Gnomes & Ladders - Dev Log 40

Hey everyone - welcome to dev log 40!

Today we're not looking at a beloved family board game but instead at the return of the gnomes and how we've changed the way ladders work.

Last week we set out what we'd be roughly covering at the start of this year and if you want to read more on that - you can right here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/1290000/announcements/detail/3148579075943293649





The ladders have been a regular critique from the community on how slippy they are and then easy to fall off the sides by mistake. We have been listening!



If you had 8 ladders you could pull off these clean tricks with the new system...

Today, Programmer Matt gives us this insight into what they've done to improve them:

Originally posted by Matt

Ladders have always been a tricky endeavour for the team, the original functionality was nothing short of a real ladder. You climb up or you climb down. This functionality was present with the previously ladder system, although it was skewed by the ability to do other forms of movement simultaneously.

With the latest system, we have simplified your interaction with the ladder, enabling you to climb up and down with less effort.

Proposed by design, we have made the ladders a two-way road in which the player may exit by turning perpendicular to the ladder, jumping off, or merely exerting enough momentum to move off in a given direction.

The tricky part in implementing this system was compensating for the different ladder placements per level, in one fine sweep.

In the early stages of development, the ladder held all the functionality to itself. But what good is a ladder without someone to climb it? With this in mind, the most sensible thought was to store and calculate the climbing data per ladder, and have the user retrieve this data when in contact.

The player tells the ladder where they would like to move, and the ladder provides the information to move in that direction. Overall bringing us to a system where the ladder no longer only supports the player, but they support each other (how sweet~).

There still remains some fine-tuning for the current system, however, we have confidence its current state will add to existing gameplay for users when encountering a wild ladder.

Here's a close look at a single ladder in-engine in-action.

Please do let us know your thoughts below this post!



The humble gnomes have become such a staple of PowerWash Simulator and even our mascot. However, they had been occasionally getting in the way of people's cleaning if knocked over in certain ways. We implemented a new QOL system to pick them up before 0.7 but realized too late that there were issues and all of the gnomes which then had to be temporarily removed.

The good news, they are returning in 0.8 and better than ever! One of our designers Nick has gone through every level and placed at least 1 gnome in it. So those gnome hunters out there, this is your time to shine!

Nick was super useful and had this to say on how he placed all of the new gnomes:

[Quote]I definitely didn't place the gnomes, they just appeared throughout Muckingham one day.

They appeared in my dreams the next day...

Thanks Nick!

On the technical side, here are some insights from Gonzalo one of our programmers who created the new pickup system and fixed the gnomes:

Originally posted by Gonzalo

Gnomes and pickable physics items in the game operate in a different way than the accessibility equipment (stools, ladders, etc.) They should have the ability to be placed anywhere within the constraints of the maps and physics while stopping the player from picking up accessibility equipment.

This led to situations in which the gnomes behaved in unexpected ways and could cause a plethora of bugs including softlocks which had been a major problem in multiplayer mode.

After some thorough investigation and testing, physics items have been reworked to be more in line with the rest of the pickable items. You should never see another situation in which the gnomes or other physics items are blocking your accessibility equipment from being picked up which means that our fantastic gnomes are ready to start monitoring decorating the areas again!

They are gnome more. (we'll stop now, we promise!)

Drop us a comment below if you're happy to see these cheeky characters making a return to the game!



Our marketing artist Cristina has been hard at work in unity posing the player model in various poses then turning them into well-known memes! Just for fun, we'll be releasing them each week for you to edit and play around with.

Here's this week's:


Feel free to share, caption or edit this template! :)

We're more than happy to share good ones across our social media!

[h2]That's all folks![/h2]

Thanks so much for reading this dev log, we hope that it has been insightful! Next week we'll be teasing one of the new levels coming in Update 0.8 so don't miss it!

Also join our Discord to submit and vote on ideas for PowerWash Simulator, find other players and more!

---> https://discord.com/invite/powerwashsimulator

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PWS Wiki: https://powerwash-simulator.fandom.com/wiki/PowerWash_Simulator_Wiki