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Trench Run Free Preview 2!

Hey everyone!

The next Trench Run Free Preview is here, this time for one weekend only – servers go down Monday 4pm UTC!

For this preview weekend the servers are hosted in EU. We weren’t able to get the backend set up on the USA box in time, sorry about that!

Changes since last time:

• More Servers! 2 skirmish and 3 run servers for dramatically increased capacity. Tell your friends!
• New Backgrounds and some colour tweaks.
• New Run Maps with a more easily defended “finish line” and simpler terrain. This means there should be much fewer run-by wins.
• Changes to Skirmish Maps.
• Run renders the distance for both teams (if its 150m or less) so you can see who’s winning the race.
• Experimental Commando Changes:
  • Spamming slash slows your movement speed to make more tactical stabbing required.
  • Flashbang is a small area instead, and you have 3 uses.
• Experimental Medic Changes:
  • Medic drops combined supply + medkit rather than healing with touch.
  • Medic gets one supply per 5 seconds
• Experimental Engineer Changes:
  • Crates are thrown in a straight line when moving rather than an arc.
  • Can jump off the rocket.
• Lots of minor bugs fixed!

Known Issues:

• Chat still sucks – we haven’t had time to get the 10-way chat system up yet, but its top of our priorities for next time around.
• Medic GUI sucks 🙂
• Medic Resupply seems buggy and has problems with healing the enemy
• Commando Flash is less useful – we’re considering a proper flash grenade if the area-flash is going to stay.
• Commando Flash is visible at end of round temporarily.
• Engineer Rocket is still “Laggier than your mother” – we’re working on a new firing system to make it lag-agnostic but it didn’t make it for this release, sorry!
• Engineer Crates still suck – we’re looking for good alternate abilitites. I’ll tell you about our plans soon to get your feedback.

Preorders:

• We’ll be putting up preorders once we have a supporter version ready for consistent play. We dont want to sell the game before we’ve settled 100% on a price and can offer something in return for the money – we’re still not 100% that this will all work at a larger scale.
• If you want to support us, there are some things you can do other than buying the game!
  • sharing the game on social media
  • getting cool gifs and screenshots for us to share
  • reporting bugs
  • getting excited!

  That should keep you busy until we can get something more permanent into your hot little hands. Lets just say we’d love to make it a Trench Run Xmas!

That’s it! Get your friends on board and see how those servers hold up!

Cheers,
Max and Michał

Trench Run – Free Preview Build Available!

Hey everyone! You can download the online preview release of trench run here!

This preview is in the EU region – there will be preview weeks in US and AU regions in future, but for this week we’re afraid most will have to deal with some lag. Pick the more ping-friendly classes: assault, medic, and commando.

Bring your friends or make new ones in the lobby!

Unfinished content:

• Menus, GUI, and Settings
  The menus and gui are a placeholder currently, and a lot of settings (most importantly your name on start) dont save themselves. This will be addressed in future versions, however the number of options is likely to remain very minimal in any future preview releases.
• Engineer
  The engineer in general leaves a lot to be desired. The rocket riding is fun but causes issues with hit registration a lot of the time. The rocket itself desyncs a lot. And the crates need a total rethink. In short, expect a lot of changes to the engineer.
• Medic
  The overall design of the medic class (defend, resupply and heal – hard support) is good, particularly when teaching someone else the game – but the GUI and presentation in general needs some love.
• AI
  The AI is borderline drunk in many cases. You’ll want a human 5v5 for best experience (though 2 players can still have a fun skirmish)
• Maps
  The current maps are just a single example of the kind of map we have planned for each biome. There will be multiple maps per biome, eventually.
• Chat
  The chat system is an interim measure just to get anything at all in there (the KAG chat doesn’t work, there’s not enough screen real estate). It will be replaced with a system based on the faces that appear at the start of a Run game.

Stuff that’ll only be in supporter releases:

• booze, cards, live band, and other lobby distractions
• character skins
• persistent coins
• multiple lobby tiers
• proper coverage of AU, US, EU regions
• offline play

Known issues: (incomplete list, but this is the major stuff)

• settings not saved (will be dealt with asap)
• rendering tearing/glitching
• pixel stretching when on non-default resolution
• engineer rockets desync and sometimes dont do damage
• clipping into walls with crates or rockets or very high speed from explosions causes problems
• possible to double-up classes in run with some latency on join
• sniper trail renders through tiles that it destroyed (with lag)
• players sometimes desync dead (looks alive, but moves “glitchy” and is dead on their screen)
• some sync errors in the lobby resulting in “weird” games – please report any exact circumstances you can find

Have fun!

Max & Michał

The Study of Humans at Poznań Game Arena Event

[report 0x00000001]
[topic: the study of humans at poznań game arena event]
[authors: 0x00002e56, 0x00002e59, 0x00002e5A]

QUESTION:
We are studying the strong and weak points of human neurology to make their eradication more efficient. Our point of interest is the minimal complexity of lock systems needed to successfully encage most humans and the reliability of our test items designed to help assign lock level to a particular human mind.

FINAL CONCLUSION:
Based on our results below, it seems that all we need to encage most humans is a door opened elsewhere.

Weekly News – TR Art, Another Expo, and KAG UI

Hey everyone, another busy couple of weeks both past and future!

Trench Run News:

Michal had a blast showing the game at Pixel Heaven! We won the “Best Multiplayer” Award and got to see lots of smiles and hear lots of laughter. Butcher was also shown, and was very popular with the more bloodthirsty fans!

Last week the first pass of environment art and effects got finalised. I also got custom palettes for each biome under way. These palettes give each area a unique feel by changing the colours. The Trenches are a brown, dusty wasteland; the Desert is bright and hot; the Forest is green and full of wet vegetation. Each of the 7 biomes has its own unique palette and soundtrack!

A sneak-peek at some of the palettes so far.

This week I’m getting to work on animations for the classes. I’m starting with the assault, but hope to have all five classes fully animated by the end of the week.

Some of the new animations for the assault class.

The following week will be polishing up the art ready to show again! We’ll be showing Trench Run at Poznan Game Arena From 16-18th October. If you’re in the area go say hi to MM, see the new graphics in action, and collect some loot! We’ve got lovely little badges of each class just waiting to brighten your bag.

KAG News:

Verra and Norill worked together on the new menus, and features for a new scoreboard. The new scoreboard shows player “cards” including the user’s forum avatar and role – so it’s clear if they’re an admin or developer. The cards may also show cumulative kills/deaths for that server in the future.

That’s all for this week, have fun!

Max

Weekly Log – TR Dev, KAG Editor and Fixes

This week’s news sounds like last week’s, but we’ve got more hard content this time around!

Trench Run News:

The “New Art” implementation is under way! Currently we’re just focussing on getting the terrain art in, because it requires the smallest number of assets. This will let us assess any changes that need to be made as early as possible. New map loading code and a simpler map format are being developed to accomodate the new tiles.

The graphics in game are currently at this point – lots of issues but coming along.

Because there’s a lot to do to get everything converted, Michal is working on a Separate Expo Version for Pixel Heaven. The most exciting expo feature likely to be carried over to the normal version is per-player stat tracking. We track many stats, such as accuracy, weapon use, time spent in the air, and time spent dead. There is also a framework for tracking more information should the need arise. These stats may end up being globally tracked for ranked matches – depending on how hard the infrastructure is to set up.

King Arthur’s Gold News:

Skinney has been working on the look and implementation of the map editor, “Cartographer”. He’s toying with a simple “paint program” aesthetic. Skinney plans powerful quick-search functionality, to prevent sifting through lists of tiles by hand.

The map editor will look and function like a straightforward painting program.

Verra has been working on a few features that are likely more relevant to server owners than players. A few game-side memory leaks are being investigated. Chat and console logs are now flushed from memory beyond a certain length. There is also a decrease in the verbosity of logging of some things, such as entity creation. All in all he reduced the memory footprint of the server, which is a great result!

That’s it for this week,

Have Fun!
Max

Weekly Log – TR Art, KAG Editor and Modding

Last week was a quiet one for progress we can share, but I’ll go over the details of what is shareable. Apologies for the post coming after the weekend again!

Trench Run News:

We’ve committed to the new art style. I’ll spend the next few weeks to a month getting the new graphics in-game, and refining any issues with them. It’s important to understand that this is not just a simple palette swap. The new art both expands the colours available and involves a lot of tile and sprite rework. We’re focusing on improving readability; as an example we’re having team colours on the characters – something that was impossible with the 8 colour art.

Team colours help immediately tell friend from foe!

On the gameplay side of things we’re making a few small changes to improve the reliability of game times. Endless stalemates from balanced teams are an issue in KAG; that’s something we’d like to avoid in TR. MM will spend this week swapping the Run mode over to a “Best-of” format. He’ll use the testing group to ensure this works out as intended. This change should shorten wait times and ease player fatigue.

KAG News:

Skinney has got some work done on the editor, “Cartographer”. He’s mocking up a few possible interfaces at the moment. It is not only a tool for creating maps, but also a moderator tool to help admins combat griefers and hackers. Cartographer should also help with building and testing clever mechanism layouts.

Verra has got some optimisation work under way, addressing how KAG interfaces with Angelscript. He has also fixed the “endless downloading” bug that prevented joining some modded servers. This turned out to be two separate bugs on different operating systems. On Linux, the bug was a file permissions issue. On Windows, it was misuse of a system function. Both issues caused the same symptom in different ways, and Verra managed to fix both. This should make the experience joining modded servers more enjoyable, to say the least!

Stay tuned for more!

Max

Weekly News – TR Run Progress and Art, KAG Modding

Hey guys, sorry for the delay on the update. Last week was a trying time, but we’ve gotten back on track. So, lets get to it.

Trench Run News:

TR
development has been going along strong. The Run mode testing has shown
that playing in a team on bigger maps gives the game a totally fresh
feel. Run allows for much more depth than the free-for-all skirmish
mode, but requires a bigger commitment.

Some issues that we’re addressing include:

• runs being hard to deny
• missing feedback for when a run is being threatened
• some connection-transfer issues between game servers.

Of the issues from last week:

• Engineer air-striking is harder but still possible ; you just cant sit right at spawn and rain hell on the map.
• The
  medic is more useful even in the hands of an idiot. You can pick up a
  wounded medic as a living teammate – which then allows the medic to heal
  the rest of the wounded.

However, the big news is not related to gameplay…

When
we first started making Trench Run, it was meant to be a fast, quite
small, 2-6 month project. More experimental graphics that we could
produce quickly were settled on at the start of the project. However, as
the project exits its first year we are at a point where the game
should probably at least pay for itself. As such, we’ve decided to
rework the graphics to be more appealing to a wider audience. They’ll
still be lo-fi, but less abstract, and with room for team colours to
help readability. Our graphical aim is “a game made from 2015 styled
like the 90s, not a game from the 90s released in 2015”.

Current pass over The Forest biome (new on the left, old on the right, full size x2 pixels here). We hope the extra time shows, because getting all this in game is going to take some doing!

This
is quite a frustrating decision for us to make. It pushes game code
work from me on to Michal, and it will take a few weeks of full time
graphics work at least for me to get a full game’s worth of art
reworked. However, its a decision needed the good of the game’s
financial success. The game being more accessible should mean you guys
have a bigger crowd of people to play with instead of another small
clique of die-hard fans.

We’ll be doing more experimentation
and polishing of the current mockup graphics this week, but I think
we’re set on this direction now. We’ll keep you updated as the game and
its art style develops, and we trust you’ll bide your time alongside us
as we work towards a better Trench Run!

KAG News:

Verra has got to work on investigating various modding “annoyances” and smoothing them out:

• Error
  messages in the console now refer to the right line even for included
  files, and dont miss errors when the error occurs at the end of the
  file.
• The “infinite mod redownloading” bug.

Progress is looking good and we’re happy to have him aboard!

Until next time,
Max

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