Devlog #15: A real front door, a day that ends, and 25 ways to hit things

This round covers 18 October. Beyond now opens on its own main menu, keeps your world between sessions, has days, nights and weather, and picked up a big batch of melee weapons. The roads and forests also got another pass.

The main menu

The game now starts on a Beyond menu instead of a placeholder. It's a dark, run-down room with the Beyond mark glowing green in the corner, and your own character standing in it: whatever you were last wearing in the world, and the weapon you were holding, in a matching idle pose.

• The menu has: Continue, New Game, Join Server, Options, Credits and Quit.
• Join Server remembers the last address you typed.
• Options opens the settings screen.

Getting the character right took a few tries. The first version saved your look too eagerly, so spawning in fresh clothes overwrote the outfit you'd left the world in. It now only updates once you actually change what you're wearing or holding.

Your world is saved

Until now, every single-player session started from nothing. Now it doesn't:

• Continue loads your saved world: your bag, the clothes you're wearing, and the world around you.
• New Game starts a fresh world. If you already have one, it asks first, because the old save is deleted.
• The game autosaves every 5 minutes, and also when you quit back to the menu. Each save takes a fraction of a second, so there's no pause.

We tested it by dressing a character in five pieces of gear, quitting to the menu and hitting Continue: everything came back, still worn. Saving when you close the whole game from inside the world is in, but hasn't been tested yet.

Loading screens

Loading the world takes a while, so it now has a proper loading screen. Each one shows one of eight shots of the map (towns, a motel, roads and forest), a random survival tip, and a green progress bar. The bar learns how long your machine usually takes, so it's roughly honest. The screen stays up until the area around you has actually finished loading, so you don't drop into a half-built world. Dying and respawning gets a shorter version of the same screen.

Day, night and weather

The sun moves now. A day runs from about 8 am to 7 pm over 30 minutes of real time, then there's a 5-minute night before the sun comes back up. Night is dark, properly dark.

Weather is random too. Each session starts with different weather (clear, cloudy, fog, rain or a thunderstorm), and it changes on its own every 6 to 12 minutes, blending from one to the next rather than snapping over. We've fixed the season to summer for now.

25 melee weapons

Melee got a big batch: 12 blunt weapons and 13 blades. Nail bats, cricket and baseball bats, a pipe, a shovel, a sledgehammer, an iron mace and saw-blade clubs on one side; machetes, a kukri, a bolo, knives, a cleaver, a sword, hatchets, a tomahawk and a spear on the other.

• Two-handed weapons use a big axe swing, one-handed ones a faster knife swing.
• They come in Scrap, Forged and Military tiers, like our guns and armour. The simple scrap ones craft by hand, the rest need a workbench or advanced workbench, and the Military Hatchet needs its blueprint first.
• Scrap melee weapons turn up in big crates and on bandits now and then.
• The recycler gives back about half of what one cost.
• The old scrap hatchet became the Scrap Hand Axe, and the Scrap Hatchet has a new painted, taped look. All the hatchets chop trees.

Damage numbers and recipe costs are first guesses, and the spear swings for now; a proper stab comes later.

Sticks, rocks and nettles

Forests now give you the basics before you own a single tool:

• 10,000 sticks and small rocks lie beside trees across the map. Pick a stick up for wood, a rock for stone.
• 2,500 nettle clumps grow in forests and meadows. Each one gives 10 cloth fibre, which is enough for one piece of cloth at the workbench.
• Anything you pick comes back about 10 minutes later.

Roads

The main roads were looking flat and fake, so they got two passes:

• A worn, dashed white centre line on the two-lane highway, and the dark seam that used to run down the middle is gone.
• About half the grass at the road edges came out, so you can actually see the shoulder.
• Rubbish along the edges: bin bags, old tyres, rubble, flattened boxes, cans and broken glass. The first pass had too much, so it's now an occasional bag or tyre rather than a constant line of junk.
• The thin, sparse roadside shrub was swapped for a denser leafy bush.

What's next

• Play-testing the new menu and saving properly, including quitting the game from inside the world.
• Tuning melee damage, and giving the spear a stab.
• Hosting: deciding whether to rent a server so Join Server has somewhere to go.
• A redo of our gameplay video, now that the game has a front door worth showing.