VEIN Weekly: Early Access Tune-Ups

Hi everyone! Welcome to another VEIN Weekly. This week has been a bit hectic, between 0.021's release and our Early Access announcement. A lot of you have come back after a long time away and a lot of our time has been spent doing community management stuff and preparing for Early Access. Let's get into the game changes.

We've been working on bugfixing and hotfixes for 0.021. This is typical of all of our updates. We also fix older bugs as we are able to replicate them. As always if you find bugs please report them either on our Discord or in the feedback reporter in-game - we read everything. Some examples of bugs we've fixed are hosts turning invisible when lockpicking, the lights in the school not casting any light, and some corpses being invisible.

We've added new mastered versions of the soundtrack, thanks to Remancer, our musician. Volume has been adjusted and normalized and they should sound much clearer.

We've updated our loading screens for Early Access with some of our graphical improvements. We're going through our websites and socials and updating stuff wherever we can.

We're adding a few more death screen stats, such as tracking individual animals that get killed. This is mostly for achievement purposes when we implement them down the line. These are super easy to implement, which is why we don't mind knocking them out now.

As stated above, we're doing some Early Access preparation work, like updating FAQs or text in the game to reflect that the game is coming out soon.

We've added some new zombie sounds (big thanks to Mahmood for the voice acting!) – their sounds are now much more diverse, and they yell when injured. There's more work to be done here but we're pretty happy so far.

We've done some vehicle work - the tractor is now drivable and will be in the Early Access map. Ditto for go-karts; they've received some fixed and tweaks.

Some of our electronic scrap have received art to replace the taped box placeholder.

In line with the release we've been polishing like crazy. We're trying to fix as many bugs and inconsistencies as possible. For example, we've reduced how many zombies spawn in interiors, and increased the distance you can move furniture. There was a long-standing bug that caused furniture movement distances to be unaffected by strength that we've found and fixed. We've fixed car alarms starting immediately when going into an area, and increased the capacity of buildable fluid barrels.

That's about it from me – over to Azi.

-- Kyle

Hi everyone! My section will be a bit shorter today, so to make up for it I'll put a few more teaser screenshots than I usually do.

Starting off with something simple, the chance for car alarms to go off has been reduced a bit. Before there was actually a lot of alarms that had a 100% chance to go off, so this has been toned down a bit.

The sandbox map, otherwise known as The Farm, has been updated with all the current weapons and tools in the game. Sorry for not updating this sooner – this map is lower priority than the main world.

Container & item respawns have been set to on by default for hard difficulty.

And finally, the map work for the initial Early Access map has been proceeding as normal. A few players have asked what the map size will look like compared to the current demo map. You've always been able to see this in the demo, but for the sake of accessibility here's a labeled screenshot of the current in-game map!

For context to how large the map will become during the course of Early Access' development, below is the approximate size of the the full map.

-- Azi

Overall the reception to our Early Access announcement has been pretty great. We're happy that you're excited to see what we've been working on. We pride ourselves on being transparent and honest; that's why we keep the demo free and updated, and will continue doing so. Your feedback is instrumental in making this a really good sim and survival game. It's a bit overwhelming to see how large this project has gotten – we never expected this.

We really have no idea how large this game is going to get, or how expansive the gameplay is going to get. We have a lot of really big things planned, and I'm confident that the future is going to be bright for VEIN.

See you next week!