Monster: Titan's Playground news & patch notes

We have a new dev diary out on YouTube. This one shows a let's play of one of the new mission types in the upcoming Big Update.

Happy Friday everyone! This week we have a full dev diary available to show off the features we've been working on for the BIG Update.

All of this is covered in the video but we're happy to announce that we have have many exciting things to show for our time. Firstly we’ve been able to work on a bunch of bug fixes, small features, and quality of life improvements.

• Updates to the mech icons in the menu that should also improve performance.

• Fixes to the rubble so it no longer despawns and can now show different kinds of rubble for different building types.

• Adding logic so that the monster’s forearms now do damage to buildings when swinging your fist through them!

• We fixed the hunter missiles so they actually hit their targets now.

• And we made the red vignette flash when you take damage so you can now tell when you’re being hit from behind.

• Oh! And we made the helicopter blades act like chainsaws now!

But those pale in comparison to the other features we have been working on for this update. Firstly, as promised, we have been working on the new map!

We have also been working on the architecture for the missions system. We’re taking a bit longer to build it out because we are designing it to be moddable!

When we started working on Monster: Titan’s Playground we had to make a lot of compromises to ensure we could get to early access in a timely manner. One of those compromises was not architecting the game to be modding friendly. Because of that, we may never be able to add full modding support. However the mission system at least is an entirely new system, and we are architecting it to be as robust and modular as possible.

Each mission is defined by an xml file that tells the game where it should appear on the missions window, as well as what the starting objectives are.

Each objective is its own xml file that can define what text to display when it’s started as well as what objectives should start after they are completed. And multiple objectives can be run at the same time.

Objectives can also talk to each other. For example one objective can be to tell the game to spawn a bunch of enemies, and another objective can reference that objective to check if you’ve destroyed all the enemies it spawned. And all of this can be easily modified by simply editing an xml file in a text editor of your choice.

What’s more is that missions are all part of mission trees. And each tree will define what tree comes before it and what tree comes next. There is another xml file that tells the game what the first mission tree is. Which means a modder can edit that file to replace the starting tree, and thus replace our entire campaign with a campaign of their own making.

So that’s what we’ve been working on for the past few months! We still have a lot of work to go before we release the BIG Update, but we’re really excited to see what all of you do with the missions system once it’s out. Not to mention being excited to use it to build the first two chapters of the official campaign ourselves!

Until then, we look forward to seeing you in the next dev diary!

Monster: Titan's Playground Version: 0.091 Dermatology Is Now Live!

This is the first content update since early access release, what we’ve been calling “the small update.” It contains the much requested skins system, as well as two new weapons, the harpoon and chainsword. We wanted to make sure we got some new content out before beginning work on “The Big Update.”

We know that lack of content has been a frequent complaint about the game and we agree. This small update is just the tip of the iceberg. The Big Update is planned to include a new missions system which will overhaul progression and add a lot more content. Paired with that will be at least one new map.

The current game mode will become the “custom game” mode, so you’ll always still be able to fight custom battles on whichever map you chose, while the missions system will provide tailored challenges, hand crafted for balance and fun, as well as a few novelty missions that will explore enemies and mechanics in more detail, like an oops all jets mission.

Plus there’s some major back-end changes that we think will make the game run better that we haven’t wanted to work on until we were able to devote the appropriate time to developing and testing them. These are the kind of behind the scenes changes that are big and scary and if they work correctly… no one will notice that anything has changed. Except that load times might be faster and performance might be better.

The Big update is going to take a while to cook. There’s a lot of new systems coming in the Big Update that are all tied together and will work best if they all come out together and not in smaller pieces. So for now, we present to you the Small Update:

New features:

Adds New Skins System!:

Purchase new skins for the monster with meta game points. Each skin comes with a side grade like faster weapon charging at the cost of lower health. Once unlocked skins and powers can be mixed and matched at will. The console for this feature can be found back in the lab room with the monster in the glass tube.

Adds Harpoon Gun:

A new arm mounted weapon for the monster. Mechs, vehicles, and aircraft hit with the harpoon gun will be pulled into melee range. If fired into buildings the harpoon can also be used to swing around the city like some sort of arachnid based superhero.

Adds Chainsword:

A second new arm mounted melee weapon for the monster that does continuous damage to anything it touches.

Other Changes:

-Added logic so that if a player quits the game before finishing the movement tutorial it shows them the first time movement select screen again. (No longer get stuck with a movement you hate before unlocking the ability to change movement in the menu)

-Changed the Anti-Missile Laser from being a toggle to a hold to disable. This allows players to still temporarily disable it if they want to catch a missile, but no longer have to guess about whether it is on or not since if they aren’t pressing the button, it will be active.

Bug Fixes:

-Fixed bug where the monster’s hand could drift off into space if a mech detonated while a limb or core rip was in progress

-Fixed bug where monster could block its own minigun rounds which also counted towards the blocking challenge.

-Fixed scary bug where grabbing the mech torso could sometimes grab the core without a second hand holding the torso resulting in all sorts of strange behaviors and physics shenanigans.

Hello and welcome new hires of Secret Evil Lab! We’re happy to announce the first update to Monster: Titan’s Playground, that comes in the form of a small hotfix. Version: 0.081-HOT Containment Breach, is now active. However, it’s not yet set to the default branch. This means you will currently need to opt into a beta to download it.

Going forward we will often be releasing new builds a little bit early on the unstable beta branch. What this means is for those eager to get the hotfix, or excited to try out prototype code, you can opt into the beta branch using Steam Betas.

To do this first right click the game in Steam

-Then click properties

-Navigate to the Betas tab

-Select “unstable” from the Beta Participation drop down

-Then close the dialog

The game should then update to the unstable branch.

If you want to get off the beta version, simply select none in the same drop down.

We also will be keeping previous versions of the game in betas too as we make updates. You can already see a few of them from our pre-early access days.

After a week or so, assuming we don’t find any catastrophic issues with the hotfix, we’ll make it the new default build, rolling it out to everyone.

Changelist:

---- Adds height calibration to the options menu and pre-tutorial movement selection screen

---- Fixed issue with monster neck mesh clipping with camera

---- Added weapon toggle button to controllers that support clicking the thumb sticks!

---- Fixed issue where cars weren’t spawning!

---- Fixed exploit where weapons would cooldown while in the menu

---- Fixed issue where hand wouldn’t stop climbing if you released the grab before the trigger

---- Fixed edge case in power fist that could lock hand open or closed

---- Possible fix for the bug where half a mech can disappear after punching him

---- Updated Bowling with Bombs description to indicate that it needs to be a ripped out boss core

We also added a default controller mapping for generic controllers. We still can’t officially support any devices we can’t test in house, but hopefully this will help players with less common controllers play the game, or at least have a head start on building their own custom controller mapping.