And hello there, another update. For myself or anyone reading these pages for any reason. As usual, let's see what we made this month and what we plan to do next.
You may call these things from now on Droplets, and we created a new menu where you can select Droplets that fall from your character. Also, we made them last longer and easier to track people by it.
The idea of Survivor is farming. As we nerfed XP gain from orbs you collect to encourage fighting, we do want to allow the (AFK) type of players who farm and join the fight once strong. This class will be harder to kill and will gain significantly more XP from orbs but will do less damage.
Tracker is improving the concept of following other players. They will be easier to kill but will optimize usage of the minimap and droplets. The default in game minimap updates every five seconds and shows locations of other players as red dots. With the Tracker rune, the minimap will refresh every second, and droplets will last twice longer - so trackers can more easily use the minimap to find where players are, and droplets to see who the players are.
We considered creating a tutorial, but it's tricky. We had one, but people were not able to bypass it. Basically, the abilities have bugs that are used as features - for example, the teleport over a wall from the 'Engage' ability that make the gameplay dynamic and fun. We can't teach every aspect of every ability, and even all possible uses of 'Engage' or 'Wind,' which were the default ones. And when you add various game modes to it, it becomes hard.
We tried to keep things short and precise, so casual players can just view and jump into the game, while the more competitive ones can get the relevant basic information and investigate further as needed.
Drums please. Tadam tadam tadam tadam. We finished. All game modes are in the state we want them to be in. This month we finished with Competitive and Titanic. The idea of each game mode is as follows:
Normal - casual, no-commitment, infinite deathmatch & sandbox
Duel - 1v1 dynamic, skill-based match
Teams - work together with your team to win the deathmatch
Competitive - skill-based, dynamic battle royale. Requires commitment.
Titanic - Chaos. Funny moments and unforgettable experience. Quick and chaotic.
In both game modes, we now show the expected event that will happen on the map, whether it's toxic rain, lava moves, or zone fall. Before, it just happened at the moment, and now you are notified about what's about to happen and can prepare.
Player upgrades are not reset on death. You have many lives (five). Quick events and fast pace, and areas fall and knock players around, creating a unique and changing map every game.
We like the current state. There is no focus on balance too much but more on unforgettable moments and laughter. We like it the way it is, so no significant change except balancing stuff.
Now this is where things get interesting. As we said in previous devlogs, we want to encourage fighting to get a permanent advantage. With the spawn points disable change, many lives is not protecting you from defeat anymore. The idea is that players should use lives to get kills and become stronger and win the game in the end in the final battle. So the change is as follows:
There are regular XP, levels, and upgrades that you gain. They are reset on death.
Every Competitive game, three special upgrades are chosen, and players select one of them on elimination during the game. They are permanent - meaning they remain after death.
Players want to use their lives, considering they will be useless eventually, to get kills and gain more permanent upgrades, which will snowball into a stronger stickman and into victory.
We are happy with this state, as we achieved the goal of encouraging players to fight and not wait for the end for the chance to win - the stickman with the most special permanent upgrades is more likely to win - so farm up early on, we gave you three lives for no other reason!
Do you know why platformers like Celeste, Hollow Knight, etc., feel so good? There are, of course, many reasons, but an important point is that the character movement feels smooth.
They may add gravity, forces, and bounciness in a special way to make the player more alive, more dynamic. While FTB is a stickman fight, and, you know, simple movement is likely the thing we want to go with - we will look into interesting concepts from games like those that we may consider adding into FTB.
Also, we need to revisit physics, bounciness, and other topics that may make the game feel more alive, as at the time of FTB's creation, we gave no thought to it, and it's an important aspect of every platformer.
We look into minimizing lags, improving sync, and allowing more than 16 players in the arena. Imagine the chaos we can achieve.
We touched on that in the previous devlog, but basically we want to make the game feel better, feel alive. To achieve that we got some work to do while keeping the simple, cartoony minimalistic hand dawn art style.
Like a "Lose" screen for when you lose. Currently, we have "Victory" but not a "Lose" indication. Yes, we missed it and there are other similiar things.
Stay with us on the journey of reviving FTB. See you next time!
