Dev Blog #48 - Health Update, Kicks and Dynamic Crosshairs

Happy Friday everyone,

Congratulations on surviving yet another work week! I hope you’ve been doing well and have some great plans for the weekend. 

A lot has happened the last couple of weeks, most of them good, but the dominant story of this week will not be one of them. You’ve probably seen the title already so I’m not going to waste too much time with an introduction and will go straight to the point.

Health Update

I’ve not been feeling very well as of late and I was very hesitant to bring this up in a blog post but eventually decided to pull through with it. The primary reason is that, as backers, you deserve to know what is happening in the development side of things. You are the reason we get to do this in the first place and it would not sit right with me to not talk about things that affect the project. Secondly, I always find it rather difficult to open up about my life and it’s something I’ve been trying to feel more comfortable with for quite a while now. I think this is a good step towards that. 

It's quite a story and I’m unsure how long it’s going to be so bare with me. I will attach a TL;DR at the end of this section in case you want to cut to the chase, which is completely understandable! Just to avoid any potential scares; No, I’m not dying, far from it. But there have been some bumps in the road that have made it hard to work on the game.

3 years ago, roughly around the time covid arrived in The Netherlands, I was dealing with quite an intense stomach ache. These are quite common for me, but this time something was a little more unusual. The pain is hard to describe. It’s basically a cramp that, during an attack, made me feel very ill, cold and shivery. These attacks would last for a minute, sometimes a little longer. The attacks kept getting worse and more frequent, so I called a doctor because I knew something wasn’t right. This was not your everyday stomach ache.

Unfortunately, due to the early stages of lockdown, the rules were very strict and I was unable to visit. Given my medical history, my doctor assumed it was just another usual stomach flu that would eventually go away. I told him that wasn’t the case, but unfortunately refused to discuss it with me any further and wanted me to wait it out. If problems persist, I'd have to call again.

As the weeks went by, the symptoms got worse. So I decided to give yet another phone call. Luckily, I was finally able to get an appointment in the same week.

When I got to visit, my doctor assumed it was a bacterial infection and prescribed me antibiotics that should take care of it. I took the medication as described for the weeks ahead, but was unable to get the situation to improve. If anything, they kept getting worse.

After yet another visit and another incorrect treatment, the symptoms were getting severe enough that I was unable to do basic tasks. Breathing was difficult and the pain was getting increasingly more brutal. Usually switching positions (e.g laying down on my side with my knees bent to my head, or sitting down leaning forward) would reduce the pain but even that was no longer an option. It’s easily the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life. It was a very long night and just thinking about it as I am writing this fills me with dread. I could go in-depth about how the night went but this blog post would have to become an entire novel. Despite how much I kept pushing for it, getting proper help was a nightmare. Even the hospital could not help me due to shortages at the hospital in my area. But thankfully, eventually, I was able to get another appointment with my doctor and it was considered an emergency case. So I was able to come over right away as soon as the morning hit.

Upon my arrival, it was evident I was not healthy. I was pale, lost tons of weight and haven’t slept for over 36 hours at this point. An ambulance was called in from another city further up, and was about to be picked up.

I arrived at the hospital and felt like I was finally in good hands. I took a CT-scan where they found something quite unusual. One part of my colon was twisted, somehow. This caused a hell of an infection and made it harder for my bowels to operate normally. An attempt had to be made to correct that and they have been able to get it done by pushing against it with a tiny camera, forcing the twisted part back to its original position. This was the biggest relief of my life. Of course, I was heavily sedated so I was not feeling any pain and while most details are hazy, I do remember not being able to contain my laughter because I was able to breathe without feeling resistance or pain, and that made me very happy.

After the procedure was done, we were halfway there. Most of the pain was gone but the infection was still present and it was approaching a lethal state, I was also diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease which I was not aware of before the procedure. We had to stop the infection as fast as we could since the Crohn's disease on top of it was not doing it any favors, so quite aggressive medicine was handed to me twice a day that should eliminate the infection. Thankfully, we noticed a reduction every day and was finally able to get discharged after a week.

Everything was going great at this point. During all of my bi-weekly check ups the results were positive and the infection was fading away more and more. The medication did wonders.

Now, this was all 3 years ago, so surely there’s a reason I am bringing this up now, right? You are correct! A few weeks ago, similar symptoms started appearing again. Not nearly as severe of course, given how it’s in an early stage, but given the traumatic experiences from 3 years ago, this frightened me, but thankfully it is now well documented in my file so I was confident getting help would be easier than the last time. And it has been! One call with my doctor and I was able to get an appointment with a specialist right away. After 2 weeks of tests, we figured out why the pain had returned.

This Monday, I learned that I have an auto-immune disease. This is well treatable these days, but what makes it more difficult in my case is how weak my colon is due to the incident from 3 years ago. The disease will forever try to cause infections there to the point that my current treatment is no longer effective enough to keep up. The new upcoming treatment has a high chance of success, but does come with the added risk of damaging the immune system. There are ways to mitigate this, one of which is by getting a number of vaccinations that prevent common illnesses. I’m obviously not a doctor so I am not entirely sure about the technicalities, but given how they saved my life last time when I had an unusual case, I’m trusting their judgment.

The expectation is that everything will end up fine for the most part. Assuming healthy habits, this will have no negative effect on my life expectancy so we can still get together and play Bingo a few decades from now to celebrate the launch of SELACO: INFINITY WAR PART II. But I do have to be careful and take good care of myself moving forward. Getting really ill is extra risky for me.

I have not been able to get the same amount of work done as usual for Selaco for the last few weeks. Still significant steps here and there, but not to a level that I feel satisfied with. The pain, hospital visits and uncertainty about why the pain is back have made me feel endlessly tired, uninspired and my creative juice felt depleted. Now that I have more answers regarding my well-being, I’m feeling the creative energy return. And you know what makes it even better? Spring is coming!

I’m still extremely exhausted as I am writing this because I took 3 vaccinations in a single day. It took quite a bit of willpower to get up and start writing, which is usually not much of an issue with these blog posts. But, outside of that, I’m feeling good. I am optimistic about the treatment and hope everything will end up as planned.

I am not expecting everyone to read this whole story, but if you did, I thank you for taking the time <3

TL;DR - 3 years ago I got an extremely severe bowel infection which only got worse overtime since Covid lockdowns made it hard to make an appointment, and when I did visit a doctor the diagnosis was wrong on multiple occasions. After multiple months of pain, I was able to be taken to the hospital where I could finally get proper treatment. Recently, similar symptoms started arriving which meant I had to visit the hospital again which had quite an impact on how much I could work on this game. The result came back this Monday and it’s an auto-immune disease. It’s well treatable and I’ll start treatment next week.

Phew, now that we have the heavy stuff out of the way, I do want to bring up a few development related topics. Not everything is bad, just look at the things we did end up doing below!

Workshop Status

Remember when I showed a mock-up in the last Blog Post? Well, we managed to get it to run in-engine now. Here is a screenshot!

A good amount of upgrades are currently working and numerous alt fires have been added. Just like last time, development progress on this is going way faster than anticipated. However, one key element is changed. In the last blog post, I mentioned that your Upgrade Tier (a tier that grants access to a new set of unlocks) would improve with every Safe Room you visit. But this has been changed for something that allows us to place more Safe Rooms in the game without padding the number too much. Rather, some Safe Rooms (usually 1 per Level) will have a Firmware Update item that you can use to upgrade your workshop. This grants you access to more stuff.

Animated Crosshairs

Selaco’s crosshairs have always been static. It’s effective, but also boring and does not provide a good visual indicator of how your weapon is currently behaving. The amount of spread is never visualized properly for example, you have no idea how much your weapon accuracy is decaying as you fire.

This new system takes these variables into consideration and tries to give you an accurate idea of what you can expect from your weapon. The longer you fire, the less accurate you become and the larger the crosshair gets. Get an upgrade that reduces spread? You will dynamically see the crosshair adjust itself accordingly.

This is still in its early stage but it’s going very well. Apologies if the GIF below makes it a little hard to see. We’re still planning on adjusting the color to be more readable. Oh, did we mention we added fancy animations when zooming?

Kicking animation

Dawn can finally use her legs to open some doors! Before, the door would just fall over and we tried to imply through sound effects that it was getting kicked, but this felt a little lackluster. Animating the kick took a few hours of the day so did not take too much time, yet the result is quite satisfying!

Will we add a dedicated kick button? Probably not, but never say never!

Pathfinding

We’ve given it yet another major overhaul! It was already in a pretty decent place with the recent Demo update, but this time we managed to add more variety in the paths the enemies take and improved their code to figure out flanking routes. Soldiers are finally aware of occupied paths and will often prefer to take different routes to reach their destination. This causes soldiers to frequently spread out, while still having a good chance for 2 soldiers to buddy up and follow each other along a path. Additionally, some enemies, like our predefined ‘Attackers Classes’, will always favor flanking over taking the player head on. This is on top of randomized combat values that decides how aggressive, defensive, fast, or mobile they are. This all results in an improved combat dynamic that Selaco has always been aiming for.

This works quite well and the results so far have been surprisingly effective! This will be demonstrated properly in an Extended Demo that goes live for Patrons later this year.

Test Lab

Anyone who is still pledging and pledged a total of $80 will soon receive access to a brand new Test Lab. I will start work on it next week!

Testing goals:

• AI improvements along with Improved pathfinding
• Plasma Rifle along with Gravity Manipulation

Everybody will be receiving an email when it’s ready for testing!

Conclusion

Bit of a personal development blog, I hope that’s alright with you all. We’ve managed to get a lot more done than just this but I’ll save that for a more chunky development blog 2 weeks from now (so still in March!). I’m currently very tired due to the vaccinations and being able to type this out took quite a bit of energy. As soon as I hit the big publish button, I’ll head down and start preparing a nice meal.

May you have a fantastic weekend, and thank you for sticking with us <3

Wesley de Waart