Small U12 Preview: breakables, mod manager

Hello mates, Baron here with the latest news! KospY and the team at Warpfrog have been working away on U12 with the goal to try and wrap the update for release. The majority focus has been on trying to finalize the in-game mod manager functionality, fixing issues with the new homemade Dungeon tech, and bugfixing.

Sadly we are experiencing a lot of technical issues and bugs that are preventing release. These are not your little type of "Oh how quaint" physics bugs that could be ironed out in a beta, but more "Hmm, today every Dungeon room transition is broken" type bugs which are complete blockers for release.

For that reason I have the sad duty to announce we will not be able to release U12 this month and it will be likely early 2023. I won't try to guess any exact time as it would be better to just know that we are working with intent to release literally as soon as possible, as soon as we can get these technical issues fixed.

So with that, I thought in the meantime I could do a little preview of some U12 stuff and generally show how it's going, bugs and issues aside.

Breakables

It was a nice surprise for us to see how much interest was generated over breakables in the last news. The funny thing was it was only like one line in the news, but since it seemed to get peoples attention here is a bit more on it!

Big thanks to Drags for recoding all the previews in today's news. ːsteamdanceː



Originally, only a handful of props were breakable, but in response to the player interest we hugely expanded what kind of props are breakable. It now includes a lot more objects like benches, wooden tables, crates, etc and in fact we went a bit mad and it is now 24 breakable props in game, lol. We hope it will make for some pretty interesting and dynamic fights!

Wrestling fans can rejoice at being able to spike people through tables now.



One of the questions that was popping up was if the broken parts of the breakable could be used as weapons. For things like blunt objects, you could always use any object as a blunt object to attack so nothing new there, but for things like ceramic shards the answer was originally no because you would have to add damage handlers to the individual shards.

However since that did seem like a really cool idea and something the player was interested in, we did go ahead and add damage handlers to things like broken pots, so now you can stab away.



While doing the damagers on breakable props there was also a few other goodies stuffed in, such as the addition of 6 new tools to find in the world that have damagers added so they can be used like weapons too. For example, a pickaxe.

Mod Manager

Now let's get into the Mod Manager. The big change for modders and mod-enthusiasts is that whereas up to now we had always used trusty old nexus for hosting mods, these in-headset mods will be hosted on mod.io. Mods that are uploaded here will appear in the headset and can be subscribed and unsubscribed via the in-headset menu.

Modders, if you want to have your mods show up in-headset I recommend you start uploading your mods now so that they are ready to roll before U12 launches.

Here is how it will look in-headset!



There are some nice filters in the manager that you can use for browsing mods, including searching mods by game version. ːpraisesunː So provided the metadata is correct by the uploader, you could now search something by filter such as "U12" + "Spells" to only display spell mods for U12.

But rest assured, if you are not too interested in this in-headset mod manager you can still download and install mods manually the good old fashioned way with any mods downloaded from the websites nexusmods.com or mod.io.

New Rooms

In the last news I mentioned the whole new Dalgarian Dungeon that is planned for 1.0, so a bit of a ways away still, but I did mention that U12 would be adding a bunch of new siderooms that will be expanding old Dungeon rooms.

These were just little extensions added onto current rooms that will eventually be useful for loot purposes, but for now they are just for fun and exploration and to add doors into Dungeons so you can throw enemy through.

Door handles are for losers!



But anyway, in the last news we may have downplayed the whole "we are adding more rooms" just a teeny bit... ːwftogrinː

We have added about 14 siderooms into the game, but we also didn't even mention that there is also about 24 entirely new dungeon rooms being added, lol. For context, the current U11 Outpost Dungeon has something like 50 rooms total, so that's quite a few rooms to freshen up Outpost. ːsteamdanceː



It will be a mix of transitional rooms, standard rooms, and then one will be an "arena-type" room, The Watermill, and by arena-type I mean those rooms that spawn mini-waves like the Chapel or Library but are not the final wave rooms like Watchtower.



Hopefully this will make Outpost Dungeon a bit fresh for anyone who has played it to death, as there will be a lot of new rooms to experience.

New UI

By the way, here is a little peek at some of the new UI changes coming that give it a nice clean look - you might spot there is a Mods tab where modders can add their own mod options.



Well that's it for now folks! This is likely the last news of the year, so from all of us here at Warpfrog a big thank you and much love to all the fans and well-wishers who support us and have followed along with the development of this game. We love you guys and wish you all a wonderful rest of your year. Here is to a great 2023! ːer_heartː