The Version 80 Post (Patreon)

Hello, V80 is out in beta. I'm going to make a bunch of bug-fixes today and then hopefully release it on the main branch if I feel safe doing so. I was pleasantly surprised that the update seems quite stable and people are happy with it. This post contains uber-spoilers for the new creatures, so beware... you're in for a scare..

We're going to work backwards through the creatures I made for V80.

Cadaver Growths

For the last few days before the update, I was debugging the Cadaver Growths because we could not encounter them as an act of God. Even as I raised their spawn chance to a flat 80% every hour (unaffected by other creature spawn chances), they still would not even spawn most of the time. That is why they now have a 100% chance to begin growing on Adamance at the beginning of the day now. It was a similar experience with Feiopars. But I also observed that the Cadaver Growths were not growing fast enough to threaten us in 90% of games, and even when we did stand in the midst of the plants for whole minutes, we sometimes would still not be infected. That's why they might be overtuned now, but I'd have to watch more people play Adamance semi-seriously to know. Anyway, that's how I spent the last day of work on V80 before it went into public beta.

The Cadaver Growths started as the idea of a creature that latches onto your back and sucks out your life-force or increases your weight, unbeknownst to you. Other players would have to see it and pull it off of you. This idea was suggested a lot, but I thought it would end up being a nuisance rather than fun. Then at the same time I had this idea of a virus that spreads from player to player, or an idea of a little worm creature that burrows into the player's body and then bursts from them like The Thing to ambush another player nearby. This is the idea I almost went with, but I wasn't super hyped about the aesthetics and had no idea what I was going to be modelling.

I came up with the idea for it to be plant-based while talking with a friend, and I think I liked it because it reminded me of Advance Wars: Days of Ruin for the DS, which had this horrifying cutscene about a pretty field of flowers that would instantly, irreversibly infect you if you barely touched any of it. As a kid I think I stopped playing the game after I saw this.

I really like concepts that are scary without being outwardly grotesque or gory. I think that's why I like this more than the cordyceps zombies from The Last Of Us.

This is what the spores looked like when I was first figuring out this particle effect that just uses single pixels as particles, making them very cheap to render. I like the spores effect because it reminds me of the only episode I ever saw of The X Files on a VHS as a kid. I think it was called Darkness Falls.

The Cadaver Blooms require a lot of fine-tuning because of their complexity. They use a lot of probability to determine who to infect, but I think I might make it so they cannot ever infect you unless you've personally stood really close to them for at least a couple seconds. The idea is that anyone could be infected, and you're not supposed to know; and that necessitates it being based on random chance to some degree. I need to tighten up the mechanics so that there are more clear counter-plays to deal with it.

The Cadaver Bloom's rig and model is kind of nightmare because of its procedural bits, but I am happy with the results. The actual Cadaver Bloom part of the Cadaver was the most simple to make; I decided it should just chase after players and only become a serious threat if the player has nowhere else to run, similar to the Masked. It has a movement that is more spider-like than the actual spider, and I am really happy with that.

Feiopars

Feiopar is a name I made up to sound like an actual big cat species. The Feiopars are the creatures I mentioned would be inspired by the Hide-Behind from Gravity Falls. Like the Bracken, I knew that players would definitely gang up on it and surround it, so it needed to have some behavior when it felt overwhelmed. I also knew that outdoors it would need extra help to position itself to sneak up on players. That's what led to the idea that it would climb trees, which made a cat the perfect choice.

They used to be about twice their size and were like a dinosaur, but they couldn't hide nearly as well, so I shrunk them down. The Feiopar had the most bugs to work through of any creature in the game, and it probably took 3 weeks total of just fixing issues.

What makes them work as the "outdoor Bracken" (or perhaps the outdoor Coilhead) is that they don't immediately stand up and run when seen, which works indoors but not outdoors. Instead they require a much more intense staring contest, which ideally becomes like a little "i spy" game in the dense bushes. There's some subtle nuances to their AI, such as the fact that you can sneak up on them and scare them while they are preying on another player. Another choice I made early on was that instead of quietly picking players off, they make a loud fuss, which is more terrifying to witness!

The Feiopar is the most "normal", non-alien looking creature in the game, which I think is kind of funny. Besides some exaggeration in proportions and its exaggerated behavior, I just trusted in my artistic imperfections to shine through and make it look like something from Lethal Company. I generally don't want to try too hard to make something look original just for the sake of originality. You be the judge!

The Backwater Gunkfish

For some reason this is the creature I feel is the most "classic" feeling. I guess it's because it's so simple. It used to be more complex, but I realized the most fun part of it was all it really needed.

The Gunkfish used to kill you with its stinger. But I realized this took away from the fun of just getting gooped, and I'd rather have it synergize with other creatures instead. Its ability to cloak was also removed; this is because it wasn't as funny and dramatic to get gooped when the creature was previously invisible (and without a flashlight, the darkness gave it enough cloaking). I kind of wanted to recreate moments in real life where people are looking at an unassuming wild animal, which then spits on them in the face.

The Gunkfish used to have alternate colors, but I thought its goop looked too much like jelly and its body looked like it was wearing pajamas. I much prefer the snot aesthetic.

V80's creatures range from simple (Gunkfish), to moderately complex (Feiopar), to very complex (Cadaver Growths). Gunkfish might not do much, but their simplicity gives them a versatility that allows them to be put on any moon I want, pairing well with any other creatures that spawn. I think I want to make more creatures like that.

The Kidnapper Fox also got added in V80, but there's not as much to speak about for that. I decided to add it back when I figured out how to make GPU-instanced plants, which required reworking a lot of its code. I then spent some time with it and fixed some big issues with its AI, limited its bold excursions, and fixed some issues with the Vain Shroud's spawning. Weed killer should be easier to use on Vain Shrouds now too. (That then helped me make the Cadaver Growths.) That's about it so far with the Kidnapper Fox.

The last month of V80 was filled with optimizations, quality of life, bugfixing, and fixing bugs that resulted from my bugfixing. I hope that I won't be swamped with that stuff going into V85. I have just one new optional feature in mind for V85, which I'm very excited to experiment with; otherwise it will be all content.