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pocketwatchgames · 6 years

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From the Tooth to The Long Tail - What We’ve Done and Where We’re Going

Since our launch on September 12, 2017, Tooth and Tail has seen over 100,000 copies sold, a resilient competitive community, 16 major patches with bug fixes, balance changes, and feature additions, numerous award nominations, and a growing mod community.

Looking to the future, we know we have some challenges ahead of us. Our player community is still very active via our discord channel, but the active Steam/GOG player base has been trending downwards. We still have a number of major bugs on the PS4 version. And the Story Mode content is still receiving complaints about inconsistent difficulty scaling. Let's take a quick look at the story so far and then figure out where to go from here!

Dont forget, you can follow development via our public roadmap or say hi to the devs in Discord!

Here's a recap of major developments and accomplishments since launch:

Launch Day

Destructoid gives us a 9.5 - "Tooth and Tail has rekindled my love of RTS games." Eurogamer, Gamespot, PC Gamer and Hardcore Gamer pile on the praise.

Launch day September 12: Top player ZenoAkoop does a 24-hour stream

We peak at 985 simultaneous players, higher than Monaco's launch day peak

Tooth and Tail Shirts went on sale via Fan Gamer.

Season One

(WARNING, strong language in this video)

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Total Biscuit and Artosis develop a rivalry, Artosis cleans up.

Our largest community tournament has 40 entrants and is won by ChipFromSpace.

Tooth and Tail launches in Chinese and Korean, and later adds Spanish, German, and Italian. Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, and Turkish are in progress.

Community members Glyde, BestTeaMaker, and Delthius show up to help us out as we demo the game at TwitchCon in Long Beach

End of Year

Let's just show off the 2017 nomination list:

2018 Independent Games Festival - Finalist: Excellence in Narrative, Honorable Mention: Visual Art, Audio IGN - Nominee: 2017 Best Strategy Game The Game Awards - Nominee: 2017 Best Strategy Game PCGamer - Nominee: 2017 Best Strategy Game PC Master Race - Nominee: 2017 Best Strategy Game Hardcore Gamer - Nominee: 2017 Best Strategy Game Total Biscuit - Top Ten Games of the Year - #8

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Season Two

We launched Ranked Season 2 on December 19th with an MMR system closer to traditional Ranked ladders. Other major developments:

The Tooth and Tail Official Soundtrack launched on CD and Vinyl (also available digitally directly from Austin Wintory or on Steam

We launched GOG/Steam Crossplay, which is powering development of PS4 to PC crossplay, and hopefully more platforms to come!

We've been featured in four major Steam sales (Winter, Midweek Madness, Lunar New Year, and an IGF nominee sale), a Chrono.gg sale headlined by Total Biscuit, and one major sale on PS4 (Outside is Over-Rated), bolstering our player community. You can bet that there will be more to come!

Campfires, new tiles sets, and a revamped world generation algorithm were added to ranked and unranked play.

Story Mode was completely rebalanced to bring it in line with current multiplayer balance.

ToothAndTailTV, a fan-run channel, casts a massive North America vs Europe tournament, which culminates in a final game matchup of the titans, ChipFromSpace [NA] vs ArbuzBudesh [EU]

What's Next?

With Tooth and Tail starting to enter its "long tail" life cycle, we're taking a broad approach to keeping a healthy player community.

Crossplay We're finally moving towards combining our PS4 and PC communities via crossplay, powered by GOG Galaxy. This means that anytime there is a sale on any platform, the increased player count will benefit all platforms.

Mod Support

(Modded units by Glorious AYY FB)

Our latest patch (1.1.4: Eat Crow) was largely inspired by a balance mod that our player community put together. I hope that our community can continue to help us balance the game, as well as create and test new features, including new units.

In fact, a new Hedgehog unit is currently being developed and tested by community members. All of Tooth and Tail's assets are in human readable XML files and PNGs, so adding new stuff or modifying existing units is accessible to everyone.

Community Tournaments and Games via our Discord Channel

We have possibly the most tricked out Discord channel in gaming, due to the efforts of our community, lead by community manager, Brian Franco (mastastealth). The short list of Discord features:

Pocketbot (a Discord bot to help the community learn about the game and keep the server in order)

Automated weekly PB Cup tournaments

Support for player-run tournaments

ReplayUltima (replay analyzer)

In development is Pocket World, another Discord integrated tool that will allow players to fight for the four in-game factions simply by playing the game. Players will take and lose territory for their team as they play.

New Platforms

Still nothing to announce, but yes, we're investigating new platforms for Tooth and Tail. Stay tuned.

New Feature -- Standard Seeds in Story Mode

The Story Mode balance still needs quite a bit of work, and I'm determined to make the campaign be something that garners universal praise -- it's very close, but with a few things that can just ruin the experience for some people. So I plan to rebalance things again, and offer the ability to play each map on a "standard" -- and fair -- seed. I hope to add leaderboards to the standard seeds as well.

Balance

You all know that I pay a lot of attention to the game's balance and I like to tweak it. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the weird. Expect this to continue.

A short history of the patches and their notable changes:

1.0.2: Howling Nerf -- Single Player Changes, Bug Fixes

1.0.3: Kasha So Sad -- Reduced Landmine range, Kasha nerf, Wolf re-stim removed

1.0.4: Butterbomb -- Campfires, tile sets added to multiplayer, Boar bomb added, boar slow, toads get structure crit, barbed wire redesign, lizard range 1, snakes can't hit structures, owl bomb removed, fox hp mega-nerfed, warren health scales by tier

1.0.5: Chicken Mole -- Flag customization, Editor Preview, Discord Status

1.0.6: Lizard Love -- Tier 3 build time increased, lizard buff, boar no longer slow

1.0.7: 鼹鼠 두더지 MOLE -- Chinese and Korean added, focus fire improvements, lizards range 2, another mole revamp, major chameleon buff

1.0.8: Nibbles and Tweaks -- Starting Farms always adjacent, major boar buff, pigeon AI changes

1.1.0: ('Tis the) Season 2 -- Ladder reset, unit and player stats added, MMR, Map Fairness

1.1.1: GOG Crossplay -- Crossplay, Tier 2 Artillery with scatter shot, Fox rooting, Landmine vision, Tier 3 build time increased, Warren health returned to 50

1.1.2: Snek House -- Snakes can poison structures again, Artillery returned to tier 3

1.1.3: Diamonds are a Lizard's Best Friend -- Single player rebalanced to fit Multiplayer stats, Burrowing to Allied bases, lizards range slightly reduced, MG nerf

1.1.4: Eat Crow -- Swift reduced to 1.75x speed, toad redesigned, boar given semi-agile, artillery range increased to 10

What do you want to see?

So what do you want to see out of Tooth and Tail in the months to come? What was your favorite balance patch? What kind of mods would you like to see? Let me know in the comments!

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voltrongenminibang · 7 years

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Frequently Asked Questions - 2017 edition, first run

About This Event

What is gen? Gen fics are, for the purposes of this Bang, stories in which there are no romantic pairings. Not in the background, not in the focus: there are no non-canonical ships. There is leeway allowed for canon relationships (ie Sam and Colleen Holt being married in the fic doesn’t prevent it from being gen), but there are no added relationships at all. The focus instead is on platonic relationships, be that friendship, team, familial or otherwise.

For the olds out there: No Romance On Screen.

Are platonic ships allowed? Yes, as long as they’re strictly platonic and don’t become shippy. We understand that sometimes the story can change while you’re writing it; if in the process of the draft your pairing becomes shippy, you will not be allowed to use the story for your Mini Bang. Either you will need to drop out or you’ll need to write something else.

How does a Big Bang work? For a standard Big Bang like this one: fic first, then art. After a few weeks of work, the authors will submit a summary and excerpt of their fics to begin the Claims process. Artists pick their top favorites from this list and submit them to the mods. One of those choices is assigned to the artists, who then create content for that fic. [In a reverse Bang, then the artists would submit what they’re going to draw and the authors write with that in mind.]

Gen Mini-Bang Details + Participation Requirements

How many people can participate? 25 authors and 25 artists. upped to 40 each, after enthusiastic response!

What’s the timeline? The timeline can be found on the sidebar, and also here.

Who’s running this shindig? @bosstoaster, @butteredonions and @velkynkarma.

Minimum word count? 5,000 words is the minimum.

Can we have co-authors? You can have a co-author, but you will be responsible for working together and making sure your fic reaches completion. In fairness to the limited number of slots, once you’ve signed up you will not be allowed to split up the pair: one or both of you will have to drop out. Also, to make it fair, if you have two authors you will be responsible for a 10,000 word story (essentially 5k each).

Maximum word count? None! Go wild. Just remember that you have to be able to finish it in the scheduled time.

What are the requirements for artists? Artists will be asked to produce 1 piece of artwork for the fic they’re partnered with after claims. We’ll be asking for progress updates/sketches during the check-ins. The final piece should be completed and ready for turn-in by the July 16th final deadline.

There aren’t any restrictions on what media you use. Traditional and digital are both accepted, and if you have other ideas besides a splash page or comic, we’re open to that too! All we ask is that it’s a fully completed piece, no sketches or WIPs.

Sign-Ups

Can I sign up to both write and create art? Due to limited space, you can only be part of the initial sign-up for one or the other, unless we have trouble filling up (which is somewhat unlikely, but more possible for the artist side). However, you can be on the wait-list for either side, even if you’re signed up for the other. So if you’d prefer to be an artist, we advise you wait until the 25 slots are full and sign-up as a pitch hitter instead, and then sign-up as an artist in the first wave (or vice versa)

Can I sign up now and drop out later? Technically we can’t stop you, but please consider the limited number of spaces available for this mini-bang. If you sign up now without the intent of following through, you may be taking that slot away from someone else who wants to participate just as badly. Please check out the timeline and evaluate your own schedule before committing.

I already signed up through the poll Bosstoaster did! That was an interest poll, not sign-ups themselves. If you filled out this form: 1) thank you!, and 2) you’ll still need to actually sign-up when sign-ups are live.

Is it first-come first serve or an application? Slots will fill on a first-come, first-serve basis. Authors: Mark your calendars March 20th!

How do I sign up, officially? Sign-ups are closed! All slots are currently full and we are running on a waitlist.

How much information will i need for sign-ups? Your tumblr handle (or other social media), as well as an active email address.

When exactly will sign-ups open? Author sign-ups opened at exactly 12:00am, March 20th, EST. Sign-ups remained open for one week. Artist sign-ups opened at exactly 12:00am, March 27th, EST. Sign-ups remained open for one week.

What if I miss the window? Mark your calendars! If you miss it, you’ll have to wait for another time.

All the slots are full! Yes, they are! You can sign up on either waitlist in case of drop-outs. Author Waitlist Artist Waitlist

Are you going to add more slots? The current cap remains 25 authors and 25 artists. Please see this post for more information. ETA: Due to exceptional and enthusiastic interest, we have upped the cap to 40 authors and 40 artists, for a total of 80 participants.

Check-Ins and Claims

What are check-ins? Check-ins are when we look into the progress of authors and artists to make sure everything is coming along on schedule. You will be responsible for showing how you’re progressed in your work at these times, usually by sending us your most current rough draft. More specific requirements may be posted as we draw closer to those dates.

The first check-in comes pretty quick! What do I need to have ready? Check-in 1 will be to make sure you still want to participate and that you’re working on your claims. It’s there so if we have any early drop-outs, we catch them earlier so that we can give our back-ups time to make their summary before claims, rather than demanding one on the day of.

What are claims? Claims are named that because it’s when the artists decide which story they want to write for. Authors submit details to us such as a summary, rating, and an excerpt, along with the tags they’d plan on using for AO3. We’ll number those submissions and post them anonymously for artists to peruse; artists in turn give us a list of which of those submissions they want to draw. We then assign them and pair everyone up.

Can I be late to claims? No. If you are late to claims you will be dropped and replaced. No exceptions.

What happens if I miss a check-in? Shiro never comes back from the astral plane.

Content Queries

My work is ‘technically’ gen? but it might be kind of shippy if people want to read it that way. Ultimately, you know your content best. We recommend that if there’s any doubt if your content is gen you do not use it for this Bang.

Can I have NSFW content? All NSFW content is acceptable (except if it involves a ship), but please remember to tag your fics appropriately for any NSFW content.

Are AUs allowed? Allowed, but please consider it may alienate artists if your niche is too specific (i.e. a Fantasy AU is one thing, a Dresden Files AU is another).

Can I continue a WIP? No. All material created for this mini-bang must be new material; the exception is a sequel to a previously-completed story. No posting new chapters of a WIP. The only exception is a WIP you’ve begun working on, but have not yet published anywhere yet.

Are sequels allowed? This is fine, as long as you are writing a sequel for a previously-completed story. You cannot continue posting a currently half-published WIP.

Can I use an idea I’ve already loosely posted about on my blog? (i.e. I’ve talked about a basic plot, headcanon, meta, etc.) Yes. Previously posted ideas, snippets or hints are perfectly fine. If you’re considering making it your Bang Fic, please hold off on posting further details about your plot so that claims are as anonymous as possible. However, as long as the fic itself is not posted anywhere prior to claims, you’re good to go.

Posting

What are the multi-chapter posting rules? The entirety of your fic must be posted on your assigned day. If you have multiple chapters, all chapters must be posted on the same day. This is in fairness to everyone on the posting schedule. It’s not fair if some people get a chapter posted every day for weeks while others get only the one post. If your fic exceeds 30k, please message us and we can consider exceptions on a case-by-case basis.

Can I post my work on my account? Do not post your work anywhere before your assigned posting date. You can post little snippets or previews, but the work as a whole should be a surprise until the posting date.

The only exception is if you’ve already loosely posted about the idea on your blog prior to Sunday, March 12th, 2017. Loose posts include ideas such as a basic plot, snippets, meta, headcanons, etc., that you’re now planning to expand into your Mini-Bang fic. If this is the case please hold off on posting further details about your plot through claims so that the process is as anonymous as possible.

Where will we post our fics for Posting Day? All fics will also be posted to your own AO3 or Tumblr. After that, send a link to us and we’ll post it. More information will be provided as we draw closer to the deadline.

Will I need the story to be totally completed by the deadline? All fic and art must be completed by the final deadline of Sunday, July 16th. Absolutely. Period.

Can fics be edited between the Final Deadline of July 16th and posting on August 1st? Yes. We just require that the story be finished. If you need a final read-over for editing, we’d much rather you do that than leave in mistakes because you think you’re not supposed to touch it. We absolutely encourage you use those extra couple of weeks of organization to polish. How do I post my artist’s images to my fic on AO3? Check out our tutorial post on this here.

Additional/Misc.

I have a question not covered on this post! Please swing by our askbox. Thanks!

#FAQ #Voltron Gen Mini Bang #Info #mod post

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jigneshthanki-blog · 5 years

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New to iOS Game Development? Here’s Everything You Need to Know

I think that anyone can develop an iPhone game. It’s ok if you are a beginner with no budget or having no experience in iOS game development. I know the path isn’t so easy but there are very few set-up costs that you have to bare and if you have that immense passion to learn, then “You Can Do It”.

Tools that are going to help you master the art of iOS game development:

We all know, that without having the proper tools, we cannot conquer anything, they give you the extra edge in any field. Choosing the right tools for iOS Game Development or for any type of development for that matter is very essential and necessary for a beginner. Game development is not an effortless process for the newbie and it’s really important to choose the best tools to work with. Sometimes the budget is bounded or it doesn’t exist at all. There are some verified and profitable tools for game development.

Best Gaming Engines:

Right now, there are only two contenders, which makes selection pretty upright.

First one, UNREAL and the second one is UNITY3D. Both engines are affordable and easy to learn for rookies, though there are some important differences which become might become important in the future.

UNITY3D ENGINE:

If you want to go alone in developing the iOS game development, use UNITY3D.

Unity3D is a very powerful game engine, easy to learn, and comes with a huge community of plugin developers. The development environment is very subtle and easy to understand, this provides novices to craft a game experience from scratch within a few weeks of passionate work and purchasing a few additional components(or not). Moreover, Unity is regularly improving its metrics & analytics systems which are crucial for mobile game developers.

Unity3D is not just a place for developing games but also a platform on which you can promote and monetize your game to ensure its forever success.

The other thing you might want to think about is that their logo will appear with the basic version - if you don’t care and you want to use their tools — the basic version is a great entry point. Conclusion: Unity empowers independent developers, monitor your statistics, promote and earn.

UNREAL ENGINE:

If you want to be in a team, then go for Unreal engine,

The Unreal Engine is the workhorse of the AAA high-end games industry. It excels at large scale productions where big teams have to come together in an established way. Many tools require mastery over time, leading to specialization.

The Unreal Engine permit alterations for commercial games, allowing newcomers to add new content like campaigns, code, and levels through plugin modifications (MODs) to many big franchise releases. This allows novices to pick up skills quickly by tinkering with content from a commercial game instead of stumbling through a vacuum.

Conclusion: Increasingly powerful devices can take advantage of increasingly powerful technology. Rookies can learn & upskill quickly by joining a project, as long as they work well in a team and are happy to deep-dive and practice to realize their full potential.

How to Use UNITY3D tools on Xcode?

You don’t need to be an Apple Developer account to build to devices, any Apple ID is sufficient for building only to your own device for testing.

A Basic account with your personal iPhone is sufficient enough to test your iOS game project. When you make a new project in Unity3D, it will create a folder which contains all the Xcode files needed to run your project in Xcode. This project should be compiled and signed before deploying on the devices.

Although these are some basic points you need to follow but, you can always read their official documentation to dive deep into the development phase.

Note: To test games, you must have an actual iPhone, But I guess that’s obvious. Simulators can’t handle the pressure. :-p

Apple built-in libraries for iOS Game development:

If you want to make an iOS game, you really have two options.

Either, you can develop it using a development platform like Unity and then build it for iOS, or you can write it natively for iOS.

ARKit:

Latest and greatest release by Apple is, ARkit, yes it has been there for a time now, but it has gotten better as the year passes, as they announce new technology committed to AR. Right now, iOS devices are capable of some fine AR works, it is the largest AR platform available, allowing us to make great use of those high-end processors in developing some cool AR games in the real world. Just google AR games in ios, and look for yourself, those life-size animated game, making you feel like you are in the game itself. It is one the biggest gaming platform to play with.

Metal:

The best framework available for processing and rendering a 3D scene, to optimize overall performance by performing parallel Task. It really helps when optimizing a 3D game with engines such a unity and unreal. This makes iOS game development more sophisticated.

Are you programming exclusively for an Apple OS (iOS)? Then have a look at Metal.

SceneKit:

From the point of programming, it is fairly simple, just adding some lines of code, can present a model on the screen. If your motive is just to add some 3D Objects in the app, it’s the best kit available in the market, and the views properly integrate with the rest of the OS. The new shaders are really effective, output some great results, visual quality can be very high. The performance overall is close to best.

I have to give it to Apple, they are trying to offer somewhat an alternative to Unity, by providing SceneKit with GameplayKit (discussed below). Although it is good for lightweight games to mid-level games, they can be more swiftly.

So in Conclusion, the available API’s works great to add small, lite 3D things to your app, but if your motive is to make a really heavy game, then you will really hit a rock.

SpriteKit:

You can tell the difference between Scenekit and SpriteKit, from the image above, right?

In case(chances are low, but still), here’s the difference.

Apple provides SpriteKit for 2D scenes and SceneKit for 3D scenes.

SpriteKit, if you don’t care about being cross-platform.

It can create 2D based games, they are optimized for the iOS platform, physics simulation, and event-handling support.

GameplayKit:

If you are targetting iOS, GamePlayKit with Spritekit, and SceneKit to create games. Although the perfect alternative to using here is Unity, with lot more support even with naive Xcode development.

GamePlayKit has a range of AI’s to help you out logics, mastering the user actions and making things a bit tougher on the next level.

Model I/O:

As the name suggests, it processes 3D models, textures them, adds more reality to it, and also generate basic 3D models.

It uses both CPU, as well as GPU to perform its tasks, it can handle 3D assets very well, it supports various types of 3D files generated by industry standard game engines, and can render them with natively very well while integrating it perfectly with the Native base.

Game Controller:

Apple also has controller API, included in their Game Controller Framework, it includes specifications for hardware controller to ensure a perfect match to both players and programmers.

You can learn more about them in Apple’s Documentation.

Game Center/GameKit & On-Demand Resources:

Although all these Kits are useful for game development, you also need status for your games, analyze the daily activity of your games.

Gamekit helps you to socialize your app players with others, track their scoreboards, make the game more competitive. You can benefit points thought the joining game invitations, track your invitation, all these things really help in popularizing the game.

On-Demand Resources:

Although it is not going to help you with your game development, but it can surely increase your users by reducing the size of the game, works best post-game development, this is a really useful feature provided by Apple, it allows the developers to move less useful resources to the cloud, and takes less space on devices, and only load when the game is launched.

With that being said that’s not it for today, the gaming community on iOS is not limited to these kits, I am sure there are pretty powerful third-party game API’s available, but it’s OK to start learning one step at a time. If you are stuck somewhere in your Unity3D game development, Get a quote from our experts. For further queries, you can write to us at [email protected] OR Call us on: +1–631–954–6922.

“And lastly, However you choose to develop your games, the key is really all about getting started and not giving up”

#iOS #iOS game development #letsnurture #Engineering at LetsNurture #Unity3D #Unity3D game development Unreal Engine #Hire game developers #Mobile game development #ARKit

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tuxxi · 7 years

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Momentum Mod - August 2017 development update & news

Hello objects with mass and velocity!

… *cough* ...

You're all long overdue for an update from the team, and I bet you all thought we were dead (again!) Rest assured, even though it's been 8 (EIGHT!) months since our last update, we are not dead!

We’ve made some large changes to the workflow for developing the mod. Thanks to Gocnak’s personal sacrifice of blood, sweat, tears, and $100, the mod is now officially on Steam Direct (but not released yet, read below)! There’s no voting process to get the game released on Steam, but it does bring an exciting turn for the game’s development.

What Steam Direct Means for Your Momentum Mod

“Am I gonna have to pay? So is it going to be Early Access? When does it come out? Will the game stay Open Source? How can people contribute? Am I real? How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren’t real?”

These are all very good questions.

Price

First and foremost: the game is going to be Free. Period. In fact, it HAS to be free. Valve requires developers that wish to sell Source Engine games to pay a hefty fine upfront for the premium 2004 Havok™ Physics Engine™™, which can be upwards of $35,000™. We don’t have that kind of money, nor do we even want to bother raising it, mostly because Valve hasn’t been very keen on licensing Source 1 out to developers, unless you possibly have a major publisher behind you (looking at you, Respawn). It makes sense, since they have been working on Source 2* anyways, which aims to be a competitor to the other engines available.

* If, and only if Source 2 comes out, we will look into porting Momentum to it. (Source 2 has been “coming soon” for the last 3 years. Sure, Dota 2 has it, but the engine itself isn’t released yet for developers. We’d actually be dead if we were holding our breath for it, so we’re just going full Steam ahead with Source 1, for now.)

Early Access/Release Date

On the subject of Early Access: the answer is Yes, it will be out on Steam on Early Access, but only when Alpha is ready. Early Access on Steam has left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, and we don’t want to put Momentum out when it clearly isn’t ready yet for the public to consume. As of writing this, we still have the map selector and leaderboards to finish. And these things, they take time. Once we have a rough implementation for both, we’ll begin to push out the game through Steam. We want anybody, regardless of CS:S ownership or not, to be able to download the game, play maps, submit times, and see all the extra features we have. Once we get to that state, it’ll be ready for “release” through Early Access on Steam.

Open Source/Contributing

As it was from the beginning, we’re taking any and all help we can get on the game. However, this doesn’t mean we’ll allow anybody to just join and say they’re a part of the team, when they do very little work. We’re going to need a bit more of a vetting process, which is defined below:

Programming

We have plenty of programmers, but if you know C++ and want to help out, I would suggest forking the SDK 2013, getting a mod running, and make some modifications to show us. Getting used to the workflow is very key, since Momentum uses it. If you need pointers, follow the Valve Dev Wiki. Once that is figured out, and you have the hang of it, send us a link.

The main part of Steamworks means you need Momentum “redeemed” on your account, even to help test the development work you’ve done, since we’re no longer just a source mod. We can generate Steam keys for this purpose, but we need to make sure they’re for the right reason.

Keep in mind that this is just for joining and contributing to the team directly, in the sense of long-term coding investment. If you wish to add a simple feature, you can clone the repository, add your feature, and submit a pull request for us to review.

Art / Level Design

We’re in heavy need for artists! While we don’t have a general art direction for the game, the more people we can get suggesting an art direction for the player model, the weapons, the levels for the campaign, the better! If you want to contribute, just contact us with a link to your portfolio. Don’t worry about how high quality your work is, as long as you’ve done something, just show us! We’ll need 2D artists for logos/UI assets/concept art, and 3D artists for models/texturing/mapping. If any of this sounds exciting for you, don’t hesitate to reach out!

Playtesting

Playtesting is probably the most popular thing that people request. With the Steam workflow, we can now generate keys to give to testers, so that they may redeem the game on their Steam account, and receive updates from us directly. Though we want to clarify: Playtesting means actually testing and giving feedback. We aren’t giving out keys for people to play ~5 minutes of the game and never touching it again, until a new update. Thus, if you want to playtest, your best chance is to join the Momentum Mod Discord, and wait until more playtesters are needed.

What Steam Direct Means for Our Momentum Mod

As described earlier, the process of moving Momentum to Steam Direct has also helped our development as well.

Ease of Use

The main appeal of releasing on Steam is the ease of use for both ourselves and our players. When the game is finally public, playing the game becomes a simple click to install. How it works under the hood is pretty cool:

Depots

As with any game that goes through Steam Direct, Momentum now has its own dedicated AppID. With this AppID comes the ability to make up to 10 depots for the game, which is very, very convenient. A depot can be OS dependent, meaning certain OSes get certain files. An example would be Linux only getting the base game content, along with the engine to run it, while Windows users can get all of the above, plus the tools that were only compiled for Windows (Hammer, Faceposer, etc). This makes the Linux download smaller than the Windows one.

Updates

Updates are sent through changes in depots, meaning any update to the game is now sent automatically through Steam, meaning no more complete redownloads of the mod in order to update!

One Game to Worry About

You can also get rid of your SDK 2013 install (unless you need it for another project or something), since Momentum uses the binaries that we pack into the depots, meaning no reliance on that clunky 4GB install anymore!

Juicy APIs

Firstly, with the process of incorporating Steam into the workflow, we’ve seen the included Steamworks API, already in the Source Engine, be used to its fullest potential. A previous example was using the included Steamworks API to mount CS:S automatically. But with the partner Steamworks API, and our own AppID, there’s now a couple more endpoints we’re gleaming at the eyes about:

Steam’s Matchmaking and Networking API

One endpoint of the Steamworks API is their Matchmaking system, which introduces Lobbies. Lobbies have been very appealing to us, and were the main reason we wanted to be on Steam so badly.

While Momentum is primarily a single player mod, we wanted to support the ability to invite, talk to, spectate and race your friends, all without having to host a server. Steam’s Lobby and Peer-to-Peer networking system handles all of this for us. Currently, players can host lobbies at a whim, invite any friend they want, play on any map they want with (or without) their friends, be able to spectate them if they’re on the same map, and chat across different maps. And here’s a picture of it in action:

Steam’s Dedicated Servers

While Lobbies are nice, we haven’t forgotten about servers either! Lobbies will be more for “you and your friends and maybe theirs too,” while servers will aim to recreate the experiences found in CS:S currently, like map rotations, custom models, and chat spam for every WR. Steam allows us to create a dedicated server tool, and using the Steam API, writing a server browser becomes even easier. Servers are definitely slated for our To-Do list, but won’t fully be implemented until after Alpha launches.

Steam’s Authentication API

Another endpoint that was only available with a Steamworks Partner account was Authentication. Steam provides a myriad of Authentication API endpoints that will prove to be extremely helpful for when we need to prove who you are, when communicating with our servers. These will be used when submitting times, downloading maps, and so on, later down the road.

Store Page

As with any game on Steam, we’ll be getting a store page! We still need to design it, and get proper screenshots (and a trailer) before we can publish it, but it should be exciting to see Momentum’s official page when we’re ready to launch!

So, what now?

“This is cool and all, but what does it all mean?”

What this all boils down to is: Momentum will no longer receive any public releases that can be downloaded through GitHub. The next public release will be the public Alpha, released on Steam, when it’s ready.*

* Unless you playtest, in which case, you’ll be testing our features in between 0.6.2 and 1.0.0. But again, not everybody needs to playtest, and we would much rather have people playing a much more complete game than Momentum currently is.

While this jump from 0.6.2 to 1.0.0 would be jarring for most, this doesn’t imply the game isn’t being worked on. You can follow development progress through this blog (we promise no more 8 month breaks™), our twitter, and our Discord server. Gocnak sometimes streams development progress on his stream. We’ll continue to update this blog with major features as they’re hot off the press, to show our progress we’re making towards Alpha.

That’s all for now! So until next time,

Momentum Mod Team

#MomentumMod #GameDev.#SourceEngine #Surf #bunnyhop

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