RoVerse Development Newsletter #265

Hello everyone! Welcome to the 265th issue of the RoVerse Development Newsletter, where we keep you updated on the progress we've made over the past week.

This week, Idyllic dove head-first into making the dogfight mobile compatible, while Jamber created gits for the rest of the stages of the project, from the alpha to freeroam.

With Jamber's experiments the past few weeks regarding scaling UI, it became apparent that making the dogfight mobile-compatible was an achievable goal. While it would have a few drawbacks that mouse and keyboard wouldn't, making the game compatible opens up the game to a huge number of potential players, who might get a taste for the game and want to try out the real thing. With this in mind, Idyllic got to work.

The state of menus in the game was not great for mobile. Nearly everything is set to an exact pixel dimension, rather than a scale, causing the screen to be overrun by menus far larger than they should be. Fortunately, a bit of math is all it took to shrink them down to the proper size.

Health, the top-bar menus, and radar were a cinch to scale down, while still remaining functional. Next up, Idyllic slightly modified the mouse-tracking functions to work with dynamic thumbstick input, allowing the player to steer the ship with the thumbstick on the bottom left corner of the screen instead of the center.

Then, we hooked up the throttle to detect whether the player is steering or not, and accelerating while the player has their left thumb down, and slowing down when it is released. While not the easiest control scheme to use, we need to reserve a lot of real estate for a bunch of other keybinds, like firing missiles, target selection, and boosting. We also set up the radar system to move to the top right, out of the way of the new "firing" button. We've repurposed the jump button (and will be re-texturing it soon) to serve as the firing button for your ships weapons.

And here we have the first (simulated) outpost clear with mobile controls!

​This week in the dogfight there were 210 kills, 14 with auto, 0 with beam, 75 with laser, 13 with plasma, 10 with railgun, and 98 with torpedo. The most dangerous ship was the Excalibur with 54 kills, followed by the Z-19_Falcon with 53. The most dangerous map was Pillarum with 103 deaths, followed by The_Great_Hollow with 92.

And now, the moment you've been waiting for...
The three players that topped the leaderboard were codyspace31, with 53 kills and 28 deaths and a 1.89 KDR; IdyllicDestroyer with 52 kills, 17 deaths and a 3.05 KDR; and FangABXY with 50 kills, 1 deaths, and a 50 KDR. They have unlocked the exclusive ship Cosmos Asimov in the Alpha Dogfight. Nice work pilots!

If you'd like to check out the rest of our data, you can find the spreadsheet here: Phase 1 Data (Week 109)

​Calexian Community Challenge
​​The challenges are: 6000 Outpost Turrets, and 3000 Non-Torpedo kills

Each week we compile a Q&A section here whenever there are any new questions posted on the RoVerse Community group wall or in the Community Discord Server. Be sure to join if you have any questions about RoVerse:

ROBLOX Group: https://www.roblox.com/My/Groups.aspx?gid=2948290
Discord server: https://discord.gg/npxBGwJ

Q1: Will there be custom ammo for guns? Having to buy more for a certain weapon, or will weapons have unlimited ammo?

A1: We like the concept of needing to supply invading armies with ammo, but it probably wouldn't be any more specific than that. We don't anticipate there being a special ammo type for each weapon, just that you'd need to visit an ammo crate or shop to collect or purchase the missing ammo. Heavy weapons could possibly receive their own class of ammo, but we have not yet decided.

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​​​You can support us by joining our Community Group or Discord server! So far, the community has been absolutely amazing, supportive, and very friendly. We are very appreciative of all the support you guys show us!

If you want to catch any of our developers streaming, you can always follow our official Twitch channel here!

Remember, we are always looking for new, talented builders, scripters and artists! If you’d like to help us you can always get in touch with us through RoVerse_Official on the ROBLOX website, or by contacting an Administrator in the community Discord! Don’t worry, we don’t bite!