Savage Development Diary

[Mister_Prophet]

If you own either UGold, UT, or any of the other versions of Unreal on Steam you should be in the clear. I myself am currently developing my Savage Land content using my UGold from Steam. For the other digital storefronts it is similar, far as I've last heard. Someone can correct me if this has changed.

What sort of stopped a lot of mod developers dead in their tracks at the announcement (and even now people are going through it) is the fact that this effectively means we as a community have reached a hard place when it comes to hoping new people discover our old game.

Those of us with family or friends have the luxury of sharing our digital copies or even our physical discs on the chance we might get someone interested in Unreal. Otherwise, the displeasure I think some people are feeling is that our work will not extend much beyond that.

People like Krull0r have made very public strides promoting his Redux project on social media. Twitter, Youtube, ect. In my opinion this might be worth exploring going forward, as I believe that in this day and age nostalgia for "when shooters were good and innovative" still tends to circulate with gamers. You get a good viral trailer to pop off on the internet and....well who knows This is the situation Epic has created for us.

In regards to Savage Land, this project was always more about giving something back to the longtime Unreal initiated. It will continue to be that.

[foo_jam2002]

Any news regarding the mod's progress? I guess I have to join the discord channel for more.

[Mister_Prophet]

New Year Stuff

We've got some more screenshots of Paul's mappage (Fashahhh). Development has not changed much since my last entry here. I will explain some details to better give an impression of the types of levels you'll be seeing (and why development might seem so delayed in spite of the suddenness of the initial demo).

Truth is that we simply have large maps, it's what it is. Even straightforward maps like Fashahhh's latest and the recent efforts I've been working on with Aspide. Linear levels are quite rare in our campaign. But even the few that are still stake the player with marathon runs. Unlike levels seen in my previous campaigns the maps of Savage Land are just longer, less set piece focused and more densely packed in terms of location. It will not be a fast playthrough by any means, though our gameplay continues to keep snappy. I genuinely believe people will enjoy shooting and fighting but make no mistake there will be a huge potential for exploration.

Here's some media:

[Kajgue]

New Year Stuff

We've got some more screenshots of Paul's mappage (Fashahhh). Development has not changed much since my last entry here. I will explain some details to better give an impression of the types of levels you'll be seeing (and why development might seem so delayed in spite of the suddenness of the initial demo).

Truth is that we simply have large maps, it's what it is. Even straightforward maps like Fashahhh's latest and the recent efforts I've been working on with Aspide. Linear levels are quite rare in our campaign. But even the few that are still stake the player with marathon runs. Unlike levels seen in my previous campaigns the maps of Savage Land are just longer, less set piece focused and more densely packed in terms of location. It will not be a fast playthrough by any means, though our gameplay continues to keep snappy. I genuinely believe people will enjoy shooting and fighting but make no mistake there will be a huge potential for exploration.

Lovely stuff, as stated on discord

[editor Dave]

Awesome stuff! The blue glow of the ASMD looks sexy. As you asked in another post, I always enjoy reading your regular updates. And I'm excited for any new playable material!

[Mister_Prophet]

Lately we've been messing around with the Invisibility item, much like we have looked at other Unreal inventory that really doesn't do a whole lot for the player in classic Unreal. In general, finding ways to boost the player's combat efficiency has worked very well (Turning Voice Boxes into bomb traps, making a variant of the Dampener that boosts kinetic damage on non-energy weapons and essentially giving the player an alternative to the amplifier, ect).

We currently are working on improving the general functionality of the cloaking mechanic that...honestly...leaves a lot to be desired in Unreal. Alcapowned has been using player proxies to help make enemies loose sight of the player while in combat when Invisibility is turned on (in the past they were only effective to sneak passed enemies that had not noticed the player yet). The objective here to give the player an escape route whilst also giving enemies a chance to reacquire the player by attacking randomly at the places they last sighted them. Also, granting the player an attack bonus for attacking out of Invisibility at the cost of deactivating the field is being tested also.

[makemeunreal]

Is it possible to reupload the images? I love these development diary things but having broken links totally destroy the immersion.

[Mister_Prophet]

I will look into this when I'm home. Had an update planned anyway but I have to check and see what happened to my links and replace the old images.

[Mister_Prophet]

Hot Days

For starters I want to say I rectified the issue with the Dev Diary Thread's images pointed out by MakeMeUnreal. The only problem now is that I had lost sense of which pictures had been shown when and had to guess based on the posts themselves. Because of this you may notice one or two or several might be missing while others might be in different orders than when they were posted originally. For the missing ones, the reason is that I haven't put all the media for Savage Land on the Moddb site originally that has also been shared discord and here. So if you notice it, apologies. Going forward I will endeavor to put everything on Moddb also.

Otherwise, some updates!

The notable ones are the continued effort on the mapping front by Fashahh, myself, and Aspide. Steadz has also been showing me some map progress in the last couple of months. Aspide and myself have been tag teaming a coastal level that will make use of an interesting gameplay approach. For the sake of showcasing, however, I will show a couple from Fashahh's new level:





In terms of new features
there have been some minor things going on behind the scenes, save for this:








What you are seeing here are new updates to Zones that will allow mappers to add titles to locations within a single level. These place names will appear on screen upon the player's entry, followed by a sound effect that can be applied to a slot. For the player what this means is that you will see Area names prompting you briefly when you enter a new area.

The reason for this is mainly due to the fact that Savage Land continues to follow a trend of level names that won't necessarily reference your locations, whereas this will now be a feature within the maps themselves. Since we have many large levels that might blend themes that back in 1998 would have called for a separate .unr, this gives us more freedom to keep the player lost in the rhythm of progression.

[Sat42]

Great stuff!!

I really like the titles to locations within a map