Hello friends,

We hope you had a great start to the new year. I can’t believe it’s already February. What happened to January? And to Christmas?

One of the most common feedback we get is that the game is not balanced. Unfortunately, Late For Work is really hard to balance, for several reasons:

  • You can play against 1, 2, 3 or 4 players!
  • Those players could be humans or AI.
  • As our game is quite accessible, you have a wide variety of combinations of players (sometimes within the same play session!): Kids in VR against siblings and parents. Parents against Kids. Experienced against casual and vice-versa
  • Multiple vehicles with different controls, easy of use, etc.

Just to illustrate the challenge on our hand: here are back to back comments in our feedback thread where one player says the vehicles are OP, then the next is surprised because they feel the gorilla is OP. And they’re both right!

We’ve been listening to your feedback and brainstorming a lot of ideas to try, including improvements to controls and aiming, scaling health and damage, tuning the AIs and dynamically adapting to difficulties. We’re not going to implement everything in one go. Some are more ambitious. But our overall, long-term goal is to create a balanced experience for everyone without requiring difficulty/balance sliders (it’s annoying having to tune settings every time you change the VR player).

Tank Aiming

First major improvement we’ve made this year is with the tank aiming. This time we focused on the reticule itself. Instead of lining up the arc of your shot, now where you look is where you will fire. We think it feels and looks much better. We’ve removed a level of indirection. The aiming reticule also adjust size (based on distance to your target object) as well as color (based on object type).

We are really curious what you think? Do you like it better or worse than before? Would you still like to see a dotted line of the arc your shot will take?

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Balancing

This update, we focused our balancing changes to Deathmatch:

  • Number of player lives = Number of players * 5. So when you play against two vehicles, they have 10 lives. Previously 1v1 games would drag on quite a bit because one side had 20 lives.
  • Gorilla health is also scaled by the number of vehicles. When you face off against 4 players, you have 4 times the base health.
  • Human Tank Damage is increased by 50%. AI Tank Damage stays the same.
  • Tank AI Shot Cooldown is doubled. The AI was shooting way too often previously. It was a constant barrage. Now you have a little time to breath.

Reviews

The last 7 months have been an interesting adventure, developing this game in the open. We really appreciate all your feedback. Heck, if you’re reading this far into our updates note, then you must really like our game and that means so much to us. Thank you.

Writing a review for our game has a higher impact than you can imagine. It validates our efforts and belief that it was worthwhile to invest building this game and motivates us to take it further.

Cheers, Salmi Games

Changelog - Build 394

Improvements

  • Controls: New Tank Aiming System
  • Controls: Reduced the range where planes auto-brake/accel. Gives more control back to the player.
  • Controls: mouse control of plane rotation feels much, much better. Works the same vertically as horizontally. Is now consistent with mouse control of other objects
  • Controls: Disabled object avoidance for freelook camera.
  • UI: Deathmatch intro correctly reflects how many players you are facing and the number of kills you need to win
  • UI: Better feedback and tips on how to accelerate and brake with the planes. Changed auto-break/accel ranges so you notice things more.
  • Performance: removed unused models, collioders and animations
  • Performance: combined meshes and materials
  • Performance: reduced vertex count of various objects to help dynamic batching
  • Performance: reduced texture size in memory by rescaling for better compression (DXT5)
  • Tech: Made the build 30 MB smaller! I know, we also don’t get it.
  • Physics: Small NPC Cars behave more realistically when thrown/hit. They no longer just slide on the ground but bounce and tumble as expected.
  • Internal: developed a tool to track down unused art assets
  • Internal: developed a tool to track down unused art assets
  • Gameplay: Balanced Deathmatch game mode
  • Gameplay: can no longer pick up the health power-up if you are full health

Fixes

  • Fixed missing model for special tanks in Mission 7 of the Single Player
  • Gorilla hand no longer twitches when you select a map
  • Day Jobs: fixed black screen at the end
  • Day Jobs: fixed duplicate arrows
  • UI: “Reset camera” message was off-screen when playing 2-player split-screen.
  • Fixed missing tank chassis (was disappearing after taking damage)
  • Gorilla can no longer move outside allowed bounds during hide n seek countdown
  • Fixed a couple issues in city map (a lamppost was falling down on start, a tree was jittering)
  • Fixed LOD model of blue houses