HI guys!
At last, after 2 and a half years, countless coffees, several all fighters, WOODPUNK is releasing today!
These past week has been frenetic. We launched a closed beta-test where we corrected/fixed a couple things that we’ll comment further on! But first, we have to thank our awesome Beta-testers / Community! Thanks to our Discord members who wanted to become beta testers, WOODPUNK has improved vastly in the last couple of weeks and this is all thank to you guys!
For the new readers here: WOODPUNK is a new roguelike/action shooter where the player will fight hundreds of simultaneous on screen enemies with more than 1400 different weapon combinations in their arsenal!
So today we’ll speak about what we have worked on this week related to the WOODPUNK’s development.
Fixing Bugs
So we’ve fixedthe last couple bugs we could find. We’ve discovered several of these thanks to our beta-testers and their extensive hours of play. We’ve implemented a few features that created bugs, others appeared out of the blue (don’t they all do?)…. The most worrying bug was one where the first time a player saved the game, we would lose their progression. So yeah… fun week right?
Changing game difficulty
The beta testers complained that a few game modes were impossible to complete, specially “Destroy the artifact” where the player has to destroy 4 “turrets” before the clock reaches 0. Every time the player destroys an “artifact” they will receive more time!
This game mode was not balanced because the players could only destroy the artifacts if they received an overpowered weapon. Ranged weapons practically didn’t damage these structures, and too many enemies were spawning. All this lead the beta testers to practically surrender the run when they arrived to this game mode. We decreased the hit points these turrets have and decreased the amount of damage melee weapons do to them. We want the players to be able to destroy these turrets with their ranged weapons! We also decreased the spawn rate enemies had for it to become easier!
Art-style upgrade
Thanks also to the beta-testers we received feedback the enemies weren’t visible enough and that it was difficult to distinguish them from the background. This led our artist to slightly change the color pallet and adapt the enemies outline. A few changes here, and a few changes there and now the game is as you can find it now! In the image below you can see the difference in the game color palette, saturation and gloom from now, to a couple of weeks ago!
Options Menu
We finished implementing the option Menu. Now the players can assign key bindings to their mouse and keyboard. In the future, after release, the player will be able to re-bind their controllers.
Other options we included in the Menu our the language options, sound and music, and lower the weather effects in case the player does not want to strain as much their CPU.
Assets
One of the biggest assets we included these last couple of weeks is a slow mode camera when you’re choosing weapons! We received feedback from our beta-testers (those who aren’t used to playing fast paced games) that they had no time to view which was they weapon they were going to receive if they were mid battle.
Our solution was to include a few seconds of slow mode when the player is close to a weapon that has dropped from his robot companion. We implemented this slow mode as a direct frame drop. This lead to two issues. Some players identified this asset as bug, they did not feel it was a clear asset. Other players were cheesing or trying to use this slow mode to their benefit. Therefore now when the slow mode activates, the screen turns black and white, and if the player shoots during the slow mode it will deactivate!
Well last couple of words guys, thank you all for reading our articles the last few weeks, we’re really excited and nervous for WOODPUNK’s release. It has been a couple of exhausting last few weeks, but alas, it has sort of ended. We’ll continue updating you guys on development as WOODPUNK continues!
