Hey LightNiters! Welcome to our Dev Blog, where you will read about the progress we've made in the past few months. Our Multiplayer system keep progressing nicely with new polished features, animations, enhancements and some improvements in the store.
Also, don't miss the new customisation skins we've created with some of our collaborators' topics and aesthetics!
Discord
Join our Discord channel & participate in our battle-pass to unlock skins & earn bitcoin! It is simple, you just need to have access to our early-access and be active in our discord channel.
Below you have a picture of our discord battle-passs, only for LightNiters!
We encourage a happy & healthy bitcoin game community in our discord channel by providing these rewards scheme sponsored by Satoshis Games team. We enjoy the way we are evolving & we expect to have a battle-pass in-game soon ?
Store
Some UX improvements have been carried out during October. Now, there is a better way to view the balance with a real-time updated rate in USD. It's very easy, just click on your balance to see the conversion in dollars.
A new version for the profile area of the store has been minimallistically redesigned to add a header & subheader on the section.
Withdrawals
Yihiii! Everyone likes #StackingSats. Hell yeah ? Now there is a new consistent and extremely attractive way to withdraw your balance from the game.
We have implemented this new feature to extract your balance from the game thinking about traditional gamers who are not typically accustomed to using bitcoin yet.
When you play Light Nite you accumulate sats in your balance, and now with the Bitrefill integration we have just made, you can withdraw your balance in the format of a voucher codes for Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Nike, Steam and so many stores globally.
Withdrawal Tiers
Yuppp! As part of a consistent development process of improving our withdrawals we have gamified the process. Now, the withdrawals are divided into tiers, and such tiers can be accessed based on the discord battle-pass & referrals. The more referrals you accumulate the more tiers you unlock and same with the discord battle-pass.
We are also adding more in-game features to allow the foundations for individual & co-op missions, different challenges, easter-eggs and more to create the battle-pass in the game with in-game challenges to unlock more withdrawal tiers easily.
New Pointer UX
Another one! ?
That's right, we have always wanted to give a more gaming look to the UX of the webstore. We have implemented a styled cursor to give the pounter a more gaming feeeeeeeeeling. We hope you enjoy this new feature. It also comes with a helper to auto-select buttons and links.
Animations
We have been working on the new revamped animation controller for characters, which will be based on a state of the art animation technique called Motion Matching. The final use of this technique is however subject to multiplayer testing, in order to study the viability of the new technology.
In the meantime, we made some improvements to the actual animation system, tweaking at the same time the gameplay speed, and the camera and aiming sensitivity.
Customisation Assets
Three skin collections and four character skins were prepared. Make sure to check them out in the store! We also fixed a few visual issues that some skins had.
Bull Bitcoin Collection
We collaborated with Bull Bitcoin to prepare a character, a hoverboard, and two weapon (shotgun and assault rifle) skins.
Bitrefill Collection
The Bitrefill collection consists of three character skins (Cryptonaut, Bluenaut, and Retronay), a hoverboard, and a melee weapon.
MtSocks Collection
MtSocks partnered with us to make four of their socks designs (Bitcoin Rocket Socks, Bitcoin Roller Coaster Socks, Bitcoin Wizard Socks, and Lightning Socks) available in the game as customisation options.
Charka Character
Charka is an old lady wearing a party dress and running shoes to be ready for #StackingSats.
Fiat Eater Character
The time has come for operation FIAT EATER to commence. This skin is designed based on the character depicted in the art work.
Default Female & Dani Character
The game has a default male character that was equipped when no other character skin is equipped. Now, the default male and female skins are available as customisation options. Just like the male version, this skin will be included with the game for free.
Dani, a young man in casual clothes, found himself in the middle of the battlefield.
Map changes
It has snowed a lot these days. And apart from that, we made many adjustments in the level to make sure colliders in objects work as expected when interacting with them.
Vegetation has changed a lot to better match the aesthetics of the game. At the same time, we fixed many problems in the terrain, materials, textures, and the basement was made bigger to have the necessary space for a third person shooter. We will avoid spaces that are too narrow in the future!
COVID19
The Covid19 minigame has been through a very thorough overhaul, with visible improvements in the virus particles behaviour, path finding, and disease zones/eggs progression.
The game was also totally rebalanced, in order to make gameplay more challenging and rewarding, featuring a different scoring system, that more accurately reflects the effort put into it.
Local Avoidance
A new local avoidance system prevents particles from intersecting with each other, which will come in handy when we implement hordes... ?
There are still some issues with paths and clipping geometry of virus particles, but these will be dealt with on a future update.
Remnants
Also new is the concept of remnants, a state of disease zones where they're not active anymore (they don't count towards the goal), but they can be reactivated very easily by any nearby particle.
You'll have to decide whether to leave them intact in order to save ammo, but risk having them reactivated again by a rogue particle, or destroy them for good, but waste precious ammo (and time) in the process.
This will make more sense in an upcoming update, when we implement item pickups, where ammo and medikits will be limited and scarce, so you'll have to ration them carefully.
New Effects and Transitions
Particles, eggs and disease zones now feature cool transition and destruction effects, including physically accurate destruction of elements into fragments.
Gameplay Improvements
A ton of polishing went into some gameplay details that, while small individually, in the aggregate drastically improve the overall experience.
Ragdoll
The character now goes into ragdoll mode when he dies, where the body goes limp and physics takes over, much like in the real world.
The ragdoll is impacted by the character's velocity at the time, as well as the velocity and mass of the projectile that hit it, which, while not physically accurate, makes it way more cool! ?
Hitboxes
No more pill shaped colliders, we now support a very detailed hitbox system, which allows to accurately mimic the various body parts and limbs.
The same hitbox setup will be shared for all characters, regardless of their proportions, in order to ensure fairness of gameplay (so that no one has an edge over anyone else simply for using a different character).
Damage Levels
Having different hitboxes also means that we can track precisely where the projectile hit, so we now support different damage levels, depending on where you hit:
- Critical damage: Head
- High damage: Torso
- Medium damage: Inner limbs (legs, arms, etc)
- Low damage: Outer limbs (feet, hands, etc)
You can check out how much damage you're inflicting through the differently colored damage indicators that pop up when you land a hit.
Death Cam
Dying has also become a more polished experience... ?
Apart from ragdolling, there is now a camera animation and post-processing effect to make it abundantly clear that you're no longer roaming within the living...
If the game mode allows you to respawn, the respawn timeout (in seconds) will also be shown.
Bullet Traces
As you're getting shot, it is helpful to know where the shots are coming from.. that's when bullet tracing comes in handy.
You can now get a sense of where the shots are coming from with the new bullet tracing feature:
We've also added some bullet whizzing sounds, when the shots hit nearby.
Sandbox Expansion
The sandbox is an unofficial "level", that we use to develop the minigames, gameplay mechanics, etc.
Up until now it has had more of a novelty aspect to it, and it still does, but we've expanded it to be a little bit more fun, with playable versions of the minigames, along with some other interactive toys.
The minigames in the Sandbox don't award any satoshis, but they each have their own independent leaderboards (unless you activate immunity while playing them ?).
In the future, we expect to add even more minigames and experiments to the playground... ;)
Interactivity
A basic interactive system has been implemented, allowing the player to interact with buttons and levers.
In the future this system will be expanded to allow more complex behaviour, such as triggering traps, opening/closing doors, carrying/dropping (non-inventory) items, pushing objects around, etc...
Surfaces Test Zone
One of the new zones in the Sandbox is the surface test zone, where you can test the different surface materials, and their impact effects.
We already support about 24 different surface types, ranging from Mud to Alien, each providing different impact effects and decals, different footstep sounds (coming soon), different breaking patterns, etc.
Covid Mockup
A simplified mockup of the CQC map has been implemented in the Sandbox, where you can test a shorter version of the Covid19 minigame.
Simply go to the console and toggle the Covid lever on or off.
Bots
Bots, also known as NPCs (Non-Player Characters), have been introduced into the game, for now only in the Sandbox, but we plan to use them in upcoming minigames and game modes as well.
You can already play with a fixed bot that shoots back if you get too close:
All the bots share the same underlying system, with different specializations for each case, which means that the Covid virus particles, the human bots, and even the turret are all close cousins... :D
For now all humanoid bots are fixed in place, but very soon we'll make them move, so stay tuned, you don't want to miss that...
Destruction System
The assets that players will be able to destroy without rhyme or reason are still under construction (ironically). While the system is not ready, we already made the template pieces that constitute the base for any future buildings that will be subject to destruction.
From these templates we'll create many different types of assets, with or without decorations, while working in the programming itself of the system, along with the different states of destruction and FX of the assets.
Leaderboards
Leaderboards are now implemented, and you can view them both in-game and on Steam (although the Steam community leaderboards will only be visible after the game launches).
You can now compare your best score for each minigame/game mode to other players, and know how you rank in relation to everyone else.
It will also make tournaments and events easier, as we can track them separately in dedicated leaderboards.
For now, these are all time leaderboards, but we plan to also support periodic leaderboards, such as weekly, monthly, yearly, etc...
It is important to note that this being a pre-alpha prototype, the leaderboards can (and will) be reset from time to time, most notably after any major changes are done to the gameplay/scoring system.
Closing Remarks
These last few months have been very productive, with the bulk of the changes being in the background infrastructure, which is getting sturdier and more stable by the day.
Next, we'll be working on some of the most requested features, such as overhauling the character controller, doing a full rewrite of the camera controller (to improve aiming), support different weapons (including melee), and fixing a ton of the issues that our community has posted in the feedback page.
But enough talk, we have plenty of work to do! ?
Stay tuned for the next feature packed update, let's meet on the other side... ?
Ahmed El-Noamany
A passionate and highly skilled 3D Artist, knowledgeable in the various development stages of 3D models. Aims to make Light Nite a great success using experience from working on countless projects.
Daniel Brinca
At 9 years old I discovered that I liked making games more than actually playing them... more than 30 years later, I feel lucky to be able to keep doing exactly what I always wanted to do.