Friday September 17th,
Hello everyone, apologize for the lack of a blog last week. When it comes to bug fixing and early game polish sometimes what the team is doing just isn’t very interesting and can be difficult to write about. We’re making some great progress on version 1.10 and we hope to have an experimental build out the week coming or the one after that. This early game focus has really given the team the confidence that we have something special here. We’re incredibly excited to get the next stages of polish on what we think is a fantastic early access project.
New Quick Start Guide
James has done a great job wrapping up the new quick guide system and it has really turned the initial experience around. We’ve adjusted new player spawns and starting in version 1.10 all new players (those who haven’t completed the guide) will spawn directly in starting camps. You’ll have everything you need in the camp to get you going on the guide.
The guide itself has been completely reworked. From what’s required of the player to complete the guide to the position and layout. As mentioned before this guide will tie in with our new help and quick video system. It should be so much easier for a new player to pick up Survive the Nights and get right into the action now.
A quick preview of some of the new guide objectives
The system tied in with inventory highlighting and quick video
One of your last tasks will be setting a home
Spawn Adjustments
We’ve tweaked spawns in the past but this time it’s just a bit different. The new player spawns have all been moved directly into the campsites. From our research we’ve discovered that a good deal of new players don’t actually find starting camps despite spawning on a trail leading towards one.
There are a few issues at hand here. Our trails need a good deal of work, some of them are not very trail-like even though we’ve improved them with the recent graphical update. Players of course sometimes just take their own way and don’t walk towards a camp. Most of these players die and we’d imagine a lot of them aren’t happy about it.
We’ve always intended for new players to get to those camps, it’s a big part of getting them going. The player learns how to start a fire, purify water, harvest (wood, cloth and metal), they can craft a weapon, they learn that fire heals, that wooden clubs also function as torches to provide light on dark nights. The camps are rather safe and zombie spawn free for the most part. If the player spawns at night a campsite is the safest place to be. New spawns will sort this issue out and everyone getting into a Survive the Nights server for the first time will now spawn right in a camp and have the added bonus of a brand new quick start guide to steer them in the right direction. James will be covering both the guide and new player spawns in the coming vlog in greater detail.
New spawn, quick guide highlighting and progress
Animation Tweaks and Improvements
John has been cracking along sorting out some of our animations. He has reworked nearly all weapon animations now. Most weapons have now had a once over on the reload, jamming and cleaning animations. We’ll continue to make progress and improvements with animations as we move through these polish builds. Below are a couple of quick examples of the improvements being made including the jamming animation on the 357, Rig and Bateman.
357 Old jamming
357 New Jamming around a second quicker and more fluid
Bateman old jamming
Bateman new jamming around 4 seconds faster
We'll continue to work on improving early game mechanics and fixing all the bugs you guys have found over the last few builds. Thanks again for the continued support and issue reporting.
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