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Light Culling

​One of the biggest performance drains on Netblast was the lighting.  So, I added a light culling algorithm that will not draw lights that are not visible on the screen.  This should result in a massive performance improvement for lower-end systems as 70% less lights are now being processed.

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The Ruins Map

We have another amazing update today.  We now have the 3rd official map completed and launched called The Ruins.  The Ruins map takes place in a rundown Gothic church with beautiful views of a forest decked with bloody stumps and interesting creatures:

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Well, we just launched an amazingly epic version tonight after a month long sprint and a 20 hour final crunch!  Roger that.

HQ Bay



This is now the heart of the entire game.  The HQ Bay allows players to purchase "straps" (primary weapons), "augs" (player augmentations), "mods" (weapon modifications), "gear" (miscellaneous utilities), "skin" (character skins), and "bling" (hats, glasses, teeth grills, etc.) using our in-game currency called "coin" (for advantageous items) and real money (for non-advantageous items).

The HQ Bay solves an incredible amount of problems as follows: progression, emergence, monetization, production (programming, art, sound, etc.), and a bunch of other stuff that's escaping me... but yeah, it's fricken cool.  Ultimately, we are inspired by the free-to-play model w/ microtransactions that Fortnite and many other games use and want to emulate that.  Much more to come on this front as we add great new items into the HQ Bay.

New Sounds/Music

Our absolutely incredible and extremely talented new sound engineer Juhani has made a AAA quality set of sounds and music now available in-game.  Seriously, the new sounds have completely changed the feel of the game and by themselves drive me to want to play it more.  So cool.

Juhani created all new sound effects for the entire game as well as a custom music track being used in all levels right now.  Juhani plans to add custom tracks for every level as we progress through development.

Company Logo/Splash Screen



Although the name of our game is called Netblast, our game development studio is called Atomic Lollypop.  Our spectacular artist Abel created the epic logo above for the company.  Myself and the rest of the team are super proud of this creation and look forward to sporting it on all sort of company swag coming out in the near future.

TwitchCon

Thanks to our amazing community manager Michael, we will be attending TwitchCon this year in San Jose, CA.  We've already got a plane flight, hotel, tickets, and cool business cards to hand out.  We are so excited about this opportunity and look forward to possibly seeing some of our growing community there.

We also plan to attend many more events over the next year including SXSW, PAX, OkashiCon, etc. as well as enter Netblast into multiple game award competitions.  This is how video games are made and marketed!

[Devilkay]

very fluid and nice animation. Congratulations 

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very fluid and nice animation. Congratulations 

Thanks so much Devilkay.  Hope to see you in our Discord soon and play a game or two together :]

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Just added an amazing new SMG gun to the game.  This baby has fully automatic fire and is super fun to use.  It also takes advantage of our new in-game store called the HQ Bay where you can buy it along with a bunch of other cool items.  We are very proud of this new weapon and would like to thank our tournament champion Strawbubble for recommending the SMG and our Discord community for voting for it.

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​New Sounds

​Added awesome new sounds to all bullet shell impacts.  Big thanks to Juhani for making these so quickly and professionally.  Now you hear the clinking and clanking of your bullet shells with custom sounds for each specific type.  Also added sounds for weapon swap, foot steps, and bullet impact.  Overall, these new sound additions greatly add to the immersion within the game.  We also recorded some new narrator sounds that we will be adding in the next release.

​Performance

​Did some major performance improvements with this version.  Fixed a bunch of memory leaks and re-engineered many parts of the game's animated sprite creation and destruction.  The game runs much faster and more smoothly on slower machines and should see an overall major increase in stability.

​AFK Fix

​Fixed the bug where if you crashed while in a server, your player would be stuck there forever.  We will never see this again with the latest set of fixes and testing.

​Kill List

​Added in a kill list so you can see who killed who at the top right of the screen.  This is standard issue for any online multiplayer game and we are proud to have it in our finally.

​Control Hints

​Added the long awaited control hints to the escape menu.  Now, you can just direct people to hit escape to see the game controls instead of having to explain them in detail thorough chat etc.

​New GUI Colors​

​Added new GUI colors to the menu area.  Now we use fully opaque window backgrounds and our Netblast brand red for all of the buttons.  We also added your number of coins to the HQ Bay area.

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New Sounds

Added new bullet impact sounds to walls and to players, new rocket canister ejection sound, new shotgun shell impact sounds, new rocket canister impact sounds, and new dirt impact sounds.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug where you where not able to move or fire your gun due to the mouse not processing while hovering over the new kill list window.

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​Password Reset

​You can finally reset your password inside the game now.   Simply load the game, request a code, and enter the code with your new password.  Hope this will help to preserve more Netblast accounts in the future.

Custom Controls

​You can now customize your mouse and keyboard controls to your liking.

Multiple Improvements and Bug Fixes​

​We made a whole bunch of visual and auditory improvements and bug fixes including impact particles, crashes, dirt/rock sounds, overall sound/music mixing, gold flying speed, player damage flash, player/level lighting, and many more.  We hope that all together this adds yet another layer of polish making the game feel even better.

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Location Arrows

The new location arrows allow you to see the general location of other players within the level.  This greatly helps when you have only a couple players on a larger map and are running around trying to find people to blast.

Hit Points

Now you can see cool hit points emitted from above the head of players taking damage similar to Risk of Rain and League of Legends.  This allows you to gauge the amount of damage inflicted on yourself or other players.

Announcer Sounds

We added some cool announcer sounds that commentate on critical events during a match similar to Unreal Tournament.  This adds great immersion and fun while also keeping you informed of what's happening while playing.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a ton of crashes and other oddities within the game.  This version is by far the most stable one we have released so far.

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Fixed some very annoying bugs including the player twitch when moving up or down the screen fast, the SMG getting stuck sometimes after firing it, and clicking the mouse into the chat text input causing the game to stop receiving keyboard commands.  Overall, these bug fixes will stop the breaks in immersion they were causing and lead to a more enjoyable net blasting experience.

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Team Deathmatch

We have finally added a team mode with Team Deathmatch!  This mode is super fun, action packed, and allows you to coordinate with your team member to dominate.  This mode currently offers up to 2 vs. 2 gameplay with the first team to 10 kills winning.

The Rising Level

We have an amazing new level called The Rising.  This level is all about floating and flying around while you blast each other into oblivion.  The level looks and feels like an old-school tron level with glowing stuff everywhere.  Check it out:

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​Freezes

​There was a major game freeze where bad network data could be sent to the physics engine causing it to choke up.  This caused the game to become completely unresponsive.  This has been fixed!

​Crashes

​There were some crashes also due to bad network data.  We rewrote a lot of the network object code and have not seen a crash since.  This has been fixed!

​Bug Fixes​

​Fixed the rocket launcher not spawning sometimes, bullets not being deleted that exited the level, players falling through the level, long AFK kick times, friendly fire shields taking damage in TDM, chat freeze on game won, and a bunch of other stuff.

​Conclusion

​This release was ALL about stability.  We want to make sure our players enjoy the game without having to deal with immersion-breaking bugs.  We hope the fixes above allow more people to enjoy the game at its maximum potential. Up next, we are going to be working on dedicated server map rotation.

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Map Rotation

We just added map rotation to the dedicated servers.  This does a couple cool things:

• It greatly reduces the number of dedicated servers we are running.  For example, we just went from 16 down to 4.  It's also scalable such that as we add more maps, our number of dedicated servers doesn't also increase.  Finally, reducing the number of dedicated servers makes hosting them much more cost effective for us.
• It allows people to play and experience a wider variety of our awesome maps.  Before, with only one map per server, people would generally only experience a single map for a long period of time, form an affinity for that particular map, and ultimately not get the mix up of level design that actually makes the game more enjoyable and fun.

Hope you guys enjoy the benefits of this new feature.  Next, we are working on payment processing integration (w/ Stripe) and adding "bling" to the store.   Bling includes items like custom hair, shirts, pants, shoes, hats, sun glasses, teeth grills, and a ton of other stuff that you can buy from the HQ Bay with real money ($$$) and equip your character with.  You can mix and match bling to create your own custom character.  It's going to be fricken awesome!

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​Coin Collection

​Fixed a problem where you wouldn't collect the correct amount of coins after a kill.

​Auto Spawn

​Now you auto-spawn after the map rotates.

​Chat at Victory Screen

​Now you can chat while on the victory screen with other players.

​Escape to Close Menu

​You can now press escape to close the options menu.

​Bullet/Blast Knock Back​

​Fixed up and added more significant knock back effects from both bullet impacts and rocket blast proximity damage.

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​Crashes

​Some players were experiencing crashes while loading into new levels.  We traced this back to clearing VRAM during level loading and commented out that code for now.

Auto-Spawn

​Players on bad networks would get stuck at auto-spawn sometimes.  We added in a timeout and re-connect feature to ensure auto-spawn always works.

Cancel Buttons

​Added cancel buttons to the spawn menu to allow players to gracefully exit if they ever get stuck there again.

Level Rotation

​Greatly improved level rotation ability by standardizing how objects and their physics are constructed and destructed over the network.  This will solve the problem of seeing old objects in new levels, crashes, and a bunch of other stability and quality-of-life issues.

Arrows​

​Made the arrows render on top of the user interface so they are not blocked by it anymore.

Colorized Usernames

Added colorized usernames to the players to help with visual identification.

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Epic Release

This is one of those rare releases where we add in some literally game changing features.

Skin/Bling Purchases

The new skin/bling purchase system pushes the technical boundaries of indie game development on the free-to-play front and we are immensely proud of accomplishing its implementation.  This is the economic engine of our game and also adds beautiful emergence through the customization of your in-game player.

You can currently buy (with a real credit/debit card) different skins and bling within multiple sub categories including hair, shirts, shoes, gloves, masks, and pants with many more coming later like hats, glasses, etc.  You can mix and match the individual items to fully customize your in-game player across three different potential configurations.

Grenade Launcher

The new grenade launcher is more fun than we ever expected.  We chose to put it in before other weapons due to its non-linear ability to "lob" grenades at other users.  The grenades bounce a little and leave a smoke trail behind them as they seek their victim.  The grenades are menacing and surprisingly effective with their proximity damage and explosion on player touch.

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Auto Updates

We've been waiting for this feature for quite a while.  Before, you had to manually figure out that you needed a new version, uninstall the current version, go to our website, download the latest version, and install the latest version... every... single... update...  This was super inconvenient and now with all of the new cosmetics coming out and our upcoming community growth would not be sustainable.

Now, every time you load the game , it will automatically check if there is a new version, download it, and replace the current version with just two clicks of your mouse button.  Now, you will always be playing the latest version of the game without going through the previous install "dance" :]

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​Windows Icon

​Added an official Netblast Windows icon to launch the game from making it look more professional.

Credit Card Form

​Added some card, SSL, and Powered by Stripe images to our credit card form to make it look more professional.

Version Message

​Improved the version incompatibility message to let the user know to uninstall, download, and reinstall the game to play it.

AmericanDad Skin/Bling​

​Added our official AmericanDad skin and bling cosmetics just in time for our Twitch stream with him tomorrow.  We plan to do more custom skins for other members of our Netblast community which we think is unique for a game.  Nothing like getting an official character of yourself into a 2D pixel art video game :]

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Dash Gear

We have added our first "Gear" to the HQ Bay as the ability to "dash" your player.  For only 500 coin you can boost your player's speed for one second to close distance on other players.  The dash has plenty of tactical applications including aiding in achieving close range shotgun blasts, dodging incoming bullets/rockets, and aiding in melee attacks which conveniently leads us to our next topic.  Note: you can use any "Gear" item with the mouse right-click button.

Melee Ability

We have added the ability to perform a close range melee attack on other players.  The attack is very powerful and works excellently in combination with new dash gear.  Note: you can use the melee ability with the mouse middle-click button.