It’s been a while since our last update, but we’re back! We know it’s been a while, but we’ve been in the weeds fixing bugs, and there is only so much we can say about that before it starts to sound really repetitive. Apologies for the radio silence! Development is ongoing though, even if it slows down occasionally, and we’re really excited to talk to you this week!
The first bit we have to talk about was sort of a surprise! Our creative director had an evening to spare and wanted to play around with Gears of Eden’s backend and was able to get partial controller support working! He’s even tested it out on our Twitch channel! Obviously it’s very partial (at multiple points, he had to put down the controller and use his mouse and keyboard) and there’s a lot of fine tuning that needs to happen so that the control scheme is natural to use, but it’s in! As someone who likes to kick back and play on my TV from time to time, this was very exciting to see happen. You can expect at the very least to control the rover and it’s functions with a controller in Alpha 2, but any UI or object interactions will likely come afterwards. Full controller support is definitely coming in the future though!
We also had planned developments this week as well, the biggest of them being changes to the way that Tier 1 parts functioned. Previously, as the player went through part upgrades, they’d go through a series of degradable parts, from Tier 2 to Tier 4. Once these parts fully degraded, they’d drop–without any accounting for tier level–to Tier 1, which we were treating as the “broken” state. This worked well for gamedev purposes by allowing us to test the basic idea of “part breaks, gets worse” but it’s not very usable from a gameplay perspective. No amount of explanation can justify in lore why a) Tier 1, without any other indication, is the broken state or b) Tiers 2, 3, and 4 all function in the exact same way after they fall into disrepair.
Now each tier really does have its own broken state, including diminished stats. We plan to include a visual change to the model for this as well, but that’s naturally going to wait until we’ve created models for each tier. We hope that this change will end up in Alpha 2, but given recent delays, we might let those slip into Alpha 3 or the Demo release. We’ll see!
Next on our list are some minor bug fixes to various systems, and then the implementation of the new UI! We’re really excited about the added functionality and user-friendliness of the new UI and can’t wait to get it in game. Stay tuned for updates on our progress soon!
That’ll be it for this week’s Dev Update. We will be back next week with more! If you want to keep up with all things GoE, check out our Twitter and Facebook pages, or give a listen to the most recent episode of our Reaching Eden podcast! Thank you so much for your support and thank you for reading. We hope to see you again next Wednesday, but until then, have a great rest of your week.
