Greetings Mechanics!
It's been a little while since we last parked our construction diggers to publish a devblog, but we intend to step things up a gear in future starting with this, the first in a revamped and polution-free series of updates, intended to keep you even more up to date with developments and community trends in the world of Scrap Mechanic!
Today's update includes exciting new details on Survival Mode, reworked guns and how terrain will work in future versions. Read on for the details - and thanks for playing!
Enter the Scrapyard
Say hello to the massive Scrapyard biome we've been building for Survival Mode! Once the largest farming settlement on the entire planet, the Scrapyard has since been choked by untold tons of scrap and garbage that has accumulated. With enormous bots pushing rubble around and stacking scrap in sky high pillars of junk, the Scrapyard will be a great place for scavenging parts and resources. But be alert... It's also not very safe!
Adjust Your Arsenal
In our last dev blog we showed off the Spud Gun for the very first time. Since then we've had a ton of great feedback from the community, including many requests for our latest firepower feature; modular weapons! We're happy to confirm that the team is currently reworking spud guns so that players can personalize and improve them from many different parts (see a few below!) We are also tweaking the trajectory of potatoes based on your feedback. Should they have a range limit? How much falloff should they have? Let us know what you think in the comments!
Survival mode terrain
The next in-development tech is something we're especially excited to share: randomly generated terrain for Survival Mode! In Survival Mode, the entire terrain will be built from tiles made in our terrain editor, similar to Creative Mode. However, we've improved the system further to give more shape and curve to tiles, which we hope will give Survival a much more epic feel, with rolling and natural-looking environments. Thanks to randomly generated terrain, in Survival Mode players will explore beautiful worlds unique to their experience. We can't wait for you to explore them yourself! Keep in mind that this is just a tech demo and not how the actual final terrain will look. It will have a lot more variation and cool places to explore.
Tile Styles
Recently we had to take a short break from working on the game's Terrain Editor, but we're happy to confirm that the team is back to work on a new version that you mechanics will be able to use to create your own world tiles! When the new Terrain Editor is released, players will be able to place trees, rocks, roads and shape the ground itself! We're also planning to include a feature that will allow you to select placement of your tiles when you start a new world. Finally, mechanics will be able to share their world tiles via Steam Workshop. We hope to have all of these features out in time for the new year!
LODs Better
In visual spit 'n' polish news, we finally got around to improving our level of detail system to make it run a lot smoother. In the current game you might have noticed that trees and rocks can pop as you get closer to them - this is because more detailed models are getting spawned in. In future versions, we've made the transition between models nearly unnoticeable, making walking and driving a much nicer experience.
Tee-riffic
Finally, it's always a pleasure to share some of the outfits our digital tailors have been busily sowing together. This one is the new golfer outfit: very fitting for when you and your friends are swinging sledgehammers at loose objects.
So, Survival Mode... When?
The Scrap Mechanic team is working tirelessly to deliver a game mode that lives up to our quality standards - and your expectations! Until we're able to hit those goals, we appreciate the patience and support of the community. It will be worth it in the end! Because the game is built using our own game engine, it means we have to work a little bit harder to get the features we want working in-game, compared to a pre-made engine which comes with functions already in place. However, this also means we have full control over everything we do, which is very important for a complex game like Scrap Mechanic. We are able to build a lot of complex and unique functions that we believe fans will really appreciate. Survival Mode, for example, will be fully moddable, on top of the deep physics and multiplayer elements you can already see at work today.
We have an awesome team that is making amazing progress every day, working hard to create a unique gaming experience that you will hopefully love for many years to come. Thanks for your support mechanics!
Until next time! Keep on scrapping!