Shoot & Build: Capture the Flag!

As always, there are more details about the event in our Discord. If you haven’t joined it yet, then do it now: https://smallfi.sh/discord

This gamemode is pretty self-explanatory! Your objective is to steal enemy’s flag and bring it to your spawn. But you also must defend your own flag - and for that, every match starts with a warmup where you must reinforce your side of the map as much as you can. Build walls, defensive buildings, other stuff. Everything that makes stealing your flag difficult. Team that captures the flag 3 times wins.

Hopefully we will try it out during the playtest, but don’t forget, it’s all work in progress!

We continue expanding the gunplay for Shoot and Build to ensure that every gun has it’s unique use cases, upsides and downsides. To make them even more further interesting to use, we are introducing dynamic spread.

Dynamic spread allows guns to become more inaccurate from firing. Using the sights on your gun typically reduces this penalty. This inaccuracy is reduced over time. We’ve got plenty of variables related to this so that each weapon is better for its intended role. For example, the SMG has less base accuracy but barely penalizes spamming it from the hip. The AR however becomes quickly inaccurate from hipfire and rewards looking down the sights far more.

Guns used to have a fixed spread and static crosshair no matter what. Adding this feature allows us to balance each weapon much better and make them feel distinct from the others. You should notice a big difference in how guns feel, for the better we hope.

I felt like this game lacks another gun that appreciates your aiming skill. This is why I have decided to add .357 Revolver - a new secondary gun. It has fast reloading, precise aiming and quicker fire rate than Kar98. It doesn’t have the same effective range as Kar98k obviously, but if you are good at aiming, this gun can make you pretty deadly in short-mid distance gunfights.

This is an experimental change (along with shovel nerf), we will see how it performs during the playtest. But we hope that this change will give much more reasons for players to build their own reinforcements instead of relying on map environment. To avoid players building something too OP and turning CTF into stalemate, there’s something new to counter new buildings…

This is understandably pretty risky for CTF and we are not entirely sure how effective it will be, so I will keep an eye on playtest feedback to make it more balanced in future. I want it to be super limited, forcing user to think wisely how, when and where do they want to use it. Dying won’t instantly recharge it.

Utility now also has a hammer. It is a quick tool that allows you repairing any damaged blocks at a pretty fast rate. This isn’t really useful for TDM/FFA probably, but will be very useful in CTF where player buildings will be the main factor in protecting the flag and your base. Even though hammer looks pretty threatening, you can’t hurt players with it.

Inventory system has been updated to improve a few backend things. First, block and shovel are now default slots, and they are always available for everyone. Weapons can be properly swapped and equipped now. Utilities are now in slot 5, and power weapons are in slot 6. Previously we had to shove block tool into utility, forcing players to choose between building, landmines, repairing blocks and drilling. Now picking utility should be better since you always can build.

0: highfront.png

In the middle, there’s a little mirrored structure that will have one power weapon spawning on each side. They can help you sieging the enemy base, so I expect there’ll be some contest for them!

This map is almost one month old, but I haven’t got a chance to use it until now. This is an experimental CTF map with a flag hidden on a big ass tanker. Your task is to protect it, reinforce it, and prevent enemy team from stealing your flag. This map was developed pretty early on in Shoot & Build development, so it may feel like ass, or may not feel like ass.

Also throwing grenades should be much more responsive and must have a better flow now. Previously our throw animation was a bit sluggish and caused some delay between “deploy” and “throw” states. This has been changed and now flow should be much better. This also allowed us to reduce grenade explosion time from 4 to 2.5 seconds. Hopefully grenades will be more viable now!

All of this shouldn’t be a problem anymore, since we natively support MagicaVoxel .vox format now. It is worth mentioning that .vox has bunch of it’s own weird issues, it can be confusing sometimes, but hopefully we will resolve any importing issues as we create more maps and find out all little tricks and annoyances with the new workflow.

We still support .vxl format, and it still loads up just fine, so compatibility with Ace of Spades maps isn’t going anywhere. However for this game specifically, we advise you to stick with VOX format as it provides much easier import workflow, and it loads up much faster than VXL maps. It also has much better size limits, which will allow creating large maps if necessary.

This a nice step towards providing a good environment for creating community maps. In the near future we also plan to convert maps from s&box game resource definitions to prefabs, which should make a few specific things easier to use.

Now, as instead shader procedurally generates waves heightmap and then computes it into tangent space normals right in shader, with no manual textures. It isn’t a big achievement, implementation is probably goofy, but this allows having more control over how waves look like, and I think it looks generally less “gooey”-ish than before.

• Max landmines reduced from 5 to 3
• You can now place landmines even if you reach the limit. When you hit the limit, last placed landmine will be automatically destroyed (with no explosion)
• Updated weapon info UI to display your current landmine count
• Landmine lifetime reduced from 3 to 2 minutes

We won’t talk about our plans on the release date for now, but the game is definitely shaping up really well. Visit our Discord for new announcements in the near future!

• New playtest on November 16th 19:00 GMT
• Implemented Capture the Flag gamemode
• Implemented Zombie Infection gamemode
• Implemented game loop for TDM/FFA
• Implemented match end screen & map vote
• Added new secondary weapon, .357 Revolver
• Implemented dynamic spread to weapons
• Many many changes to weapon accuracy and behavior
• Implemented dynamic crosshair
• Implemented styling customization for crosshairs
• Reduced shovel block damage from 100 to 50 per hit
• Reduced shovel swing speed from 0.1s to 0.5s
• Increased player block health from 100 to 200
• Added new utility tool, Drill (high efficiency block breaker)
• Added new utility tool, Hammer (repairs blocks on hit)
• Small Fish World map rework by CyberAgent
• New map: CTF Tanker, by wheatleymf
• New map: CTF Highfront, by wheatleymf
• Reduced grenade explosion time from 4.5s to 2s
• Added grenade trajectory preview while holding grenade
• Significantly improved grenade throw flow, should have no delay between deploy and hold states
• Implemented .vox map file importer (easier import, higher import speed)
• Added input glyphs (hints) for all gear
• Added blood decals spawning upon player damage
• Added screen brightness settings
• Added screen contrast settings
• Added voxel impact FX when hitting blocks with a weapon
• Reduced max landmine count from 5 to 3
• Update UI to display current amount of deployed landmines
• Reduced landmine lifetime from 3 to 2 minutes
• Last deployed landmine automatically destroys itself if player tries to place another landmine beyond the limit
• Another bunch of water shader changes
• Added command to change the current map (admin-only)
• Updated SMG anims to fix thumb clipping through gun since apparently it annoyed half of Small Fish
• More work on player animations from Grodbert, new hold types for guns
• Can pick colors from world blocks for your block tool
• Added headshot SFX
• Updated hitmarker sounds (thanks Mungus)
• Changed chat announcement notification sounds to be less similar to Windows sticky keys sound
• Piss