Hello everyone!
Northwood Studios would like to present the first entry in our new
'Site-02 Transmissions’ series. The purpose of this series is to provide our players with better insight into the development process of SCP:SL.
Posts will include direct commentary from our studio’s departments, as well as general information detailing the internal workings of the studio.
The first entry of this series will be a longer read — primarily structured around the updates provided by our Programming, Art, and Game Design teams, respectively.
These updates will consist of sharing each team’s progress in the recent months, along with their development plans for the near future.
[h2]DEV COMMENTARY[/h2]
Programming Team:Since doubling in size, the Programming team's been operating around the clock — working on a multitude of new features, and planning out the upcoming months alongside the other development teams.
We’ve increased our work efficiency to a point where we’re able to work on two updates simultaneously without hurting development. These past few months, we’ve been actively working on the (now released) 13.2 update, Halloween, and the recently announced PEARS.
With the recent overhaul of the Translation team, we’d discovered that our current translations system was unprepared for essentially any systematic change. Our team has since made a number of major improvements to the system, effectively resolving this issue.
We’d like to commend our new programmers for being able to adapt to their new workflow as quickly as they have — allowing us to release our updates at a much quicker pace.
Art Team:The Art team's been hard at work on several projects that we can't quite talk about yet!
The bulk of the work that was showcased in the latest Patreon post is complete, so we're turning our attention further to the future. While we can't share specifics at this time, just know that we're very excited for you guys to see what we're working on!
The process of creating assets for the game varies, depending on what exactly we're making. We'll usually work through a "concept art phase" if the asset is something fictional — like an experimental weapon, or the model for a playable SCP. Either way, once we know what we want the final model to look like, we start modelling.
While the specifics of the workflow may vary from artist to artist, we'll typically create a ‘high-poly’ and a ‘low-poly’ variant of the model. The 'low-poly' is the mesh that's used in-game, while the 'high-poly' is a higher-res model that's utilised for texture detail.
After that, we texture the model, rig it, and animate it if need be — and it's ready for use in-game!
Game Design:Game Design’s been hard at work on the (now released) 13.2 update, having finalised a number of patches centred around community feedback and input.
We’ve been working closely with the Feedback and Community Management teams to determine what the largest issues with the 13.2 update was, and have drafted some changes to ensure that the update does not negatively affect the balance of gameplay.
As of late, we’ve been looking more into the game’s current arsenal of weapons — more specifically, into each weapon’s state of balance, and their individual effect(s) towards the feel of gameplay. This involves examining whether or not a certain weapon meets our standards of how we want the game’s combat to feel — the biggest case study for this being the FR-MG-0, as we feel that the weapon is due to receive further adjustments from what it had originally received in the recent hotfix.
Looking towards the near future, Game Design is hoping to fix up a number of experimental game mechanics to ensure that they work within the current state of the game — as we feel that those elements have either become outdated, are not as fun as they could be, or are simply no longer viable in the current gameplay meta.
We also hope to surprise you with some very spooky changes this coming Halloween!
[h2]COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHTS[/h2]
Art by:
Ferar
Art by:
Jank
And that concludes our first entry. Thanks for reading!
We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on our first
‘Site-02 Transmissions’ post.
Your input is an essential step towards helping us structure future posts to the standards and expectations of our community.
As always, we’d like to thank everyone for their continued support.
See you in the dark.
~ Northwood Studios