April Update & Official Roadmap
What's new in this update?
This update is focused on improving the experience for new users and addressing a number of early issues found in player feedback. Over 100+ tasks/changes were completed, and the highlights include the following:
- Added keybinding options
- Improvements to server browser network status, player count
- Set region filter to ALL by default, for now
- Adjusted player count function used in server browser to be more lenient
- Added Force Respawn button (press K) for players stuck on geometry
- Several stats fixed and made more accurate
- Increased Material earned from pterosaurs
- Re-implimented Material pickups. "Gems" will be randomly spawned in the Lairworld (Lairworld only, not arenas) to be picked up for bonus Material
- Slightly slowed and evened out spore earnings per level as they go up
- Reduced the cost of fusion bolts by half
- How to Play menu can now be accessed from the Pause/Lobby menu
- Added PLAYSKYFEAR.COM menu, a place to view Roadmap, Commits, FAQ, and more, without leaving the game
- Fixed an issue where pressing F on a spore multiple times before the reward screen appears would repeatedly subtract the Material cost
- Fixed more Spore positions, some of them were inside walls
- Fixed Unnatural pro not ignoring collision damage, works now
- Added Team Name to HUD, near the score and timer. Text will collapse if game mode does not use teams.
- Added full 3 DOF control to Avatar customization camera, plus a light to light up the player model to more accurately see the colors and such
- Decreased sway/increased speed on customization camera control
- Increased the lighting on Chasm, so you can see player skins better
- Increased size and visibility of the roar effect
- Added option for seeing speed value on HUD
- Added option for Health/Magic values on HUD
- Added extra visibility elements to server “Join” button
- Improved positioning and color/visbility of Basic Controls widget
- Fixed some of Wintertide’s spawn locations being way too far out
- Expanded the range of sensitivity settings
- Increased visibility of single (isolated) buttons, and added parenthesis around keybindings if applicable
- Increased delay for showing the options on the Post Game menu, and forced input to null until that appears. This prevents user from accidentally skipping the Post Game menu entirely by accident because they were trying to jump or fly.
- Reworked and rebalanced meteor and spore related sounds
- Added and improved vegetation that appears in place of claimed spores, and explained this better in the spores Help page
- Added a progress % value next to spores stats, and reworded to align better with the widget elements that occur during delivery
- Improved position and phrasing on post match return to warm-up timer
- Fixed rocks spawning in air
- Added shoulder cam to Basics widget
- Camera shake from roaring now uses camera shake intensity setting
- Slightly increased bleed xp earnings from certain actions
- Killer's emblem added to death screen
- Death screen slightly neatened up
- Added UI elements to the server browser directing players towards Create A Server/Discord
- Added Geysers page to Help
- Added more combat tips
- Updated a couple of outdated arena artworks
See the commit log for full list of changes.
Keybindings Notes
Keybindings were a popularly requested feature, and thus have been added in this update. This includes gamepad controls, even though this game does not fully support gamepad. More complete gamepad support is something I would like to have, although stats currently indicidate nearly everyone is on mouse & keyboard. I would simply like to point out that changing keybindings on the gamepad side of things is prone to unexpected issues, due to there just not being enough testing and feedback on that, so just be aware of that. Please keep sending me feedback!
What's Next? Roadmap!
Here is the official roadmap, which is going to be a regularly updated document highlighting the most likely things for the game to realize, separated by planned versus in progress. This document is subject to frequent changes as the game's issues evolve.
About updates - it's going to be normal for several smaller updates with minor fixes to come between major updates. Depending on the severity of an issue, it may be addressed in a small update on the sooner side, or later tossed into a major update. This is why the commit log nicely compliments the roadmap. The commit log will show you what's been done, as it happens (updated once or twice a month), so that you can see what's coming in the updates before they drop.
The focus of the next major update is going to be content, dragon/gameplay, and after the last two updates, there's a lot of UX/UI that needs housekeeping. There is also that Intel CPU hardware name issue, which has unfortunately probably impacted the player count to date. I have a potential fix in the works but testing it will be a unique challenge.
Keep the feedback coming, and keep the arenas alight!