Monday January 24th,
Hello all and an early hello to our Patreon supporters. You’ll be reading this blog a day before everyone else and we wanted to express our gratitude for your extra support, so thank you! It really helps out a tiny team like ours to know people like you will go the extra mile to help development. We’ve been working mostly on player reported issues and general game improvements for 1.14. That being said, there are actually some rather large changes coming and we’ll discuss some of them below. As always, keep up to date with everything we’re doing by checkin in on the changelog or asking right on the Discord.
Horde Improvements and Fortification Tweaks
Some big changes are coming to the hordes in Survive the Nights. Wrapped up in the horde changes you’ll find fortification improvements as well. Our original concept for Survive the Nights focused heavily on structure fortifications. The original spark and idea for the game itself stemmed from Call of Duty’s Nazi Zombie mode. James and myself (JB) we’re fixated on this mode, the ability to add planks to structures, the feeling of holding down a building, repairing entry points and keeping the hordes at bay while doing your best to kill them and survive is still super appealing to the team and somethin we aim to deliver in the upcoming builds.
There are a couple of core changes in the works. The player will now find as they advance through the zombie hordes that not only do the numbers increase but their strength does too. We’ve made all fortifications stronger, around 3 times stronger than the previous implementation. Increasing zombie difficulty aims to alleviate the issues where players take advantage of pinch points. Pinch points like staircases or narrow halls, this renders the entire game loop useless it also makes fortifications pointless.
The upcoming changes and improvements aim to fix these issues. We’ve made fortifications useful again. Players can now take full advantage of boarding up a structure. Doing so will actually hold zombies back, zombies will not instantly gain access, the player should really have an opportunity to stand their ground now. We’ve upped ammo spawns as well, making shooting to kill way more viable. Along with these changes zombie hordes will no longer be skippable. We never intended them to be, STN has always been about fighting zombies and now the player will be able to properly do so.
Fire Improvements
We’ve found via feedback and just simply watching players play that our UI can occasionally be unnecessarily cumbersome. James has spent some time this week improving fire machines across the board, hearths, campfires, barrels and stoves. He has completely removed the UI and the need for a UI. The new system is far more fluid and simple. The player only has to aim at a fire source and press E to add wood.
We plan to expand on these UI improvements. Removing the need for a UI for other in game machines or cleaning up and making any needed UI simple and easy to understand.
Improved Rain and Weather Performance
Andre spent some time this week tweaking and improving both the look of weather effects and their performance on clients and servers. Rain particles have been updated and optimized, rain emission on lower quality settings have been adjusted for better performance among other changes. The results are rather pleasing, the rain particles themselves look far more realistic and impact performance significantly less.
New Rain Particles
Continuous Placement Crash
Many of you have created tickets for this one. Currently in 1.13 you may run into a client crash involving item placement. This was caused by a bad loop and continuous placement should cause no further issue in 1.14.
We hope to have 1.14 out the first Friday in February and hope to continue a monthly update cycle from here on out.
Thank you for the continued support, we’re working on issues you’re finding so please keep reporting any bugs and making any game suggestions you can think of.
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