Progress is going on as strong as usual with LBKR, although I haven’t felt that there’s been much to show up until now, as alot of time has been spent on bug fixes, coding the final boss behaviour and creating world chunks for the final chapter, which has already been shown in previous posts!

For the moment nearly all mission-related world chunks have been prepared for the final chapter, aswell as ~35 regular chunks- including new secret areas and randomized world events. All maps already implemented in the game have been set up with the new decal system (replacing the previously used, physics/mesh gen-decal system I had created.) and as far as I’ve been able to see this far it’s had a positive effect on game performance and memory consumption.

While still speaking about maps, one of the void-rift maps currently implemented, namely the “SX0 Exterior” will be unavailable as of v2.28, the map’s been out of date for quite some time and I feel that in order to have it work properly with some new missions I’ve added I want to recreate it from scratch.

Some changes made to existing stuff include the character stats. A skill used to calculate the likelihood of evading an attack in earlier versions of the game, “Dodge Rating”, has been removed. As of 2.27 this skill was rendered useless as all attacks were modified to use collision detection for hits and a new input was added called “Dodge”, allowing the player to perform a dodge roll ( or a warp if playing with the ‘Cryptic’ player class. )
A new skill has been added to the game called “Ranged Damage”, and will as the name implies, affect the character’s damage while using ranged attacks/weapons. As more player classes are beeing added to the game I’m noticing that alot of the player’s attributes feel unclear and that it might be difficult to know which ones to focus on for a certain character so I’m trying to plan for an improved attribute list, and the ranged damage skill is a first step.

Some issues reported in earlier versions will be fixed for the next release, some of these are as follows.

‘The Cryptic’s ‘Chain Strike’ ability no longer randomly target destructible environment, but will instead only target enemy characters as intended’
‘Minions no longer attack, nor get stuck while attacking, destructible enrivonment’
‘Fixed issue with corrupt mesh data in some of the maps of Highland Chapter’
‘Cryptic’s Shuriken ability no longer heal the player if the attack destroy a destructible object instead of hitting an enemy’
‘Tech’s Junkaton ability no longer heal the player if a destructible object is destroyed instead of hitting and enemy’

I’m also making some adjustments to the background, story and lore of LBKR- this will most likely not be fully finished until the next release as alot of content has to be updated, the changes are intended for the alien “Forsaken” creatures, that in the current version of the story inhabit the planet and seem to live unaffected by the parasite that is infected almost all humans on the IGCC station.

I’ve never been quite satisfied with the appearance of the Forsaken though, and I feel like they’re quite…. random? Anyways, they will still appear in-game and while their background story will remain more or less the same, they will now show signs of infection aswell. My idea is to make them appear more evolved than the infected humans, since the Forsaken inhabited the planet alot earlier than any humans did (although, hidden in caves deep beneath the surface.) and were infected earlier aswell.

I’ve begun remodeling the characters and this far I’m more pleased with them, they feel more like LBKR-monsters to me than the previous versions of them. Unfortunately this will take some extra time to remodel, animate, rig and re-implement each monster of the Forsaken faction but I believe that it’ll be worth it!

Work on LBKR continues as usual, been putting together alot of world chunks for the final chapter, currently there are 25 chunks game-ready but alot more to be done!

I’ve created the primary minion that the new player class “Puppeteer” will be able to summon, it’s a puppet (… who could’ve guessed? 😉 ) The ability used to summon the minion has three modes, the first mode will summon a puppet that deal only physical damage, second mode may summon up to three puppets that inflict random elemental damage and the third mode summons a single large monster puppet.

Hastily moving on to visuals, in previous versions of LBKR I’ve generated flat meshes at runtime for blood stains and splatter however, I recently noticed that this method was to a relatively expensive cost once entering the Wildlands (Chapter 6), as the system I wrote to handle this relied heavily on extra world colliders. The old system worked fine for the first five chapters as all world colliders are fairly simple and originally, LBKR was only supposed to have 5 chapters, it wasn’t until last year that I decided to add another 5 of ’em and that alot of the new chapters would take place outdoors or in caves with more detailed ground etc. therefore involving more complex colliders.

Anyways, I’m now using projections instead to simply bolt blood stains onto any surface that I allow to receive projected decals. As all extra colliders necessary for my old decal system are now unnecessary I’ve decided to clean up all old world chunks from them, and I’m currently half way through, more or less. ( Which I find to be quite good… considering the current unique world chunks count is about 600 or so chunks. )

I seem to have made a habbit out of beeing silent for a few weeks between each post, I won’t throw in any excuses though instead, let’s try to catch up on what’s been going on the past week and check out some of the new stuff that will be implemented into the next version of LBKR!

First of all, I didn’t manage to get the Travel station UI done in the UI update that was released with v2.27 as I had left it untouched until the very end, and I noticed that I had to rewrite alot of the code for the UI behaviour. It’s nearly done now though, now following the style of most other UI elements in the game, and also a new map that display in what part of the station (or on the planet for the ch.5 – 10) your target destination is located at.

A new player class will be available, named “Puppeteer”. Like the Tech class the Puppeteer make use of summoned minions but unlike the Tech, her abilities are more focused toward some blood-magic-like style. On my to-do list is also to make each class more different from the other, currently I get the feeling that they’re pretty much the same with a single difference beeing their abilities. For this to work I’ll also have to create a few new character skills, the character attributes list will be modified as some values and/or entire attributes no longer make sense due to some changes done in v2.27. All the changes regarding the class, skills and attributes might however be delayed to v2.29 depending on how much time I can spare for the moment.

I’ve also begun creating some geometry and props for the final chapter and combining them into world chunks. Still got quite a few stuff for the geometry and prop-packs to do though.

Some new monsters are on the way aswell that will be encountered primarily in the final chapter, and while I’ve got the concept of the last chapter done there are still some fine tuning and plotting for the boss.

I think that’s it for this time, I’ll return soon with more updates on the upcoming release meanwhile, don’t miss out on the LBKR Twitter page!

Loot Burn Kill Repeat v2.27 has just been released.
Major UI changes has occured for this version, read more about the changes here
There’s also alot of new content in the new version, some of which you can read about here

The game is as usual released as free to play and can be downloaded from the Files page.

Make sure to read the Update Log for a complete list of all fixes, improvements and updates!