Darkraze Windows, Mac, Linux game

Hello, and welcome back to another development log of Darkraze! You may have noticed how I didn't say Week #7 since I have been absent from IndieDB for over a month. So, the start of the school year is always the most important part of education, and of course, with mid-terms/finals coming up, school is certainly not helping the development process at all.

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(If you don't care about my explanation of my absence, just skip ahead to the next paragraph)
So, I have risen from the dead, but I will continue developing the game whenever I have spare time. However due to the fact that I can't guarantee to post news updates every week, I will only post when I have interesting things to talk about (when I have the time of course). Now, you are probably wondering, what is a high school student spending all of his time on? Well, the answer is quite obvious: school-work and maintaining an acceptable GPA. Not only that, but I have college courses that are quite challenging and have to put time into. I have much more to life than just sitting at the computer programming, so I will count game development as a hobby. However, education should never be sacrificed just to complete the game of my dreams. Sadly, that's just the way life goes.

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So anyway, moving onto the interesting stuff that you newcomers/followers are here for, to show the current state of my game. First of all, I mainly improved many features and fixed many bugs dealing with network and some gameplay elements. However, the most important feature that I want to point out is that I finally got around to sticking with a web host (an actual great one that doesn't have downtime every 2 days). This enables me to develop more towards web server-sided things and beginning to store data and info online. Of course, everything is basic without any special features, but at least it's functional.

Retrieved data from database before match

Retrieved data after a (very short) match

As you can see, it loads and sets data on the server without having fear of losing progress. So, now you can actually progress through the game with some sort of objective! In addition to that, we also improved the effect of EMP to be more distracting and harder to aim. Not only it restricts vision, but it also impairs hearing so have to be constantly on the lookout for enemies.

New EMP distortion effect/technique. It intentionally tears the screen around the middle to make it harder to aim on a target. This effect will only happen for a split-second.

Finally, we improved the camera effect of encountering explosions. Once you are within the explosion proximity, it will blur your vision and utilize a new effect: radial blur. This makes you feel like the player actually felt the shockwave, instead of the camera just shaking.

Based on this image, you can see that near the edges of the screen, they blur away from the center, creating a truly immersive experience when encountering explosions.

Additional changes:

• Many UI elements and visuals have been adjusted to be more visible on darker monitors (this was a common complaint).
• You cannot shoot your weapon while transitioning to aiming (sorry MLG quickscopers).
• Drawing animation now affects the camera.
• Kill feed will now display the weapon name that the victim was killed by.
• Created new weapon icons for all the weapons.
• Made bots more distinguishable in the lobby or the scoreboard, by making their clan tag use (parentheses) rather than [square brackets], and made the tint a different shade.
• Improved the aiming animation to follow a curved movement pattern rather than linear.
• Modified the bullet tracer slightly, it now has a very slight variation in the texture, rather than it being a straight line, and it now tiles correctly.
• After the EMP phase is complete, the weapon icon should no longer disappear. This is due to the UI system upgrade, but is now fixed.
• Being able to chat to a 'team' in Deathmatch or non-team based game modes.
• Kill parsing is now more reliable, supports bot suicides, and uses a little bit less bandwidth.
• Assists and kill bonuses are now rewarded even when the player is dead (previously, you had to be alive to receive the assist bonus).
• The distortion image effect's UV offset was not working properly.
• Cone of dispersion for weapons was incorrect when looking up vertically. This is now fixed.
• 3 new placeholder weapons (RPK, MP5-SD, and MP-412 REX), just to add a variety of weapons for upcoming alpha builds. This introduces new 'base' weapons for LMGs, SMGs and revolvers.
• Basic quick match functionality, which randomly selects a server from the server list. This will be improved in the future, but it works for now.

Those are the most notable features of the things I got to work on. However, many of the others are either under-the-hood changes to code, or too insignificant to even show. Thank you everyone for reading, and I hopefully will see you in the next dev-log!

Thanks for the support,
Kevin, lead developer of Renegrad Studios