Another Step Closer To Release And It’s A Big One Too

Well that was a lot of work. It’s been a while since our last patch, but we know it was worth the wait. Why? Cause this one has so much in it, including:

• Campaign and Campaign Systems, 
• Overhauled Wave System,
• Updated Character AI,
• Ally Spawners, 
• Level Polish, 
• More Shaders,
• Updated Club Sounds,
• UI Improvements, and
• Unity updated to version 2019.4 LTS.

Campaign and Campaign Systems

The beginning of A Giant Problems’ campaign is in. The first four maps are available. But the levels aren’t fully tuned. Nor is the story complete. This being early access this should be no surprise. To get more feedback on this we are planning on launching special playtests later this month. More on that in a future blog post.

Overhauled Wave System

To build out the campaign and even to enable an Endless mode in the future we’ve changed how we call and deploy enemies. This gives us more control to fine tune the levels of the campaign, adjust the difficulty, and create variation to the encounters.

Characters With More Character

Everyone is getting smarter. Or at least more reactive. The enemies and allies all have new behaviors, and those they already did have been fine tuned. This is in part to create additional reactions between them, as well as with you. They are by no means complete as playtesting and your feedback will inevitably show us changes that need to be made.

Ally Spawners

What’s the point of having gnomes and hedgehogs if there isn’t a way to create them in-game. That’s why we have our lovely little ally spawners. With a press of a button, a new ally arises ready to fight. There is a cost of course - mana. The introduction of these adds to your arsenal to make holding off the invaders all the easier.

Level Polish

We wouldn’t be going for gold if it didn’t also mean making sure everything looks the best. This is more than just visual improvements. It includes functional ones for things like the water making items sink, the lava does the same, out-of-bounds setting limits to the player teleport. But it’s also a lot of pretting up of each map through more props, more particle effects, more decals, new textures. Just more.

Shaders

Speaking of more, we’re making much greater use of shaders to awesome effect. They’re helping spruce up levels, mechanics and more. Where we can we’re using them to make the game really pop.

The Club

Swinging a giant baseball bat really should sound impactful. And now it does. So go out and hit something… like a goblin. But be careful when waving your arms about in VR, you could damage something or someone in the real world - even yourself.

UI Improvements

We say it every time cause it’s true, but we’re always working on improving the user experience - especially when it comes to pressing buttons. Something we don’t want you spending too much time on anyways. But when you are we want that to be the best, most informative time pressing buttons possible. We’ve also got the UI rendering in front of everything else so it’ll no longer appear inside terrain or objects. This development is courtesy of the next change.

Unity Update

We updated the version of Unity we’re using to 2019.4 LTS. This brought changes to the render pipelines which have enabled more shaders on our part and the aforementioned UI improvements with rendering. It provides us some additional benefits as developers and will help in porting the game to other platforms.

All in all there’s a lot that went into this update - things big and small. Just the campaign itself and all the systems involved in that is worth dev diary of its own. But we won’t burden you with that for now. So that’s it for this update. And as always, we have more in store for A Giant Problem. But for that we need your feedback. Please be sure to reach out to us on the Steam Forums, on our Discord or via our support email.