maps afterwards.

Maps will be divided into three game modes: Last Stand, Team Score, and Arcade (final names are yet to be decided).

Last Stand was the most popular mode during Demo. It plays a bit like a Battle Royale, where players fight to be the last one standing.

In Team Score, your team need to perform specific tasks to earn points, and the team that reaches the score limit first or has more points by the end of the game clock wins. Some of the maps in Team Score play like Capture the Flag: you need to take the special items home. The rest of the maps in Team Score play more like a ball game, where you need to take things to your opponents' base.

The Arcade mode is essentially a collection of maps that don't belong to either Last Stand or Team Score. Arcade maps can be selected in Custom lobbies, but they will not show up in Quick Match.


[h3]1. Last Stand - Blizzard Warning
[/h3]
Fighting next to small campfires in freezing temperatures. When a blizzard comes, anybody not close enough to a lit campfire will be frozen into a block of ice.

The campfires will dwindle over time. Be careful not to stand too close either.




[h3]2. Last Stand - Black Hole
[/h3]
Fighting beside a black hole generator.

Players need to grab heavy objects to avoid being sucked into the black hole.




[h3]3. Team Score - Need for Speeding Train
[/h3]
Players need to carry lumps of coal into the fire engine to speed up the train. The first team to cross the finish line wins.

Do not pull the hand brake. It will quickly slow the train down.




[h3]4. Changes made in team size
[/h3]
We have changed the team size in Last Stand from 8 solos to 4 duos. Previously, you only need to fight everyone you see, but now you also need to work with your teammate to eliminate the others.



You can freely change the team size in custom lobbies. The options are 8 solos, 4 duos and 2 squads. This setting is only available for Last Stand, not Team Score.

The purpose of this change is to encourage more teamwork, to prevent players from avoiding actions, and to decrease the average play time of a game. The 4 duos is the default option. We believe this gives the best balance between teamwork and fights.

Playing with Friends

Playing online with others was the most popular way to play Party Animals in the 2020 Demo. However, at the time, our relatively rough network system caused many problems. It was difficult to find a friend or a lobby of your choice. There was no way to communicate in the game either. There were many other issues as well.

In the past two years, we have added and improved many features of the network system. The goal is to make it easier for players to fight and talk trash enjoy the game with friends.


[h3]0. Friend System
[/h3]
Players are now able to add friends with in-game IDs, and invite them to join a game. If a person is already your Steam or Xbox Live friend, they will automatically appear in your Party Animals friends list.




[h3]1. Chat
[/h3]
You can use the chat in game to both chat with strangers, and chat with friends.

Players can talk to their friends from anywhere in the game, including in-game. There is a chat box similar to an IM tool, which will store your conversations in the current playing session only.



For strangers, players can talk to each other whenever they can see each other. Your messages will pop up on top of either your character or your avatar. You will have to literally be able to see a person in game, in order to see their messages this way.




[h3]2. Quick Match
[/h3]
Quick Match is implemented so that a player group of 1 to 4 people can form a team, and quickly join a fair game against others. A player can invite up to 3 other people to form a team and jump into a game together. Your teammates will be on the same side as you when you enter a quick match. If you wish to fight amongst your friends, you can invite them to your custom lobby instead.

When a match is found, players in the same session will have the opportunity to vote for one of three random maps as the upcoming game map.




[h3]3. Custom Game
[/h3]
Custom lobbies can now be sorted, searched, and filtered to find the lobby of your choice. We have reworked the lobby list to make the refresh and search more efficient.



Through custom settings, players can have the option to experience more versions of gameplay. You can change settings like team size, player HP, Stamina, and banning weapons, etc.. You can play around with the settings yourself, and even change the game into 'one shot kill'. Besides, the lobby owner is now able to change all the lobby settings, like maps or team, during a game, without having to exit the current game first.




[h3]4. Custom lobby owner
[/h3]
Custom lobbies are now modified to be more similar to traditional video games: the lobby owner acts as a host for computing and network re-distributions. The lobby will be dismissed when the lobby owner exits the lobby.

This arrangement will provide better network responsiveness when players are geographically closer to the host, but the opposite is true if they are far away as well. The ping value in the custom lobby list makes it easier for players to find a lobby that suits their network conditions.

Our goal is to use a peer-to-peer network distribution system to reduce the demand for potato servers, so that we can accommodate more online players. Due to the complex reallife network environment and Party Animals' relatively high demands for the network quality, we are still trying to decide which type of network server structure is most suitable for the actual situation. It will take a long time to provide a better network experience, and our engineers will continue to test and optimize the network performance.




[h3]5. Split the screen
[/h3]
In the Demo, multiple local players are playing on the same screen, which makes it difficult for two players to see their own animal characters when the characters are too far apart.

We are now splitting the screen apart for up to 4 local players. Player 1 can use keyboard and mouse. The other local players must use a controller. On Xbox, you will need at least two controllers to activate split screen.



These are all the content we have for you in this dev log. As mentioned above, we will continue to showcase new maps and gameplay in the next issue. If you have any suggestions or ideas, please let us know in the comments.

P.S. we are thinking about giving out some special rewards for our Demo players when we launch. Any suggestions?

After the open demo in October 2020, we haven't announced any progress on Party Animals for a long time. Many players have asked if the game is still in development and when it will be released. We can feel the anticipation and anxiety of our players. So starting this month, we'll be releasing a little more information about the game's progress and answering some questions from players.

The first answer is that the game is still in development and the target release date is hopefully within 2022, with possible delays due to quality and compliance approvals. What I want players to know is that I want the game to be released as soon as possible (after all, this is the only source of income for the game studio), but quality is still the first priority.

In 2022, there are three times as many people directly involved in making Party Animals as there were in 2020. In the beginning, when the number of people was small, project management required only a few colleagues 'talking things through'. You could even say that not much project management was needed back then. However, when the number of people reached a certain size, communication and process problems led to a significant decrease in efficiency. Also, since the game studio is in Shanghai and everyone has been working from home for two months, this is a new efficiency challenge. We will now use more frequent meetings, tools, and processes to improve efficiency and development schedule issues.

Anyone who has worked on a larger project will know what I'm talking about. "Production Hell" describes this particular phase, a term Tesla Motors uses when expanding capacity. The same problem CDPR, Rockstar, and other established studios encounter when they are working on a brand new project to expand their staff ... even though they are already very experienced. I hope you can understand that this can be a phase that a game development team has to face. We are now gradually improving the efficiency of the game production as we start to work better as a team and the production process improves.

CHARACTERS

In the past two years, in addition to adding more maps and more characters, we have redone almost everything inside and out. Animal furs, map appearances, physical system, sound system, UI system and so on. The goal is to provide more gameplay, better game performance and immersion. I'll discuss these details in more detail in future Dev Logs.

Today I'd like to start by looking at what we've done regarding characters in the past two years.

There will be quite a bit of content regarding characters, so we're going to devote two posts to this topic.


[h3]0. NEW CHARACTERS[/h3]
We had 11 cute little animals during the 2020 demo, and you may have seen some of the new ones in last year's E3 preview, such as the bull, the moose, the pig, the tiger and the gorilla.



Our concept artists have completed more character designs and we are currently making 3D assets for these new animals. The ultimate goal of Party Animals is to include all the animals we know in this animal universe, which will probably take a long time, so we plan to keep updating these animals for a while even after the launch.



We have conceptualized and finished much more characters than these ones here. We will keep you updated in the character production process.


[h3]1. CHARACTERS THAT MIGHT NOT BE INCLUDED[/h3]
Some characters will not be available to players because of their aesthetic style or because they are incompatible with the current character system. Some examples are Penguin, Godzilla, and Toucan as they are shown below. You may still see them, for example, as spectators in certain scenes. When a better solution is available in the future, they might reappear in the list of playable characters.




[h3]2. REVAMPED AVATARS[/h3]
Previously, due to time constraints, our artists did not have much time to devote to detailed avatars. Now we have completely revamped all the avatars for each character, spending most of the time on the furs, with the goal of making the fur feel more like a small animal than a stuffed animal. Below is a comparison of the 'before and after' of Nemo and Carrrot.





We are also reworking the official website, so you can download these cute little animals as your desktop or your social media avatars.


[h3]3. DID YOU BRUSH YOUR TEETH TODAY?[/h3]
The revamped animals have mouths now, and in certain situations you can see their teeth and tongue inside the mouths. For now, mouths will open up when the characters get knocked out. If you have any suggestions on when and how to further utilize this feature, please let us know.




[h3]4. COMMUNITY SUGGESTIONS[/h3]
We've received a lot of submissions from our Discord, and they're all super cute, and we've compiled them into a Steam post as well：

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1260320/view/3293832755470730999
Our concept artists have decided to add some of these animals to the game, such as this shark.



If you wish to participate in giving us character suggestions, feel free to do so in our Discord server: https://discord.com/invite/partyanimals

We have also received suggestions regarding character skins. For example, this Samurai Nemo skin, which is very cool. We will have another dedicated Dev Log talking about the character skin system in the game.



These are the contents of this Dev Log, which represents the current state of our development, but does not guarantee that what you see today will be in the final game (the legal department made me say this).

We'll discuss other aspects of the game's current state in the next Log.

We're not sure if you want shorter Logs with more frequent updates, or longer Logs once a month. Please comment and let us know what you think.

HELLO EVERYBODY

In the past year and half we received many fan arts and photographs as suggestions for new characters in Party Animals.

First of all, thank you for sending them. We aspire to be a studio that can listen to our players community and respond in actions.

As a matter of fact, we have already made and have plans to continue to make quite a few characters directly inspired by your inputs.

There are also plenty of suggestions that we love as well but aren't sure just how exactly to 'translate' them into the Party Animals design language.

That's the main reason we are opening this thread, which is to show off your creations and ideas to the community, and to help us see what you as a community like to see in Party Animals.

Just to be clear, the drawings or photographs we show here, unless straight-forwardly confirmed by us, are not guaranteed to show up in the game.

However we will make sure to let you guys know what we have chosen and made in the future right here in this post, and your opinions will definitely have a impact on which ones we eventually choose to do.

Here are the first batch of community suggestions that we really like:

1. Siberian Tiger suggested by Chester
   
   
   
   
   
2. Sloth suggested by ElleSvenne
   
   
   
   
   
3. Shark suggested by Nimrim
   
   
   
   
   
4. Samurai Nemo suggested by LudwigTheHolyBlade (fear the old blood)
   
   
   
   
   
5. Samoyed suggested by Maestro
   
   
   
   
   
6. Saint Bernard suggested by silverpal
   
   
   
   
   
7. Sable suggested by GameKing
   
   
   
   
   
8. Deer suggested by Ronin
   
   
   
   
   
9. Raven suggested by LuckyEye
   
   
   
   
   
10. Platypus suggested by Otaku
    
    
    
    
    
11. Parrot suggested by Super Gamer
    
    
    
    
    
12. Pangolin suggested by TheProfanePrince
    
    
    
    
    
13. Owl suggested by SkeleKingGamer
    
    
    
    
    
14. Narwhal suggested by SkysFallenStar
    
    
    
    
    
15. Moose suggested by fanaticspace02
    
    
    
    
    
16. Pug with Luchador suggested by Fluffy
    
    
    
    
    
17. Lion suggested by Deleted User 4fa83df9
    
    
    
    
    
18. Leopard suggested by romil0702
    
    
    
    
    
19. Koala suggested by Benja
    
    
    
    
    
20. Hamster suggested by Cynops
    
    
    
    
    
21. Gorilla suggested by Candeias
    
    
    
    
    
22. Godzilla suggested by Maestro
    
    
    
    
    
23. Frog suggested by Glade
    
    
    
    
    
24. Fox suggested by sydisdizzie18
    
    
    
    
    
25. Fennec Fox suggested by Mxrd.png
    
    
    
    
    
26. Eagle suggested by BritishBoi
    
    
    
    
    
27. Capybara suggested by Capibara Gaming
    
    
    
    
    
28. Bull Terrier suggested by DIL$IN
    
    
    
    
    
29. Bat suggested by Yurusa
    
    
    
    
    
30. Axolotl suggested by Glade
    
    

Please let us know which ones you personally would like to see in the game, and if you would like to make your own suggestions, please let us know in the Discord: https://discord.com/invite/partyanimals

That's it. Hope you all have a very good day.

Hello gamers, Happy New Years!

Thank you for your support. The number of responses submitted was far above our expectations. These feedbacks that will help us make improvements on the game. 

We randomly selected 23 of you to send out gifts. Here are the results: 



2 winners of iPhone 13 Pro 512G:

Steam ID: 765611982****0592
Steam ID: 765611984****7412


1 winner of Razer Blade Pro 17" Gaming Laptop:

Steam ID: 765611984****9804


2 winners of Xbox Series X + Controller:

Steam ID: 765611983****4968
Steam ID: 765611988****1232


2 winners of Nintendo Switch with Neon Blue and Neon Red Joy‑Con:

Steam ID: 765611990****4736
Steam ID: 765611981****7296


3 winners of Logitech G915 LIGHTSPEED Wireless RGB Mechanical Gaming:

Steam ID: 765611982****6032
Steam ID: 765611989****4926
Steam ID: 765611987****2473


3 winners of Bose QC35 II Gaming Headset:

Steam ID: 765611989****3948
Steam ID: 765611988****6615
Steam ID: 765611983****1055


10 winners of Steam Digital Gift Card of US$50:

Steam ID: 765611983****4078
Steam ID: 765611988****2309
Steam ID: 765611981****5703
Steam ID: 765611980****5125
Steam ID: 765611984****8747
Steam ID: 765611980****5140
Steam ID: 765611982****8417
Steam ID: 765611984****9758
Steam ID: 765611988****2072
Steam ID: 765611990****5818



Note:

1. To protect the winners’ privacy, we are hiding part of their Steam IDs. Winners will be contacted via the provided email address in the survey response. Please respond within 20 days of the Announcement Date and provide a valid mailing address to Recreate Games.

2. Click Here to check the fairness of this draw. Please visit Terms of Survey page if you need further information,


Thank you for your time!