Hey. Long time no see. Things have been slow since I've been dealing with nightmarish moving. But I've been settled in my new place for the past couple months, sort of, and have started working again. For beta17, I've added and changed some fun stuff, but I think I'd like to share that all in a video soon. Instead, I'm just going to share some boring but important crap first so the video doesn't have to mention any of it.

Achievements

The achievement system is finished, and 35 achievements will be available when beta17 is out (I might add more). Most achievements can be earned with any server settings you'd like, but you can only earn achievements on stock maps in order to discourage creating 'achievement farm' maps and crapping up the Workshop with them. Some achievements are tied to hardcore survival, so 100% won't be a small walk in the park.

You do not need to reset your Steam achievements or GameJolt trophies, as achievement progress is primarily saved on the server along with weapon skins. So if you already have the achievement on Steam, it'll still be locked in-game.

31 achievements are either from v1, or some sort of spiritual successor of a v1 achievement with changed rules and/or icons. Achievement slots in Steamworks were recycled, so when beta17 is out you might have achievements unlocked already depending on what you did in v1. 4 achievements were replaced entirely, as they are either irrelevant or just stupid as hell:

-- NET+ Certified (Better server support thanks to linux + holepunching)

-- Arsenal (Weapons are no longer locked for new players)

-- God (Too many lame survival wave count achievements)

-- No type-killing (Stupid joke that became real)

Notice anything weird?

Stats

Stat tracking is now official in beta17. I've been tracking stats for a while but I wanted to add more and not have a player's old stats be so different when compared to recently added new stats, so I've decided to reset them. Plenty of bugs and crap occurred with it too, so some of the data might be incorrectly bloated or something.

You'll also get a break down of your skin collection, and a few individual stats for each weapon. Stats are collected on any map under any settings, I don't know how to really handle it any other way. I may add a clear stats button in case you're converted to a TDM exclusive player or something.

Lore

The Lore system has been implemented, and it's something rather unique I'm doing.

Thanks to my chipmunk brain, writing can be difficult at times and often impulsive for me. I've thought of some funny tidbits at 3am that left me wishing to put it into the lore but without needing much context, categorizing or relevancy.

To solve this, I've made this new lore unlocking system, where once a day you can find lore codex in-game. The lore you get is random, so that allows me to write lore almost context free. In-game, it comes in the form of some media or vessel of information (CDs, hard drives, papers, etc). When you 'open' it in the lore menu, then you get a mostly nicely formatted article, which also has the ability to embed images.

That's not all. The unique thing is in order to comply with my impulsive writing, the game is also able to update lore from spasmangames.com, without needing to update the game build. So anytime I write something up, all I need to do is add it to my server and you will have it in your drop pool the next time you log in.

Better cloud saving (for me)

In beta17, I've been working on converting your save files into table data for SQLite. B-Man and Tunnel Divers save data is based on Windows text files, embarrassingly enough. As more and more people try the game, the more text files are created, and I think things are gettin' outta hand. As long as it works, this should not impact you at all, but I thought I'd mention it as it's probably the most unstable thing next update.

If it's not already obvious why 100k+ folders full of files are bad, then switching to SQL will make everyone's save data much much easier to back up, as it would only be 1 file thats ~200mb. The login server has also been slowing down due to the mass of files constant growth, so once everyone's data is converted and we've been settled in, I can nuke all these files and hopefully see a performance boost

That's all for now folkz

There's plenty more to share for beta17 but I wanted to try to start making YouTube videos more. I have no idea when beta17 will be out, and I wouldn't be surprised if I make it the first v2.0.0 build. I have vvvverryy slow internet where I'm staying right now, which is why I rushed the Linux export so I didn't have to host from home anymore.

With this upload speed, my Upload-A-Billion-Hot-Fixes strategy isn't going to work very well. I'll need some time to figure this out before I can think of a date. I don't think beta17 is too broken, but I'm always needing mulligans.

Sorry for the dead player population, I wish there was anything more I could do. This game being hard to market is also getting pretty old, and coupled with my anxiety about annoying people with advertisement, its had a poor marketing job. Either way, I'm finishing what I started and at least I think my servers and code are in much better shape for a coveted player rush then last time, so I'm happy to say I'm ready and waiting, even though it'll probably be an eternity.

If you somehow didn't notice the B-Man holiday event is on going until January 2nd, and B-Man DLC is in the winter Steam sale.

And if you missed it, here's a sneak peek at the Buzzer:

https://i.imgur.com/Czhcdra.gif

https://i.imgur.com/Gx88eNa.gif

Thanks for your support!

- S

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