VEIN Weekly: Corn, Cauliflowers, and Cabbages

Hi everyone! Welcome to another VEIN Weekly. We're continuing to work on bugfixes while adding some new content as usual. We're still quite busy from the Early Access launch, which was much larger than we expected, but we're managing what we can. Here's what we've been working on.

We've made some changes to the AI spawning algorithms for the next update. Zombies will no longer appear in houses you've searched for a while, and we've fixed the issue where zombies would appear behind you. We have a lot of improvements planned for zombies, but we have to be careful of changes we make to them as they are at the core of VEIN. Making them excessively difficult would render the game unplayable, and making them excessively easy (which, to be honest, we think they are right now) removes threat from the game.

Last week we shipped Hotfix 8. We'll probably ship one more hotfix before the next game update, as it's never too early to fix bugs.

Elevators are now wirable, which was in the last hotfix. People have been unwiring the Mill No. 3 elevator accidentally so we want to make sure you can still access the Apex easily. Did you know there's another entrance other than the elevator?

We've fixed people falling through cave floors, but not basements yet, in multiplayer, and pushed it in the last hotfix. The reason behind this is because the server is unloading the area you're in but not loading it back in fast enough. We've increased the loading priority of caves.

We fixed items not being able to be placed on vehicles in the last hotfix, which was a bug from launch that we were unaware of.

For the next update, we're now listing XP boosts in the item properties of cooked food. I don't think we showed these anywhere, so now you know!

We've started replacing our foliage art assets. To begin with, we've replaced the cornfields for the next update with high-resolution art. We plan on replacing most of the foliage in the game for consistency reasons.

A new music track has been added to the game, thanks to Remancer, our musician.

We received a lot of comments from non-American players looking to switch the date format displayed in game, so we've added a setting to display dd-mm-yyyy dates instead of mm-dd-yyyy.

We've been working on double doors. Right now in-game, there are numerous buildings with double doors, but in the game code, doors don't know about each other, so double doors are independently locked and have independent opening. We're working on a way for double doors to be considered as one 'unit' so they can no longer be independently locked.

We've been working hard on gamepad support. We know a lot of players default to gamepad use and don't care for keyboard and mouse controls, so this is a priority for us. We're nearly finished with this – the game is currently playable on a gamepad for the next update, including using the UI, but has a couple bugs we want to iron out first.

We've added a bunch of new seed types for the next update. In 0.023, you can expect the ability to grow artichokes, broccoli, cabbages, cauliflowers, eggplants, garlic, and watermelons.

Finally, rugs are now movable for the next update.

At the same time, we're doing game design planning. Two heavily requested features we've repeatedly heard have been better animals and better hunting, so we'd like to potentially try focusing on that for the next update.

With the success of Early Access, we have a lot of considerations to make in terms of prioritizing features, and there's a bit of a transition period as we settle finances and expand the team. Apart from game development work, a bunch of time has been just doing regulatory/financial/legal business work, so that's happening simultaneously.

So that's about it! As usual, this is just an overview; we've done a bunch of other stuff in the last week but don't want to make this article too long.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!