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[cow_trix]

Original Post:

Hurtworld is a multiplayer sandbox survival experience - hardcore crafting, building, combat, exploration and vehicles. Battle hunger, cold, heat, and the dangerous environment around you. Tame your surroundings, build a base, explore your world. But the biggest threat out there is other players - create alliances, or destroy your enemies.

Developed for PC, Hurtworld is aiming for a 2015 release. A closed alpha is on the way - if you'd like to be one of the first to test our game, sign up at www.hurtworld.com!

We're developing Hurtworld in Unity, in a team of 5 - two programmers and three artists. We sometimes stream development builds on our Twitch channel and tweet on @PlayHurtworld, so be sure to check us out! If you find our project interesting, please leave any suggestions, comments, or questions and I'll be sure to answer them as quickly as possible!

[Ticebilla]

I'm not usually interested in building games much anymore, but you've managed to pique my interest with this. It's looking pretty interesting.

[cow_trix]

@Ticebilla - That's awesome to hear!

Some shiny character GIFs for you all!

[cow_trix]

More concept stuff! This time a mockup of the construction overhaul that's coming - the current building materials are completely placeholder.



Then, hazmat suits! A big part of Hurtworld is going to be crafting to gain access to normally inaccessible areas. There's going to be large parts of the world where passive environmental hazards make them uninhabitable to unprepared players - but nothing insurmountable!

[cow_trix]

Gameplay gifs! Higher res webms linked. In order: eating a steak we've cooked on a campfire, just running through some rocks, and placing a workbench to be able to craft more complex items.

[cow_trix]

We've recently posted an FAQ, so I thought I'd throw that up here as it sheds a lot of light on where the game's at, and what we're going for:

What is Hurtworld?

Hurtworld is a Multiplayer Hardcore FPS Survival Sandbox. Let's just call it a MHFPSSS for short?
 
We're focused on:
Survival progression that never becomes a trivial, and remains a meaningful challenge through to the endgame
Powerful sandbox tools that allow you to really change your environment
Hand crafted worlds that allow for a well balanced and tuned difficulty progression
Creating a platform for endless game types and maps.
Tight FPS Gunplay and Physics
 
What is the world like?
 
Our first official map "Diemen's Land" is a punishing desert world. There is a strong progression of difficulty the further you move away from the starting zone, including harsh environmental effects and dangerous creatures.  Even when well geared, procedural events can ruin your plans very quickly. The world is littered with ruins of times before, with plenty of tech to be scavenged.
 
When can I get an Alpha key?
 
We are working our way towards the first alpha build which we are aiming to get out by the end of June. Keys will be released in batches based on date subscribed, and enough people near you to populate a server. The best thing you can do to ensure you get a key is spreading the word to increase the chances we can support a server in your region.
 
Will you allow modding?
 
Modding is one of our top priorities. I look at Hurtworld as a platform for different sandbox game types. We are designing the game we want to play most, however the framework of player movement, gear, combat, environmental effects, AI, vehicles, construction and gathering can all be applied to vastly different game modes with very little work. We plan to release some minigame modes in future to run alongside the full survival mode, I can't wait to see what other people do with a solid FPS framework with the backing of a fleshed out survival game.
 
Can I shoot people in the face?
 
Yes PVP is an important part of Hurtworld. That said, murdering your fellow Hurtworldians needn't be the focus of the game, just a tempting option. We feel that survival games deteriorating into deathmatch is due to a lack of endgame content, and plan to address this by giving players other goals to set themselves. More on PVP soon...
 
Construction?
 
This system will be one of the more fleshed out parts of the alpha, you can claim a plot of land, construct a home/stronghold using small prefabricated pieces of different shapes and sizes. Built to be extremely flexible we plan to create a massive library of both static and dynamic construction blocks. Currently in dev is dynamic machines, crafting automation and item/resource pipes and electrical cables!
 
Will you add procedural maps?
 
Currently we are focusing on hand crafted maps. We will eventually release an SDK for Unity so the community can create their own maps in-engine. It's not out of the realm of possibility that a server will have its own unique map designed by its admins.
 
Can I host my own server?
 
Yes! During the first phase of the alpha we will only be releasing the Windows client (which can be used to run a server), not far off we will release a Linux headless server build.
 
Can I make YouTube videos / stream / post thoughts?
 
Go for it! All I ask is that you clarify that we are in very early alpha when discussing the game.
 
Where can we talk about ideas / suggestions / bugs?
 
For general discussion we will be most active on reddit:
 
http://www.reddit.com/r/hurtworld
 
For bug reports please submit them here:
 
https://www.hostedredmine.com/projects/hurtworld/
 
What's the player limit per server?
 
We are shooting for 50, during early alpha it may be less than that until we iron out some client side performance issues.

Do you think we missed anything?

[cow_trix]

Hey Guys,

Quick update on our progress. For the last couple of weeks we've been focusing on fleshing out content and trying to clear out all known bugs before we unleash the alpha.

Continuous Gathering

Two game-play elements we've been working on improving are gathering and base construction. The main challenge with base construction in survival games is balancing the raiding mechanics. Generally the optimal way to construct a base is similar to constructing a bank safe. This doesn't leave much room for creativity. Raiding and defending tends to be a test of who spends more resources rather than skill - we think this is boring.

We love the feeling of claiming land and building massive structures, we are working on tuning the metagame to reward players that occupy more space.

On the other side of that, we want to reward players that invest in gathering techniques for specific resources to create an ecosystem where trading actually makes sense.

Introducing the first continuous gathering system, the automatic drill (and the new blast furnace)


This guy will keep running as long as it has fuel, and depending on placement in the world, and proximity to other mining drills, it will gather resources while you're away.

The result is:
More land = More resources = Larger area to defend = More interesting raiding
 
Status effects
One of the major goals of Hurtworld is to create a level of survival depth that will continue to challenge you through hundreds of hours of gameplay without becoming a trivial task of topping up a bar over and over again.

I've tried a heap of different ways to do this. The hardest thing to overcome is throwing super harsh conditions at a player (ones that will kill you in seconds) while making sure the player always knows what is going on.

I think what I've got now finally solves those problems. Each status effect has a stat bar that is only visible when it's a problem, or is going to be a problem soon. It clearly shows, what state its in, how quickly it's changing and how long till it will make you die (hopefully without spamming you with too much info when you have it under control).



Mils has done an awesome job designing all the status effect icons, the bar colors are mostly programmer art for now, the main point is the information they express. Hopefully I'm not the only person who understands what they mean.

Secondary to this we can now define visual and audio alerts based on different conditions for each stat that will make sure you don't miss an issue, and won't get spammed by something that's not an issue.

Chris made heaps of new animations, also introducing the Rafaga. A super annoying predator bird.


Gav's been giving the tools / weapons another pass with higher detail. Eventually we'll bring everything up to this level, for now functionality takes priority.


The closed alpha target of end of June is still possible but optimistic, it depends on how the map progresses over the next couple of weeks.

[cow_trix]

Quick update on the shotgun!

[jmakegames]

Those character animations (especially the one with the rifle in your OP) are incredible!

[cow_trix]

@jmakegames - thanks! Those are the work of our awesome animator, Chris, and modeler, Gav.

The boss recently did an interview about the game, and I thought I'd post it here. Enjoy!

Also, here's a rifle for ya all:


And finally, we've got a public Trello now so you can see how we're going with bugs and stuff. Check it out here!

[Christian]

Those animations in the OP really make me wish this game was third person. I don't mind survival games, but I'm tired of first person ones. But the art style here is nice

[cow_trix]

Hey Christian. The game supports both 3rd and 1st person - so you're in luck!

[cow_trix]

New C4 model! For raiding bases and blowing up stuff. Check it out:

[cow_trix]

Hey guys! Just a quick update on where we at with Hurtworld

Performance

Something that came out of the alpha tests was that servers were struggling at around 17+ people.

This is much lower than we wanted, so Spencer our team lead has spent the last couple of weeks doing a major refactor and performance optimization on both the server and the client to ensure we can handle around 50 players at once.

As you might have seen in other early access projects, doing major architectural changes to a game that is already in the wild takes much longer to get anything done. So while we could just throw it out now and fix things later, we would be building on unstable foundations and the work to fix them would increase tenfold.

These changes should fix all memory leaks server and client side, along with removing most lag spikes where the game would freeze for a second or two.

Structures also build in one tenth of the time, making joining older servers MUCH faster.

On the client side, we have heavily optimized the player model, and created a cut down low lod skeleton to be switched in when there are lots of people around to keep framerates smooth.

Security

Another area that needed some love was security. We designed the Hurtworld network infrastructure to be as cheat proof as humanly possible. All player movement and bullet detection is done server side, meaning the only cheating possible is a local area ESP and Aimbots which can be targeted by something like VAC.

However something that we glossed over with security was object interaction (storage crates, workbenches etc). Previously with the right hacked client, a player could interact with any object in the world from anywhere. As part of the refactor, Spence changed the interaction of items to be based on direct line of sight of the player on the server. Theoretically, if you have a storage create inside a locked room on a Hurtworld server, it is physically impossible for someone to access your items is without legitimate explosives.

Fortunately the hard part is over. However, as with any serious renovation, we now have to start the process of a full regression test.

Update Schedule

While Spencer been busy fixing the foundations, the rest of the team have been powering ahead with new content!

We have decided that the rest of the content we have in the pipeline will go into the first Steam release. We feel that micro updates once a week don't really give the content the experience it deserves, especially while we are in closed Alpha and player numbers are limited.

Post Steam releases will be similar to TF2 updates, with lots of content that compliments each other. When we drop an update we want it to be a reason to take Monday off work rather than login, look at a new item, and logout. We know survival games are best experienced with lots of people, and getting to figure stuff out at the same time / race for first to do something is a big part of the fun.

After major releases we will put out rapid hotfixes to keep things stable and work towards the next major patch.

We plan on releasing on Steam as Early Access in roughly 2 months.

Peace!