It’s Holographic!

2 May, 2024 

Howdy, folks! Here we find ourselves towards the end of another Thursday, which of course means a new edition of the Weekly Cheese! Your weekly dose of everything cheesy in the world of afflicted is fairly tech heavy this week, as Ryan and Daniel have been grinding away at the to-do list and dealing with new issues as they come up. This doesn’t mean the creative side has taken a break, though, so hop into a comfy chair with your beverage of choice and we’ll get into it!

Stay Hydrated

Listen up. It’s getting warmer out there these days, and that means you need to stay hydrated. Whether its straight-up water or some other form of hydration, make sure you’re staying on top of it. It’s important! We need our community hydrated for when the time comes to handle the cheesy nature of afflicted. Trust.

Come Mr. Tally-Man

Who doesn’t love details, right? Well, boy howdy, do I have some details for you! Let’s jump in.

• Ryan

  • Clocked about 60 hours with Daniel this week. Took him into the guts of the game to redo the core game loop, fixed a bunch of bugs, and blow each other up with rockets. Changes Include:

    • Created PlayerAuthenticator: This is a new core system that handles authentication to Unity Services and properly links the player account with Steam (and eventually other things).

    • Created EventManager: This is a centralized event system that allows events from our core systems to be subscribed to by other core game components (UI, Server stuff).

    • Fixed: LobbySystem decoration delay. We redid the entire thing to make it event-based instead of a brute force redraw (what the hell is Ryan even talking about) idk dude I’m cooked.

    • Fixed: All authentication-related Order Of Operations bugs.

    • Refactored: The entire PlayerInventory system to make all “items” more generic and properly initializes inventory if null. Using lists instead of arrays now – thanks Daniel.

    • Refactored: A ton of menu UI components. Won’t get into the weeds with this one just yet but we are working on making things more manageable to keep up with the creative team.

    • Changed: Kill feed now shows the gun the player was killed with & you see the name of the player that killed you on your death screen.

    • Changed: Added the ragdoll effect back. (Cole note -> It’s hilarious).

    • Nerfed: Rockets – seriously you guys need to chill. [Everyone disliked that]

• Bryan

  • Main focus for the week: Transforming Map Loot into Kinetic vs. Cheese Weapon Components

  • As of now, our list of possible component outcomes at the transformer (name change pending... best I came up with in my first go was Metaforge) is mainly comprised of components that fit the themes of our kinetic weapons exclusively. Cheese guns haven't been given much love here.

  • Since we've abandoned the traditional tech tree progression for all weapons and shifted to more of a cookbook approach with a medley of available recipes, the player now has the ability to build any weapon they'd like... provided they have the necessary ingredients.

  • This will now be the case for cheese weapons. All components will now have a cheesy variant that the player can craft through the transformation of map loot. Since the cheese weapons will offer our main source of PvE damage, and PvP utility, we will price out the cheese components accordingly. 2 to 1 DNA cost, as well as 2 to 1 material cost is my first thought.

    • For example: if the player collects 4 pogo sticks, they will have the option at the transformer of crafting 4 springs, or 2 ‘culture coils’ at the same DNA cost as the 4 springs.

  • In addition to this adjustment, all components will have 3 tiers, dependent upon the origin of the map loot. Components crafted from desert items will be tier 1. From the swamp will be tier 2, and from the city will be tier 3.

• Daniel

  • Added sweetspots and power shots to ping pong prototype.

  • Replaced models in ping pong prototype to merge w/ main game.

  • Helped Ryan break a lot of things, made him fix all of them.

  • Getting more familiar with project layout.

  • Helped Ryan refactor lobby system.

• Marc

  • Memes galore!

• Mike

  • Continuing his glorious work on animations

• Bruce

  • He’s out there, in the ether…

• Cole

  • Paused on posters this week to continue thinking up audio logs. Have one series broken out and plan on running about 2 series per map, of ~3 logs each. We’ll see how it goes!

  • Prepping to be away for a little bit, though I’ll still be actively contributing artwork and potential audio log recordings in the meantime.

In Closing

All in all, a fairly busy week! The technical team has been deep in the trenches on the codebase and their work has never felt better in playtesting. Given the chance, I’d love to get the playtesters into a light-hearted slaughterfest sometime this weekend, but we’ll see where the game is at by that point.

Eating my weight in spaghetti bolognese,  

Squid