Sub Rosa
The new update has been taking longer than I hoped, one of the main issues is the game is now too big for me to handle by myself. I've been talking with a few people about helping out though, so we'll hopefully be getting that together soon. In the meantime I've been making progress on some new systems. It's also been cool to see people playing again, sometimes when you're working on a game you can get lost in adding new features that you forget about what's already there. It has brought up the problems with Alpha 25 again, but I've been designing solutions to most of those.
Some of the systems I've been working on the past few months are:
Player Movement
Physics-based movement is something I've been working on for years, Sub Rosa already has some physics for the players but the legs are faked with a raycast. I've been adding physics-based legs with balancing and propulsion, which will create a lot of possibilities for gameplay. Some of those possibilities are:
Players stumbling when injured
Diving through windows
Sliding
Jumping and grabbing on to ledges
Reputation System
One of the main problems with Alpha 25 is the imbalance with deals. If one corporation's players have way more money than another then the poorer one can't really offer anything worthwhile. The reputation system will mean the game can give players in a corporation more money than the deal is worth to them, but they will want complete the deal anyway otherwise their reputation will drop.
One example of how this will work would be:
Goldmen gets a disk, the corporation wants 50k for it. Monsota wants the disk, and they get 100k to buy it with. If Monsota can talk Goldmen into selling the disk for 50k, the players will have the other 50k to split among themselves. However, if Goldmen sells the disk for 100k, their players can pay the 50k to the corporation and have 50k left over. This will create the negotiations that earlier versions of the game had, and I think that would be pretty cool.
I'm also considering a reputation system and/or police for crimes, to hopefully reduce some of the chaos in the current version.
Golf for Workgroups
Golf? is a game we started working on 12 years ago, since then we've done a few jams working on different parts of the game. It's always been one of my favorite games to play, I used to tell people it was the funnest game no one ever played. Last year we talked with Devolver about finally finishing up and releasing it, and earlier this year we met up for a week and got a good build of it ready. We're calling it Golf for Workgroups, you can check it out here:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/572160
For anyone worried about this slowing down development of Sub Rosa, most of the game was already done, and the a lot the things I've been working on for Golf will be used in Sub Rosa also like:
Improved server browsing
Easier server hosting (no more port forwarding)
Full 3D wheel physics (although there probably won't be rockets on the backs of the cars in SR :))
Hockey?
We haven't forgotten about Hockey?, in fact we're hoping Golf does well enough that we can do another jam on Hockey? sometime this year.
