Hello again, friends!
Holy guacamole, has it been a busy several months since our last update! There’s plenty of exciting stuff to talk about, but before we kick things off, we’d like to send another HUGE thank you to every member of our growing community for all of the support, patience, and enthusiasm we continue to receive and enjoy as we bring this beloved project closer and closer to life.
Seriously, your collective excitement fuels us more than we can describe. Thanks so much for that!
We could start this wrap-up by explaining how we wanted to post something like it sooner than, well, now — but instead of making playful excuses, how about we just get right into it? It’s a big one, so get comfy!
Dev vlog #1
Alongside this update blog post, we’ve released our very first development vlog as well!
If you prefer your Highpoint development updates more video-shaped, good news! We have just what you’re looking for, right here:
The remainder of this post covers the same updates as the video, but in much more detail. (Plus, there’s a few extras here.) So, please read on if that’s your thing!
Customization Improvements
Character Customization is better than ever — more options to choose from, surrounded by a much more pleasant scene. And the best is yet to come!
Anyone who has had a chance to talk to us about customization in Highpoint knows where we stand on the topic. It’s hugely important and exciting to us. We want players to be able to express themselves as much through their customization choices as they do through their behavior and playstyles on the field.
Recently we made some changes to how customization is done in-game, and these made a big impact on how fun it is to customize our little bot friends before each match. The process of designing and executing these improvements also taught us a lot about where we want to take the customization system next and over the long run. Fun to work on, fun results!
Probably the most noticeable thing we upgraded was the front-end level/environment, where customization happens. Here’s what it looked like before:
Where before we used a colder, more sci-fi environment in the front-end level, we are now greeted by a much warmer, more inviting, open-air environment when the game starts:
We also remade the customization UI to make it simpler and easier to use. The original UI was a bit too complex, and it too easily allowed players to accidentally end up with a mismatching look. The newer menu fixed that issue, and others. Even so, we’re still far from done improving it. (Hint: expect more updates soon!)
As for the customization options themselves, we gave some love to the primary material options for each team, making them more distinct and legible from each other, and just better-looking in general.
Lastly, players can now also customize their bots’ trim materials, because (a) it’s fun to do, and (b) it looks REAL GOOD.
We have big ambitions for what customization will look like in the final game, and a long way to go to get there. But we’re constantly having fun making progress toward that goal, and having a blast watching players try out new looks as each new piece of the customization suite comes online.
Endzone Upgrades
Better form AND better function for one of our most important gameplay components.
During the late spring and early summer, we took a shot at solving a shortcoming with our existing Endzone design. The issue was, it was sometimes hard to know how close an Endzone was to being fully captured, especially when frantically moving or battling inside that space. This was a consequence of the Endzone only showing its capture progress in a single, two-dimensional place right at its center.
Because there was only one visual meter, and because that meter laid flat on the floor of the Endzone, it was often obstructed by other players, or even completely out of view — especially when looking anywhere except directly at it.
Though this issue wasn’t exactly gamebreaking, it didn’t sit well with us, because it meant the game was doing an inadequate job of communicating clearly to players what is going on. We consider this kind of game-to-player communication extremely important, especially for a fast-paced multiplayer game where teamwork and quick tactical decisions can be super rewarding and make for very memorable moments. We never want these opportunities to be bottlenecked, especially not inadvertently by poor delivery of gameplay information. So we were inspired to try to fix it right away.
We thought up some simple improvement ideas, developed a few prototype looks, and got to work plugging in the new design and functionality. (Some of this process was sneak-peaked in our last dev blog post.) Here’s what we ended up with:
The updated Endzone is better in three key ways:
- The ‘Capture Meter’ now exists in two places: in the center like before, and also all around the boundary of the Endzone, so you can see it no matter which direction you’re facing. This also effectively prevents it from being fully obscured by other players, since the boundary meter occupies such a large area.
- The boundary meter is 3D — it doesn’t just lay flat. This makes capture progress easier to see from pretty much every angle, and is even clearly visible from across the field. (Bonus!)
- The whole dang Endzone is just a lot prettier now. (Okay, maybe this isn’t as key as the other two, but still!)
With those improvements made, we felt a lot better about the communication issue. But there was still another part of the Endzone that could use our attention: the goal-line area.
The ‘goal-line area’ is what we call the platform right in front of the goal. Its purpose and design have changed a lot over the years, but more recently, its roles have been to: (a) give defenders a place to stand in front of the goal and launch defensive strikes from; and (b) to funnel players in toward the goal to kinda concentrate the action and force confrontations.
Plenty of testing has since taught us that the forced funneling hasn’t given us the results that we’re really after. For one thing, we decided there is already plenty of confrontation all across the field, and by concentrating that action in front of the goal, we inadvertently made things a bit too chaotic there. (This was also true for our smaller, circular Endzones back before we enlarged them to the size they are today.)
Further, having limited space in front of the goal placed too much of a constraint on the way players want to play the game, and — as we’ve since discovered — it stifled creativity and teamwork. (More on that in a bit!)
So we embiggened the goal-line area. And wow, it really made a difference.
A few important things became clear to us very soon after making this change:
- Passing and Teamwork: many new “passing lanes” were opened up. Passing to a well-positioned teammate right next to an open goal became much more viable and worthwhile. We started seeing more clever passing plays pretty much immediately, which was incredible.
- Shooting on Goal: it’s now possible to approach and take a shot on the goal from many new angles. This means more interesting positioning for players on both offense and defense, and therefore many more opportunities for mind games, fake outs, etc.
- Defender Confidence: with a larger area to move around in, being a goal-line defender now feels less claustrophobic or precarious. This means less worrying about falling off the edge or getting AoE’d by an opponent, and more freedom to outplay the ball carrier and deny incoming shots.
- Fewer/Better KOs: because the new goal-line area is larger and less chaotic, there are fewer “meaningless” KOs caused by frantic button-mashing-for-your-life. This means more players often remain alive for score attempts compared to before, which makes those big moments more involving, more unpredictable, and more exciting.
Suffice to say, we’re thrilled with how much better the new goal-line area is. It’s a great example of how a simple change can have a huge and positive effect on the entire game.
Passing Improvements
More freedom, less engineering. Sometimes simpler is better.
Passing is one of the most important mechanics in Highpoint, and it’s one of those things that we are most determined to get exactly right, no matter how many iterations it takes us.
Over the summer, we revisited passing once again, and decided we wanted to try something else with it. The way passing worked at the time was like this: you got the ball, looked toward a teammate, tapped the pass button, and the ball would be thrown toward whichever teammate you were most closely aiming at. This means the pass was partially “auto-aimed”: it would be thrown at the correct speed and direction to reach your teammate given your teammate’s current location, speed, and movement direction. In other words, the game would predict where your teammate and the ball should intersect — like a quarterback does, just with more math — and then launch the ball using that prediction.
This auto-aimed solution was the best approach we had tried up to that point, and we were relatively happy with it for a good while. But it had its issues.
Most important, it was very constraining for the player. Because it worked in a fairly predictable way, players found themselves having to work around this ingrained behavior to make passes more unpredictable and harder to intercept. (Jumping or dashing before passing, for example.) Additionally, even though there’s no way to perfectly predict what a player is going to do a few seconds from now, it felt bad when the prediction algorithm got it “wrong” and the pass missed; the passing player often felt like the game had cheated them of their moment to complete a cool play. Finally, this auto-aiming solution was also just too “easy” — it didn’t allow for players to develop their skill, it didn’t nicely accommodate passing ‘routes’, and it didn’t permit players to willingly release the ball for any reason except to pass toward a teammate.
Put simply, we had overengineered passing. We needed to simplify. And so, we deleted several hundred lines of code and tried again.
In its new, current form, passing works like this: you get the ball, you look in the direction you want to throw it, you press the button, and that’s it: the ball is thrown forward. This means you can aim and throw in any direction, and predicting your teammate’s movement is up to you — now you are the quarterback, not the game.
Like expanding the goal-line area, this change was simple but had several major benefits:
- It raised the skill ceiling: now, passing is affected by player skill, meaning skilled players will be able to leverage their experience to pull off superior passing plays.
- Entirely new kinds of passing: quick lobs, hail marys, bounce-passing off the wall, bounce-passing off the ‘backboard’, self-passing — all of these already have happened during testing, and there are bound to be even more creative passing techniques that we just haven’t seen yet.
- Utility throwing: players can now tactically throw the ball for purposes other than completing passes, such as buying time or relieving pressure when outnumbered, say by throwing the ball far downfield (like punting). Another example is in-bounding the ball in a more controlled way: when a KO is unavoidable, it’s now a lot more feasible to throw the ball back in bounds toward the opponents’ goal, where your teammate might be able to reach it first.
- Trick shots: alley-oops are now more achievable than ever! Need we say more?
As always, there is still vast room for improvement with this mechanic. But for now, we’re happy to report that passing in Highpoint is absolutely, tremendously, thrillingly better than ever.
New Ability: the ‘Spinning Air Strike’
For when you want to smack your opponent in-air, but want to be all “spinny” while you do it.
For a long while now, the uppercut has been the way to really show your opponent just how much you enjoy punching them. It has also been the only way to defend the goal against incoming score attempts. So we added a new strike to the game to help address that second point. (We’re happy with the first point; we <3 uppercuts.)
The new spinning air strike is intended to be the complement to the uppercut in multiple ways, and especially should help defenders feel readier against the wily ways of hard-to-hit players soaring toward the goal with the ball.
Here are a couple key ways the new spinning air strike contrasts with the classic uppercut:
- The spinning strike travels horizontally, compared to the uppercut’s more vertical orientation. This gives players a broad, lateral alternative to the snappier, vertically-aligned uppercut — and allows out-of-position or moving defenders to have a better chance at connecting a strike to defend the goal.
- The spinning strike covers a much larger area, and feels more defensive compared to the aggressive uppercut. While the uppercut requires timing and precision, the spinning strike is more like a broad ‘shield’ useful for covering and protecting an area (particularly the goal).
As it is still very new, we’re still working on the spinning strike. But it has already shown us a lot of promise and has been a blast to test out with friends.
Visual Improvements to ‘Mountain Temple’ and ‘Sky City’ Arenas
Two of our arenas suddenly look a lot nicer.
For now, all of the art in Highpoint is placeholder, but whenever we get the chance to pepper in some updates that help inform the look, feel, and vibe we want in the final game, we’re gonna take it.
That’s just what we did with our Mountain Temple and Sky City arenas, and we’re pretty happy with the progress! Luckily, this topic shows a lot better than it tells, so, get ready for some images.
Here’s a before shot of Mountain Temple:
And here’s a bunch of after shots:
And now, Sky City. Here’s a before image for comparison:
And Sky City after the updates:
These updates help point out a couple of important features that we intend for all of our arenas to have:
The first is distinct sides: all directions (north, east, south, west) of our arenas will be different and distinct from each other. When you’re standing on the field looking outward, we want each direction to be unique and identifiable.
The second is feeling like you’re there: we don’t want the “visual flavor” of our maps to live way off in the background; we want you to feel like you’re inhabiting these spaces. Instead of separating you from the outside world with a giant dome or a vast empty space, we want the surrounding world to feel like it’s just at arm’s reach, and as if it connects seamlessly with the playing field.
Sky City, especially, was improved in these ways when it got its update. Both arenas look a lot better after a fresh color pass. And though there’s still vast room for improvement, these arenas are now much better examples of what we want the final game to look and feel like. That helps us now and helps us later — because we get to enjoy the improved visuals as we play now, and because we have a more focused target that we can later take to full art production when we’re ready.
Final ‘Rapid-Fire’ Update Notes
Summing up some of our smaller updates by abusing bulleted lists even further.
Here’s a list of some other updates or events from summertime that deserve at least a quick mention:
- In late May, we crossed 500 followers on Twitter, and we made a silly video about it. And in September, we crossed 1,000! And made a silly video about that too! (Thanks everyone!)
- We added a “radar pulse” visual effect to the game ball whenever it re-enters the edge of your screen, making it even easier to find the ball during frantic gameplay.
- We added the “Player View” camera to our spectator mode. Now you can see exactly the same view the controlling player sees — or, when watching a replay, the same view they had when the match was live!
- We added sound effects for fumbles and collisions with the goal posts. (Take our word for it, these make a big difference!)
- We made significant improvements to gameplay smoothness during online multiplayer (improved “netcode”)
- We improved the look of the game ball. Plus it now changes its interior color to correspond with the team that is currently in control of it.
Work In Progress
Here’s a sneak peek at some things we’re currently working on that we’re eager to share more about next time.
So far, we’ve written about the game’s front-end, about customization, and about some of our arenas. That’s a convenient segue, because currently we’re working on improving the way those three connect together!
Specifically, we’re working on adding a “multiplayer lobby” to the game. If that description means nothing to you, don’t worry, it’s something you’ve seen before, probably at least a dozen times. Anytime you’ve played a multiplayer game with your pals and partied up in the menus, queued for a match, or picked your character class just before the game starts, you were in some kind of “lobby” on some game server somewhere.
Okay, so I know that sounds boring, but we promise it won’t be! First of all, instead of sitting in the lobby just staring at menus, when you’re in a Highpoint lobby with your friends you’ll be looking at something like this instead:
Going further, you’ll be able to customize your bot right alongside your chums and color-coordinate (or not!) to your heart’s content. Want your team to be all green and black like cans of energy drinks? We hope not, but regardless, it will be easier than ever to match up your look with your teammates in real time.
And lastly, the lobby will give players improved control over who plays on which team, how many players are on each team (anyone up for a 4v1?), who’s spectating (if anyone), and more. We promise, it will be life-changing! useful and fun!
Farewell For Now
That’s it! That’s what we got up to this summer, with a glimpse into what we’re working on right now. Thanks so much for reading!
We’d like to say, one more time, just how much we appreciate everyone in the community. (A lot!) Your interest in these updates, our work, and the game itself means a heck of a lot to us. We’re so glad to have you along on this journey with us!
We’ll be back again with another update as soon as we can! In the mean time, stay healthy and safe out there!
Much love! 💗
—The HIGHPOINT Team