The end of the year again came blazingly fast, especially after so many good games made their debut this year and had time flying by like life was running on x8 speed...
So we want to close this year with a quick preview of the next Update that's currently in progress. We still don't have an ETA as it got a bit bigger then we initally intended, but hopefully that's a good thing in the end. ːsteamhappyː
Currently the very rough "feel" is, that it'll be finished around the end of February/March, but we'll try to keep you more up to date with the progress next year.
Till then, here are some of the stuff that'll come with the next update besides the new/missing levels:
(Please note that all the screens, numbers etc. may still change or are work in progress yada yada yada)
Performance
We finally found the time to add many more LODs to the game, especially the factory parts.
For those of you who don't know what this means: LOD stands for "Level of Detail" and is a technique used in games to improve the rendering performance, when many objects are on the screen or if they are very far away.
Basically what it does is, it reduces the amount of details of any object, the further away it is from the camera. You may've noticed this in games when for example a city far away looks like a bunch of blurry blocks but the closer you come, the more detailed the buildings.
So, we've added that for the game and managed to cut our Verts count in half and the Tris count was even reduced by roughly 3/4. Basically this means, that your GPU has a lot less to render and it should drastically improve the performance especially when zooming out on larger factories.
Before:
After:
Look at those shiny numbers in the upper right, that most people don't find interesting at all ːlunar2020hearteyesrabbitː
Data Nexus
One of the new features is the new "Data Nexus" which replaces the old Questbook.
You'll still find the old Quests there, but now there are many, many, maaany more. Basically for everything you can do in the game, there is now a "Data Item" which requires you to do a certain amount of something. Mostly Crafting or Defeating Enemies.
Each Data Item has different difficulties, it's basically something like "mini achievements" in other games, but you'll get rewarded with skillpoints for each finished Item.
Wow so many Skillpoints... what should I do with them?
Oh I'm glad you ask, here's the next change that'll come with the update:
Skilltrees
We are overhauling all the skilltrees to make them more interesting, make spending skillpoints a little bit more of a "strategic decision" and also to bring some new features.
One of these changes for example is, that the costs for a skill now increase with it's level. So you now may have to consider a bit more if you want to spend those 15 points on a 3% dmg increase for the Vulcan Tower, or if you'd rather upgrade another one.
We'll also introduce "endless upgrades" for each tower. There are 3 in total that are at the end of each of the 3 "Sub Skilltrees". Their cost also increase with each level so you have an incentive to still put points into other towers :)
Also we are overhauling the Tower UI, to hopefully make important stats more visible.
Here are some small previews, with a lot of placeholder icons :D
But maybe you can spot another 1 or 2 upcoming features that we'll talk more about in an upcoming news post ;)
That's all from us for this year!
Let us know what you think of these upcoming changes and we from Snob Entertainment wish all of you a merry christmas and a happy new year!
See you in 2025
- Snob Entertainment -
