Cheez-Its or Jesus?

1 February, 2024 

And on the day known as Thursday, there was the Weekly Cheese. And it was good. This week, we cover quite a bit of the finer things in game development. Fun things like more memes, more Terry skins, and even Steam achievements. We’ve really got our heads together lately and are working like a well-oiled machine. It’s incredible, but don’t just take my word for it. Check it out for yourself!

Pressing the Advance

This week, I’m not beating around the bush. We’ve been churning and burning through the remaining task list and not really focused on much else, so I’m ready to just dive in and get to the nitty-gritty (not the griddy). Check this shit out:

• Ryan

  • Steam (ITS WORKING!)

    • Got authentication working with linking the unity account. This way data / inventory / stats persists. (inhales) WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

      • This is Ryan’s actual note.

  • Grated Escape

    • Win condition now properly firing for a successful extraction.

    • Got extraction controller to properly inject the extraction game mode's extraction time.

    • Completed first pass of end-to-end Grated Escape game mode.

  • Main Menu

    • Got Terry & DNA Apparatus skin selection UI working.

    • Skin selections persist in menu and in-game properly - working in multiplay.

    • Got foundation set for the following conditions:

      • Calling for extraction when not eligible - this will play a message from B.R.U.C.E.

      • Successful extraction - this will play a cinematic and show you the items you extracted.

      • Death scenario - this will play a cinematic and then move you into spectator mode.

    • Did some more work on submenus for THE_ARMORY room.

  • Gameplay

    • Reworked Trueman GameObject to allow for better support of skins.

    • Added first pass of Melee weapons - its a crowbar (a COLE_BAR).

    • Created NPC Loot Table so each level can have a separate loot table for NPCs - no need to attach an inventory to them now.

    • Separated camera state logic for server and client so the server can now "see" if you're aiming down sights. This fixes an issue with projectiles not going where the player thought they shot.

  • EntityDatabase

    • Added EntitySkinData to entity database to allow for skin selection.

    • Added additional automation for all EntityData to calculate its unique string ID as well as perform configurations for underlying entities.

    • Added automation to entity database so when you create new EntityData there’s a checkbox that will add itself to its respective collection if it doesn’t exist yet - or remove itself.

    • Fixed some bugs related to currency data not automatically refreshing

  • Animations

    • Started working on refactoring the animation logic for weapons, including parenting different weapons to different slot holders when armed / disarmed.

    • Fixed hand snapping to work with new animation logic when reloading.

    • Fixed weapon jitter for Observed Agent.

    • Got weapon attack animations to play from a random pool of applicable animations based on the currently equipped weapon - all networked.

    • Fixed projectile impacts for the new hitscan weapon. Issue was the bullet impacts were:

      • Excluding proxies (so players couldn't even see other players' shots).

      • Being handled in NetworkFixedUpdate so the networked data didn't always match the rendered bullet. What’s that mean? Honestly, who cares? You can see impacts from other players now.

  • Economy

    • Added EconomyManager to the Scene prefab. This will be responsible for updating and refreshing the cloud economy values both in the main menu and in-game...at least that's the idea. I never get it right the first time.

  • Bugs

    • Fixed initialization bugs related to NPCs - non-state authority shouldn't have visibility of any data nor should they incur any processing responsibilities.

    • Fixed projectile bug where bullet would go slightly to the left of where player camera was on the left shoulder (idk how I didn’t notice this until now).

  • Vitals

    • coldbrewCounter == 38;

    • Squid Note: Yes, Ryan has consumed 38 Cold Breaws (purposefully misspelled nerd) in the last week. He’s a trained professional, don’t try this at home (I fear for his life).

• Bryan

  • Working with the entire team to register a comprehensive item list for assets used within the game and their corresponding models. This was the beginning of a huge lift that will set us on a great course for documenting what players can interact with.

  • Working with Cam on various new models and assets.

  • Providing creative insight to the whole team now that it’s time to start implementing more creative portions of the game!

• Bruce

  • Creating hella custom skins for Terry. Dude is on a roll.

  • Got set up with Unity and has begun to assist in prefab creation. This will help me (Squid) tremendously.

• Marc

  • Still drafting and posting those sweet memes to our new Instagram meme channel. We’re trying to make a better distinction between our memes and technical previews, so people don’t only assume that the @playafflicted account is purely meme based (but it is based).

• Cole

  • Finished out high-fidelity concepts for Cheddarprise and the CHURCH_OF_CHEESE in-game factions.

  • Continuing work with THE_CITY prefabs. Completed the Cathedral (the CHURCH needs a place to call home, right), the Gas Station, the Construction Site, and several housing blocks.

  • Starting to draft a community engagement plan for when we drop the demo and full release. We want to be sure we get a lot of excitement and buzz when we start out so we can continue to make afflicted the best it could possibly be!

  • Still need to investigate performance draws within THE_SWAMP map.

Working hard, or hardly….wait, no, just working hard. Like really hard. The excitement of how far we’re pushing the game is really driving all of us here at 3rd Shift Studios to press on faster than we ever have. Ryan’s even ordered Steam keys for internal testing already, so you know what that means…

In Closing

It’s February! Not that it means anything, I’m just glad that we’re one step closer to it being warm again (mostly so I can golf and kayak some more). But seriously folks, we’re over here really grinding away to keep the afflicted ball rolling. Thanks for sticking around, and if you’ve reached the end here, feel free to let me know how we’re doing. What would you like to see more of in the Weekly Cheese? Is there anything missing? And if you spot any spelling mistakes, go ahead and shove them ping ya boi so I can fix them.

Tomorrow is Groundhog’s Day,  

Squid