We apologize for the lack of news lately, but it’s only because of how busy we’ve been!
After the last update, we decided to shift our focus to getting the rest of the game done instead of continuing with staged releases. One reason was that preparing each update took a lot of time away from moving the game forward and making it better. Another was that we didn’t want to keep resetting everyone’s progress over and over. We also feel Betrayer will be best enjoyed by playing at your own pace instead of being at the mercy of our release schedule.
We've made lots of improvements and additions, many of them based on the great feedback and suggestions you've provided, so we wanted to share a few recent highlights:
Blake
- UI artwork for clues and inventory.
- In-game clue and inventory models.
- Couple of new enemy weapons.
- New character fx.
- Various performance improvements and visual polish on existing effects.
Brad
- More enemy types!
- Added more detail options to control performance and look of the game in the menus and under the hood.
- AI behaviors improvements, such as dodging shots, leading player when shooting, and handling animations better
- Added Headshots and more violent hit reactions
- 3 monitor support added with proper FOV.
- Engineered low difficulty setting to make it easier so you can play the game more like an adventure if you choose.
- Waterskin healing inventory item.
- Player will respawn with a small amount of ammo so they don’t start from nothing with no money.
Craig
- Finished the script! Well, mostly. There are some loose ends to tie up, but the majority is done.
- Completed an initial gameplay pass for the entire game.
- Lots of balancing and pacing refinements.
- Came up with a couple of new concepts that help tie the whole experience together. Don’t want to spoil anything, though!
- Pestered various people with countless requests for features or fixes to improve the game, many based on community suggestions or complaints.
David
- Updated all the UI maps to incorporate changes in existing levels and making the new ones.
- Made new loading screens that use the maps giving an overview of the coming world.
- Built new enemy models (We won’t spoil it by telling you what they are yet!)
- Took the game on the road for the Good Games Club indie event in SF and meeting with the press.
- Went back and polished up existing characters.
- Social media updates (more in the coming weeks).
Larry
- Unified and improved the look of the Interface across the game.
- Got the HUD and screens working properly in 3 monitor surround mode.
- Updated the HUD to report more information about weapons, water skins (health); more information presented to the player.
- Visualization of listen mechanic for those having difficulty hearing it or with a subpar listening setup.
- Easier way to go from Store to Inventory and back, as well as usability improvements to both.
- New” icon in Clues, Notes and Colonists screens to notify what has been added to your "journals".
- Boring business stuff and trailer work.
Ron
- Lots of tweaking to existing enemy animations.
- New character animations (again, can’t tell you what they are just yet).
- Added animation to the "colonists".
- Rigging of David’s new enemies.
- Tweaks to first person weapon animations.
Wes
- Worked on wrapping up all the remaining environments.
- More iteration and polish on lighting and atmosphere.
- Investigated more anti-aliasing options with Brad and settled on some custom AA options that players can choose from.
- Shader material upgrades across the game with the inclusion of a 3rd quality setting for materials!
- Performance benchmarking and optimizations on content and shaders.
We removed spoilers from this list.
New Features
- Added more detail options to control performance and look of the game.
- Ability to Save&Continue, in addition to Save&Quit. F5 also does a save.
- Multiple monitor support added.
- A low difficulty user setting to reduce the enemy damage.
- Headshot damage multiplier.
- Enemies will sometimes drop broken weapons, which aren’t usable by the player.
- Player will respawn with a small amount of ammo so they don’t start from nothing with no money.
- 4 new enemy types: secret, you’ll have to find them.
- Waterskin healing inventory item.
Improvements
- Aiming to interact with items in the world much easier
- Arrows will slide less on the ground.
- Wind will make AI have harder time hearing the player.
- Updated BurningMen to turn on flames when they are aggravated.
- Play unique sounds when reading notes or examining objects.
- AI now align their feet to the ground.
- Announcement when player retrieves their dropped loot.
- Dead AI bodies will not disappear in plain sight.
- More performance options are used to better tune the detail levels.
- Ability to scale fire rates. Useful for balancing the different bow weapons.
- Show a HUD element when player can’t pick up a dropped item they are at capacity with.
- Enemies will play an audio hints when they are beginning to detect the player or spot the player.
- Play special sound when player inflicts bonus damage for hitting unalert enemies.
- nitial setup to support lowering ambient sounds when listening.
- Play different sounds when collecting loot from different categories, such as money and weapons.
- Option to show locations of areas to listen to on compass.
- Added 3rd material quality to help spread out the performance options for different detail levels.
- Show the ammo count of inventory in the store.
- Fixed internal system to help identify unlocalizable text.
- Killing enemies while undetected is less likely to alert nearby enemies.
- Initial setup for supporting more languages.
- Play some animations on enemies using the full body, such as melee.
- Enemies can now lead the player when firing.
- Added some utilities for game design to store information between worlds.
- Show a “new” flag in the menus when something has been added to your “journals”
- Enemies can now run serpentine towards player to avoid getting hit.
- Enemies can vary their movement speed to make them less predictable.
- Enemies can be setup to have better peripheral vision.
- Show art when examining an object.
- Enemies use better equipping animations.
- Laptops with nVidia high performance discrete graphics cards will be automatically detected and use that card instead of the integrated one.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed AI doing frequent friendly fire when trying to hit the player.
- Fixed AI reinforcements not sprinting the full distance into action.
- AI now play their pivot animations when turning in place. Some animations are still missing.
- Fast traveling to Last Location would show the wrong area name if a map load was required.
- Fixed AI sliding around when doing melee or reload.
- Falling through the world on death.
- Fixed problem with losing inventory if player quits while dead.
- Enemies sometimes not able to see player when player was standing near walls.
- Fixed bug where player couldn’t access map until they killed all the AI in the level.
- Fixed destructible crates sometimes becoming invisible.
- Fixed enemies not reliably notifying nearby enemies of danger.
- Fixed melee always doing loud damage.
- Fixed melee not properly doing extra damage when enemy was unalert.
- Fixed issue with death effect not playing reliably.
- Fixed issue with player not being able to walk off ledges while crouched or walking.
- Fixed issues with detail level getting forced to “Medium”.
- Fixed enemies getting stuck in place if shot from behind.
