Developer SethR Posted February 25, 2015 Developer Share Posted February 25, 2015 Adding Giant Beasts and Padding Towards PAX East “No more rhymes, I mean it!” I re-watched The Princess Bride the other day--that movie holds up. … You’re all here for updates on what I’ve been watching recently, right? Oh, that’s not why? You wanted to know something about Don’t Starve Together? Hmm. Well, I guess I can offer that, too. On today’s menu, we have three main topics: Development/roadmap updates. We’ve crossed off most of the items on the January Roadmap, but there’s a bit left to do and more beyond that. Why we’re adding Reign of Giants this way (“this way” being “all at once”) and how it’ll be available to DST players. PAX East! It’s in a week and a half! We’ve been getting ready: a bit about what we’ve put together and will be showing. In a return to form, I’ll be spoiler-tagging individual topics so you’ll be less assaulted by my Great Wall of Text. Development and Roadmap Updates About 5 weeks ago, Jamie outlined what we’d be working on for the immediate future. Since he posted that update, we’ve delivered player-hosted dedicated servers, DST on Mac and Linux, and controller support. There are improvements to be made and bugs to be fixed, but they’re in a state where we can focus on adding to other aspects of Don’t Starve Together. Reign of Giants We’ve been adding the Reign of Giants systems and content to Don’t Starve Together more or less since the post I mentioned above went up. We’ve made a ton of progress and we’re actually nearing done merging all of the Reign of Giants code into Don’t Starve Together. That part of the integration process should be done in the next week or two. After that, we’ve got to start testing and balancing all of RoG (and likely adapting the behavior of some things for a multiplayer environment). But: progress! It shouldn’t be long now before the first DST players get access to all of Reign of Giants: we’ll probably do a limited roll out to suss out some bugs before the full release, much as we did with dedicated servers. Looking Ahead Although the Reign of Giants integration is a massive undertaking, there are folks on the team that have been working on other things--things that look towards the future of Don’t Starve Together. For a while now, the art team has been designing creatures and items (which many of you have found evidence of in the files with recent patches). Since RoG doesn’t need new art for the most part, they’ve been free to create a stockpile of art for the designers to mine once RoG is wrapped up. Most of this stuff falls under the umbrella of Through The Ages, so it won’t come into play for a little while. Not everything is quite so far off, though: we’ve started working on two big and exciting items. We’re not yet sure of the exact timeline for these things, but they will hit before Through The Ages. We’re beginning to scale up our servers so they can handle the load when we open the floodgates and give Don’t Starve Together to all of the Don’t Starve players that don’t yet have access. With so many players coming in, it’s just going to get harder to keep track of which Wilson is which (and, along with that, to feel like your Wilson is truly your Wilson). So, around the same time, we’ll be adding alternate character skins to Don’t Starve Together! Yes, this is what the “inst.skin_name” addition to player_common.lua and some of the new inventory item images that slipped out are about. Beyond that, there’s still caves (which some programmers are starting to look into solutions for) and Through The Ages (which we’re starting to plan the content for). Interim Changes (Including Some Words About Willow) When we started on the Road to RoG (our internal name for the tasks and priorities leading up to the release of RoG in DST), we laid out plans for a handful of small-ish batches of content and changes that targeted specific areas we wanted to improve ASAP. The idea was that these updates were small things we could do in tandem with integrating Reign of Giants to continue improving the game while we were in a quiet stretch. The main target on our list was fire. Fires are the main contributing factor to the deterioration of a world over time and the strongest tool for griefers. Reign of Giants has tools and mechanics for fighting fires. We were hoping to port over the fire-fighting stuff from RoG before the rest of RoG, but in the end, it wasn’t really viable to extract only that part: its tendrils reached into too many other parts of the game for it to be a clean process. The other parts of the fire patch were a redesign and retuning of fire propagation and a Willow rebalance. The fire propagation was implemented in our Reign of Giants branch, so it made more sense to keep all of that stuff together (which meant losing fire propagation from our patch). So, what did that leave? That’s right: Willow. As many forum-goers have guessed, this is not our final vision. It’s a stopgap that we hope will improve experiences in DST overall by reducing fire-destruction and starting to change some of the Willow perception problems that exist right now. With the changes, Willow players can’t light up a forest and stand around in it without consequence--but between Willow’s reduced fire damage and the previous nerf to overall fire damage, she won’t take very much damage. Her lighter is now craftable and limited: dedicated servers won’t get flooded with piles of lighters this way. We probably need to finesse the recipe a bit, but the lighter is still a worthwhile investment--it lasts 8 times as long as a single torch and isn’t affected by rain! Now that the lighter is craftable, a Willow can craft lighters for other players. As for the removal of insanity fires: it was the best (i.e. simplest and fastest) stopgap solution. We coupled that with increasing the effects of sanity auras on Willow. This version of Willow is a character concerned with managing the more extreme peaks and valleys of her sanity using proximity to fires, rather than the entire team worrying their Willow might accidentally destroy their entire berry farm because her insanity fire proc’d at an inopportune time. Rather than not address fire/Willow at all until Reign of Giants is ready, we decided to put out the Willow stuff. We’ll be doing a more holistic rebalance on all of the characters. We don’t have an exact timeline for the rebalance yet, but we’re aiming to have it done before we let in the rest of the Don’t Starve players. The Firestarter will make a return to her former glory (but in a way that works better for everyone in multiplayer). Mea culpa for not posting about this along with the patch yesterday. As with everything, we watch and read and then adjust based on feedback, so keep it coming! But back to non-Willow things: in the end, all of the small batches of content I mentioned were intended to cherry-pick pieces of Reign of Giants and introduce them to DST early. As with the fire stuff, that proved to be not-so-viable. Instead, the folks not working on Reign of Giants have been focused on preparing for GDC and PAX (more on that below) and fixing bugs. Reign of Giants: Yes Like This, Yes Like This I mean, come on, that moment in The Matrix when Switch sees Apok go down and is all “not like this, not like this”--so good, right? Oh, you were serious about not caring about what I watch? Hmm. Reign of Giants it is, then. The question of the optimal way to add content to a game like Don’t Starve is something I’ve spent a lot of time considering--and to this day, I go back and forth on it to some extent. As a developer, it’s much easier to have larger blocks of time to work with because you have more room to make sweeping changes or build systems that have wide-reaching effects. However, regular and quick updates have the benefit of enforcing a schedule and making sure your build doesn’t rot with bugs (while also having the hassle of having to regularly prepare, test and release new builds). As a player, it’s good to get smaller amounts of content frequently because it keeps the game fresh. However, each content drop is smaller, so you gobble it up faster. So, it’s good to wait and get a massive chunk of content all at once--it takes longer to untangle a larger ball of yarn. There are more surprises and more facets to figure out. Because I like graphs, let’s imagine what graphs of these player experiences might look like, where X is Time and Y is Freshness. Frequent updates would be a sine wave: the next rise is always visible, but small (and fades quickly). The average Freshness over time is probably higher, but each peak is smaller. Large content packs look more like a few very-tall spikes followed by exponential falloff. The peaks are higher and the tails are longer, but the average is probably lower. All right, so what have we learned so far? 1) Graphs are cool. 2) Seth is weird. 3) There’s not actually a clear answer to this question. So, how do we decide? The same way we design most aspects of the player experience: we get in a room and hash it out. When we did this for Reign of Giants itself, our takeaway was that we were coming off of 6 months of regular updates to Don’t Starve (plus all the updates during the Early Access period), so going dark for a little while wouldn’t be such a bad thing. In fact, it would breed curiosity. It also made sense for the goals we had when we set out to make the DLC that would come to be known as Reign of Giants. Specifically, we wanted to push out the plateau of stability by adding seasons with new demands and tougher creatures. If we introduced players to one piece at a time, the challenge wouldn’t be as formidable. Ultimately our goal with Reign of Giants was to get as close as possible to setting our veteran players back to square one. We wanted players to feel like they were in an uncompromising wilderness with rules to figure out again, rather than continue to be master of the world. That was only possible by introducing it all at once (or very nearly so). Further, the changes we planned were big--it would be insane to do them piecewise and maintain an interesting and functioning game throughout. As an illustrative example, the first two weeks I spent working on Reign of Giants were consumed by refactoring and updating the seasonmanager.lua file to allow us to have the full 4 seasons. When we’ve done regular updates, they’ve been on a two or three week cadence. It should be fairly obvious how untenable that would have been. Of course, adding Reign of Giants to Don’t Starve Together is a slightly different equation: many DST players are already familiar with RoG and the mere presence of other players changes the experience. While the first point seems like an argument in favor of adding Reign of Giants to DST bit by bit, it doesn’t change the fact that the nature of the RoG expansion is such that, for the most part, that’s extremely tricky to do (see: being unable to extract the fire-fighting stuff). Reign of Giants was designed to be highly interconnected, with many overlapping cycles, systems and creature behaviors. Veteran RoG players would no doubt be pleased to see each piece added, but many of those pieces don’t actually stand on their own--they need the support of the rest of the expansion in order to be interesting (and, importantly, be what people are used to them being). Furthermore, while many DST players have played RoG, that doesn’t mean all of them have. And who are we to deny those players the experience of being sent back to the proverbial Stone Age?! As for the impact of multiplayer, that remains something of an unknown: we won’t really know how RoG will be affected until it’s basically done. So, even though it’s less clear-cut what the best course for RoG is this time around, we ultimately decided (for all of those reasons), to do it in one big content drop once again. We think it’ll be an exciting time in DST for everyone to figure out Reign of Giants together! As for how Reign of Giants will be available to players of Don’t Starve Together: once it’s ready for primetime, we’ll release an update to DST that adds all of the Reign of Giants content and mechanics in. We’ll be providing world presets that mimic vanilla Don’t Starve as closely as possible (i.e. only Autumn and Winter, etc etc) for people who still want to play that way. Everyone that owns Don’t Starve Together will be able to host and join servers with Reign of Giants content. Everyone that owns Don’t Starve Together will be able to play as both Wigfrid and Webber, but folks who own Reign of Giants will be getting something extra as a thanks-for-buying a little ways down the line. You will still need to own Reign of Giants itself if you want to play any of the Reign of Giants content in a single player game (i.e. launching Don’t Starve instead of Don’t Starve Together). PAX East: What a Feast! I know, I know--you thought the rhymes has ceased. [*everyone groans at once*] The last time we brought Don’t Starve Together to a PAX show floor, it was in its infancy. It was the first time anyone outside of the office had a chance to play. We were running a goofy hacked “dedicated” server where the host game just didn’t spawn a player. We showed the game on the floor and ran the first ever Don’t Starve Together tournament. Somehow, we survived. PAX East is right around the corner and PAX Prime feels like an eternity ago (it wasn’t--just 6 months). Much has changed for Don’t Starve Together since then. We managed to salvage a bunch of the work on the demo mode we built for PAX Prime--the experience on the show floor will be pretty similar (in fact, it’s the same exact map!) to what we had there, but some with cool improvements like a bona fide dedicated server. One or two things have changed in the DST code base and save data since PAX Prime, so I spent the past week updating our demo mode to work with those changes. The build is just about finalized and various folks around the office are gearing up to leave for GDC and/or PAX East. I’m one of the lucky few that gets to do both, taking a redeye from GDC and going straight to the PAX East show floor. Wahoo! Peter has also put together a new and improved tournament mode for PAX East, which we’re really excited about. We’re hoping to seat (at least!) 64 people for the tournament, which is on Friday at 6pm in the PC Tourney room. We don’t know the details for registration yet, but there’s typically a sign up at the PC Tourney room, so if you want to compete, make sure you get over the early! There will be two game modes for the tournament: one cooperative and one free-for-all. Both modes focus on eating and feeding as much as possible. The cooperative mode is a group effort to score as many points as possible by eating and feeding each other tons of food. The free-for-all mode has players vying for opportunities to fill the Pig King’s stomach--it’ll be a delicate balance of preventing other players from getting access to the Pig King while making sure you gather enough resources and cook enough food to give to the Pig King yourself. Peter and I will be at PAX East representing the DST team, but a few others that you might recognize from the forums or their work on DS will be around as well. If you’ll be at the show, come say hi at the booth (I may look like a zombie after my flight, but I promise I don’t bite) and check out the tournament. Both should be rad! That does it for today. Until next time, keep the conversation going! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rezecib Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 My seat by the fire is so warm and cozy ^_^ Edit: I wish I'd managed to get a ticket for PAX East... But I can at least confirm that Peter's new game modes are fun! Interested to see how the character skins will turn out. Dryicefox did those recolors of all of the characters, which would be one way it could go. But a lot of the time most of the character (except the face) is covered up, so how would that be handled to distinguish between skins? Unless... it's literally... skin. Like Wilson with purple skin... yeahhh... Did not see the sneaky Wilson! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flare2V Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Oh DANG, that Wilson tease! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarkXero Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Turbo awesome.Don't Team Fortress Starve 2. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Asparagus Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Merm-Pigmen Wars O__O Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ButterStuffed Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 I can't help but hope for a warrior Webber skin now. Darn it Seth, making my toes tingle with excitement. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Letter W Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Wilson is channeling his inner Dr. Steel! Minus the bald head. And beard I guess. I can't wait to see the skins that come out for this! Huzzah! Thanks Seth homie! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quady14 Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Would be awesome if WX-78 had an alternate skin based on the exclusive WX Overdrive figure that ESC Toy made, though really I'll be happy with anything. Alternate skins is super exciting, period. Woodie wearing a Canadian Flag-esque maple leaf sweater... Okay no more from me I'm done. I'm leaving! Sorryyyyyyyyyy!~ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tracc Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Thank you for the update!These updates are especially important to non beta-players like me, because otherwise we dont know whats going on. I am very exited to introduce my friends to DST when it is finished (we are anxiously waiting).You are doing a great job with your communication to the fans! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nike_Ritual Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Thank you so much! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ailailou Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Can't wait for RoG in DST and all the extras! For anyone who missed noticing the hyperlinked "W", here's the concept for a Wlson skin: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F1sh Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Too.. much.. hype... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zillvr Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Will the PAX East Tournament be streamed on twitch or at the very least have video coverage on youtube? I just need confirmation on this (again) cause I remember asking it before during a dev stream, but I forgot what the exact answer was.I'm very sorry for forgetting and asking again... EDIT: Question was already answered on the latest stream, the tournament won't be broadcast via twitch but people are welcome to video record the event. Just thought I'd let people know Klei's answer for those who may be asking the same question if they see this. Cheers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pyromailmann Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Keep dat hypetrain moving! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RobbingZombie Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 So are these skins going to be mods, or built in content we buy as miniature dlc's like a lot of games do? I was a little confused on that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acemurdock Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Ahh this is all very exciting! Glad to hear that Willow's fixes are temporary. And custom character skins that don't require a seperate mod? NICE!Can't wait to see you guys at PAX east! I might be cosplaying... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
acemurdock Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 Would be awesome if WX-78 had an alternate skin based on the exclusive WX Overdrive figure that ESC Toy made, though really I'll be happy with anything. Alternate skins is super exciting, period. Woodie wearing a Canadian Flag-esque maple leaf sweater... Okay no more from me I'm done. I'm leaving! Sorryyyyyyyyyy!~ OR A HOCKEY JERSEY!!! Love that idea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michi01 Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 So are these skins going to be mods, or built in content we buy as miniature dlc's like a lot of games do? I was a little confused on that.I'm 100% sure that they'll be normal game content. Klei isn't one of these companys that let you pay for like every single piece of content. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sindex Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 I'm 100% sure that they'll be normal game content. Klei isn't one of these companys that let you pay for like every single piece of content. I have to agree with you there. Klei is a very outstanding company, when it comes to the content they offer for their games in continued development or post release. Not like other companies that sell you horse armor for their games and slap on a demeaning price tag. I am looking at you Bethesda who started the trend for idiotic DLC's that offer little value for your money. I better stop there, before I go into a full fledged rant. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Clwnbaby Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 I didn't read all the responses but cant believe no one said it in the first page. - "Anyone want a peanut?" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RalphKastro Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 umm.... so.... Pyro skin for Willow? And Maybe a frog skin for Webber? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarkXero Posted February 25, 2015 Share Posted February 25, 2015 frog skin for Webber? Confirmed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oCrapaCreeper Posted February 26, 2015 Share Posted February 26, 2015 On characters: I assume Webber and Wigfrid are coming with the RoG development, and Woodie appears to be a design nightmare and will take a while, but what about Wes and Maxwell? Maxwell appears to have the obvious PvP problem with his starting equipment, but Wes is more concerning since he was always the hardmode novelty character, and no one would really dare to play as him in a multiplayer environment, the design behind his character seems like it would have to be changed so he's not dead weight on the server. I assume that will be handled in eventual character rebalances down the road? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pyromailmann Posted February 26, 2015 Share Posted February 26, 2015 what about Wes and Maxwell? They'll probably be in the game in the future obviously, but Seth needs to bring their existence up.Seriously, are we to assume Maxwell and Wes are fighting behind the portal or something?Because if they're fighting, they're probably in a boxing ring with mobs all around Maxwell's side and Balloon animals around Wes' side. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SuperPsiPower Posted February 26, 2015 Share Posted February 26, 2015 It shouldn’t be long now before the first DST players get access to all of Reign of Giants: we’ll probably do a limited roll out to suss out some bugs before the full release, much as we did with dedicated servers. So this means that those 80,000 will be the first ones to test RoG, Correct? That being said, I assume that we will backtrack and use the emails that you've already collected for the signups and send out codes right? Omg this is so exciting! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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