Yogi Klatt · Vehicle Feature Team

Well, as Rich said, there was no eureka moment. Usually when we develop stuff like that, we're going step by step in our iterative processes. It was easy to identify that slow speed combat works a lot better simply by limiting the velocities ourselves. Suddenly, the geometry and so on looked a lot better. So when you say testing, it actually covers quite a lot of time, from checking what do we do with the velocities, how do we actually limit the velocities when you go above boost and so on, right? Because what never felt good was, for example, just boosting to your maximum SCM velocity and then being stuck there. Being stuck in that maximum velocity in all directions was one of the problems why combat felt stale, right? Because it doesn't allow you any more interesting tactics. And so we slowly went in adding stuff like the post boost or the above-SCM boost boundaries and all that, making sure that the boost is applied in a non-spheric way, but it's actually more egg-shaped. So basically when you boost backwards, you burn a lot more energy than going forward, which just forces you to go to your target and turn around. And all these things we just went through step by step. It's not like we're living under a rock or so. We read and watch YouTube videos of so many backers, or players, I should say. And there's hours and hours of dogfighting analysis. We looked through it all, and a lot of these points were actually true. So we kind of built our requirement list out of that, and then we just tried to go there step by step. And testing is basically, we have testing slots every week. The last two weeks were horrible in this regard because the builds were just crashing on some other parts. But I mean, this happens. But we just test the game every week with our PT friends, so that's Bayer's team. And then we knew we were on the right track when, it was a couple of months ago, we were just fighting with master modes around, and one of the PT guys was critical about one specific aspect. It wasn't really important, right? And then I was a little bit insecure and just asked, yeah, but do you like the master mode system in general? And they were like, oh, yes, yes, of course we like it. So this gives us enough confidence to know that we're on the right track. And the process itself with the testing works, right? We just slowly go step by step to the solution that we would like to see.