FROM THE BLOG

Weekly Log – Campaign Progress and New Intern!

Hey everyone, progress has been good this week so let’s get into it right away!

Trench Run News:

Trench Run had its first proper successful testing of the campaign mode. We had to shrink down the map size to improve match turnaround when there’s evenly matched teams, but that just means we’ll be able to make more maps, more quickly!

“[Nuclear Launch Detected]” “Head for the tunnels!”

A few unexpected quirks have been found, as well as many a bug. Many have been fixed but there is still quite a lot of work to do. A sort of meta-game has developed with some of the players as well with the engineer staying back with some supplies dropped by the medic and “air striking” the map continuously, with the other team having to stick to cover to avoid the rockets. We’ll definitely be looking into the explosion radius for the engineer rocket (having whole teams blown to bits ten seconds into a game might be a bit much), but it’s very fun to see this kind of strategic play so early in this mode’s testing!

We’re currently considering renaming the mode from “Campaign” to “Run” – the motivation is that campaign doesn’t say much about the objective of the mode, whereas run does, and is short, catchy, and 50% of a title-drop to boot. What do you think?

KAG News:

Verrazano, a programmer from the community will be joining the team of interns here at THD! He’s excited to work on common frustrations for modders so if you’ve noticed something inconsistent or annoying while modding the game, he’s the guy to talk to about looking into it! We’re glad to have him aboard, so congratulate Verra if you see him ingame!

Skinney continues work on the in-game map editor, which he’s dubbed “Cartographer”. This will be an invaluable tool for creative folk and admins alike, and is an important usability improvement over directly editing image files, especially when placing and arranging mechanisms!

Norill continues work on the port of the game menus to scripts which will allow them to be much more easily refined and re-arranged.

Build 1591 seems to have gone quite smoothly after a few initial hitches were dealt with. The new maps in particular have led to much shorter games of CTF when decisive plays are made, which helps prevent teams leaving through attrition and keeps the game flowing. Check out the forums for some ongoing discussion of trap block behaviour and the dreaded bomb nerf.

That’s all for this week, let us know what you think in the comments and of course, follow us on twitter, like us on facebook, and tell your friends!

Have fun!

Max