Challenges of Update 1.13

It has been a turbulent year for many reasons, but we are starting to climb above the pile, with help and support from our partners at Coatsink, SuperGenius, Robot Teddy, and Unity. Because of this we wanted to update you on what has been going on at Boneloaf, why updates have been slow, and our plans for the next year.

Community

First of all, we wanted to just say thank you to all of our amazing community. You really make it worthwhile. Watching the community grow with us, all of the videos and responses have honestly made some of the more tougher times bearable. We’ve even received fan letters, which we never thought would have been a thing - we’ve proudly framed and put them all on our office walls! Oh, and we want to give a special acknowledgement to the community run Discord which means we get to communicate on a more personal level with fans and even play Gang Beasts with them from time to time.

Update 1.13

In order to be able to release the update, we needed to fix certain things. And to start fixing things, we needed to review systems that touch on a multitude of parts of the game, including Online, how we build stages, and how we build costumes. Some of these fixes are in this update, such as the new glass fracture and buoyancy system, which not only look substantially better, but also are more optimal (aside from a few bugs we are still working on).

Other systems will take a bit more time to implement into the game, such as an update to the costume system [we have been working on] with SuperGenius. Once it’s done, it will significantly improve performance and also give us better flexibility and control over the way costumes look.

Coatsink has also been making many fixes, improvements, and optimisations to the online portion of the game. Some of these are in this update, which is why it now plays a lot more like local play, but there are many more improvements to come!

We have also partnered with Robot Teddy to help us with the game production and business decisions. It has been an invaluable aid to us throughout 2020 and one of the main players to make it possible for us to release this new update while self-publishing Gang Beasts.

Finally, we’d like to mention we also brought Unity onboard early this year to help us with improving our internal tools, pipeline and workflows, optimising, and just in general future-proofing the game. We’re incredibly excited to be able to show the outcomes of this work.

A Meatmass Miracle

Well, as some of you who are reading this probably already know, we finally got update 1.13 out this year and although we feel there’s still quite a lot we need to improve with the game, it’s been great to be able to get updates out again. We feel like this update should address a lot of the issues people had with the game (other than the bugs that went out with it that we’re still working on), especially with the online portion of the game which made it play significantly different to local games. Hopefully, updates should be a lot more frequent from here on out, as we’ve improved our build pipelines a bit [as well as] a few other things that were making it difficult to get updates out.

2021, What the Future Holds for Us

We have a multitude of things we’re working on to improve Gang Beasts. We plan to completely overhaul our UI, which is really in need of some TLC. We’ll also be improving the game’s visuals now we’ve moved to Unity 2020.

Our costume system update is getting very close to being finished, which will give us better flexibility and control over the way costumes look (as in better use of tints and textures), and let us bring back some of the legacy costumes, like the “Christmas baubles”! This should also help us improve turnaround times on creating new costumes as it's significantly easier to work with.

We’ve also got several stages, plus escalations for existing stages, that we’ve been working on too and we look forward to sharing them with you as they become a bit more finished. As part of the stage work, we’ve also started rebuilding the city background to give a better sense of where things are positioned in the world, with the idea of being able to spot one stage from another. If you look below at the WIP blockout of the new city, you may even be able to spot one or two of the concept locations for new stages…

With all this being said, it is by no means a definitive list of what we’ve been working on and what’s to come. There’s a lot more planned and hopefully we can share more next year!

Let us know @gangbeasts if you’ve figured out how to escape the tentacle deathgrip yet.

Boneloaf