GoodBoy News

[p]It’s been quite the week, y’all.  Let me tell you what we’ve been up to.[/p][p][/p][p]First and foremost, we’ve got a live Demo!  The demo has three available levels for your team to ransack, and a lot of hints about what’s to come.  We’ve tried to clearly mark what’s still under development, so it should be pretty obvious where we’re planning for more.  [/p][p][/p][p]And speaking of that “more”, we’re hard at work expanding our content for the Early Access release (planned for later this year).  The Death Bunny–a horrifying little critter that Joe drew on stream a while back–is almost ready to be in game.  The DB still needs some fur on the model, and some work on tweaking her behaviors,  but we think she’ll be ready to terrorize our playtesters soon.[/p][p][/p][p]Look at her!  Isn’t she just the cutest little monstrosity?[/p][p]
Over the past week we’ve added more than 600 items to the game.  While our playtesters have only seen a couple sets–some suburban homes and an office in an old mill–we’ve got big plans for other locations.  In terms of sheer volume of art assets, this may end up being our biggest game yet!
[/p][p]We’re working on three more levels (two houses and a third bonus level) to include in Early Access.  Earning team rep will unlock more locations, and that functionality should be included next time we update the playtest.  
[/p][p]The trickiest thing about creating new houses is making them run smoothly, with all those items in there, so we’ve also been working on creating a tool to help with optimization.  There are still hitches, so our work isn’t done yet, but it’s coming along.[/p][p][/p][p]That’s all we have to report for now.  Happy Spooky Month to all who celebrate!  We’ll be back next week with another update.[/p][p][/p]

• [p]Jessica, the producer.[/p]

[p]Hello, all!  It’s Jessica again, bringing you highlights of what we’ve worked on over the past week.
[/p][p]Probably the biggest news is that we’re letting 200 more of you into the Playtest!! Reminder to everyone that you need buddies to play with (it’s more fun with friends to betray help), so if your friends aren’t in the playtest you should definitely hop over to our Discord and join the Good Boy channels so you can find team mates.[/p][p][/p][p]Speaking of your team mates, we’ve added them to the HUD!  It’s a helpful way to keep track of who is dead and who is not.  Or who might be about to be dead.  So you can be careful while you move that couch.[/p][p][/p][p]We’ve got new heists and new objectives created, along with a huge assortment of items to steal, and a bunch of masks.  We’re working on getting little icons in for all the masks for use in the HUD, so you can identify your teammates on sight, rather than calling out “Uh, who has the cat statue head right now?”
[/p][p][/p][p]We also decided to participate in this Steam Next Fest!  So a lot of our attention right now is on getting our demo buttoned up.  That’s involved a lot of meetings (what do we want in the demo?  Is there enough time to get that in?) and then a lot of rearranging of priorities.  For instance, this past week has seen progress on an Environment Helper Tool, so named because it helps optimize environments for a smoother gaming experience.  We’re also working on getting some of the planned music into the game, and offering at least a few video settings in the options menu.[/p][p][/p][p]We are not actually updating the playtest build this week, since some of our demo changes have introduced fascinating new bugs that we’d like to save you from.  [/p][p][/p][p]There are a couple known bugs in the current build, and if you’re playtesting we could use your help in tracking them down.  If you experience a crash, please use the crash report to send us your logs.  If you experience an issue that doesn’t result in a crash, we’d be super grateful if you hopped into our discord and shared your logs with us!  Game logs can be found in "%localappdata%/GoodBoyPlaytest", and you can upload them along with a brief description of what you saw happening in our Good Boy Bugs channel.**[/p][p]
That’s all for this week!  Happy Playtesting!  GLHFDD!

**this is a direct link to the channel, you'll need to join the server first in order to use it. Link to join the server is the one above![/p]

[p]Hi folks! [/p][p][/p][p]Jessica back again with an update on what we’ve been doing over the past week. [/p][p][/p][p]One of our designers has been going nuts with the masks.  We always knew we wanted a lot of different masks (more masks means more tag combos, and more tag combos means more choices in gameplay, you get the jist) but he’s really gone all out.  If you’ve ever wanted a penguin statue for a head, well… this is your moment.  
[/p][p][/p][p]We’ve also got new heist locations available for our playtesters, some of which are variations on the current suburban theme, and some of which… are different.  That’s all I’m gonna say.  If you want to know more, go join the playtest.  We’ve got a lot of ideas about how we’d like to theme future heist locations, but incorporating each level set in a good prototype level takes some time.
[/p][p]Another member of our design team has continued to expand the objectives for the heists, and he’s gotten creative with goals that are unique to each location.  He’s also added a weight limit to the get away van, which adds to the complexity of the missions.  Take what you need to reach your goals… but not so much you can’t drive away.  
[/p][p]You’re going to start seeing team reputation get calculated on the results screen, although the long term effects of that are still a work in progress.  You’re also going to notice that voice chat now impacts the noise meter, so remember to be quiet.[/p][p][/p][p]If you’re not quiet, and Mr Fish gets you, no worries.  You can now speak with your still living teammates, and they should be able to see your incorporeal presence floating in the air.  You can choose to be helpful, or you can harangue them for letting you die.  Up to you.[/p][p][/p][p]We’re still working on players being able to control how closely they hold an item (it’s working for the host of the game, but no one else at the moment), and we’re continuing to work on our unholy critters, although as of now you’ll still only be seeing Mr Fish in the playtest.[/p][p][/p][p]That’s definitely not everything, but that’s most of the major changes since last week.  Let us know what you think![/p][p]
[/p]

[p]Hi Folks,[/p][p]Co-Director Joe here. We’re trying to get in the habit of posting regular updates about Good Boy progress as a way to keep ourselves accountable and moving forward. We’ve been quite busy lately.[/p][p]On the art/level design side: We’ve been building more houses to loot. In active dev is a 3 story multi-family house, a manufactured-style house, and an entire heist based around a basement. There’s a lot that goes into making a new location to heist, and still a lot of new lessons we discover with each new location, but we think it’s fun getting to ransack new places.  Speaking of items; we’re also tinkering with a fragility setting for them, so some things are more–well–fragile. This is kind of like a durability setting in some games, (except not at all, because people hate those so we named it Fragility to try and hoodwink everyone) but it’s  more like a bias towards breaking, and not a “prop health meter”.  Jokes aside, this is a game where stuff breaking is half the fun, so we imagine that things like item health and fragility will be an area of constant iteration.[/p][p]This week we’ve also been laying the groundwork for unlock progression on masks.  There aren’t many masks/heads in the game right now, but we’re going to add more, and we want the expansion of the pool to follow a logical progression as players explore the various heists. Similarly, we’ve been improving our objective pools. The builds now have a single primary objective per heist, as well as secondary ones—which are randomly drawn from the available goals for that heist. This is creating an interesting variety for each visit to a house, which we like.[/p][p]
[/p][p]On the tech side we’re working on improving item rotation and distance while carrying. This is also going to be a never-ending-fine-tuning project, we think. We are ok with some humorous jank here as it makes everything, in general, a bit more fun… but we do want a bit more polish than what we had previously. Finding the balance between polish and humor is tricky here, so if you’re in the playtest then please give us feedback! If you’re not in the playtest: go ask to be invited! We’ll regularly be adding new players to the playtest pool every so often, whenever we need a new batch of first impressions.[/p][p]We’ve also been working on a bunch of internal tools; ways to help us set up new masks quickly, ways to analyze the loot that’s in a house to better balance objectives, ways to spawn horrifying monsters to come kill us so we can see how death feels…  things like that.  Speaking of… we’ve finally got the Dog up and running and terrifying us, but it’s still a bit early, so he’s not (or…shouldn’t be..we think) in the playtest yet.[/p][p]And, lastly, on the character side, we’ve been tinkering with some new mob art and concepts. We’ll share those later, but they’re pretty fun. If you follow our weekly streams though, you may have seen some of the concepts I’ve been doing, and some of those have been a hit with the team.[/p][p]See you all next week![/p][p]
[/p]

[p]There’s a lot of questions that come with game development.  It’s a natural part of the process, when you’re going from “idea” to “actual-game-that-real-live-people-will-want-to-play.”  And sometimes the only way to answer those questions is to just make the darn thing, and then see if you like it or not.[/p][p][/p][p]Here’s some of our questions just from this week alone:
[/p]

1. [p]Should the truck have a ramp?[/p]
2. [p]Are rotational physics a good idea here?[/p]
3. [p]Where does Mr Fish fall on the scale of “absolute pushover” to “total reign of terror”?
   [/p]

[p]We don’t have all the answers yet, but we’re working on it.  If you’re in the playtest, definitely let us know what you think.
[/p][p]Meanwhile, we’re just following the golden rule for all creative processes.[/p][p]
- Jessica[/p]