THE RABBIT'S BURROWISSUE SIX OPENING
I contemplated not making another newsletter because this whole thing was supposed to be done by now and other reasons I'll go into shortly. College, well, education in general tends to destroy creativity. I'm no exception as it destroyed a huge chunk of my motivation. However, I noticed the last newsletter was from 2016 and decided that I should post some sort of big news to remind people that I'm not fully dead yet. A few months ago it had hit me that I had been working on this update for nearly three years, that is, once September hits. I became increasingly paranoid that the rather high amount of development time for something that wasn't initially planned to have a lot of content would set people's vision of this pack to unsatisfactory levels. I cannot emphasis the amount of work that has gone into creating this version. There have been many moments creating this where I just wanted to stop and quit everything. There even consisted a version where I destroyed every single map in the pack and only added smaller variants. It was a complete breakdown but a necessary evolution. I was then reminded that this ideology is impractical; you cannot please everyone. From what very, very little feedback I received along with my increased intuition that I've gained over the past almost three years, I instead re-evaluated everything. The end result was a lot of work. There's a lot of small maps, a lot of bizarre maps, and a few symmetrical maps. I underwent a huge amount of evolution in terms of design, often resulting in me remaking maps I had already remade for 4.5. Unlike V3's .5, V4's .5 might as well be a V6 or even a V7. That's my view on it anyways; I just hope people enjoy what I've done. Due to the amount of changes, as much as I would like to guarantee there's something for everyone, there may not be that anymore. I am fine with this, I cannot please everyone. The mentality that I could do such a thing held me back in terms of both critical thinking and design that I could've applied to the pack a lot sooner.
I wholeheartedly thank the people who helped contribute things to this project and everyone else for their patience in this project. It has been a wild journey that I'm glad that you were a part of. Anyways, sit back, because today's newsletter is jam-packed with things that almost nobody except for me and a few people have seen for the past few months or years. I hope you enjoy!
PERFECT BLOSSOM
V4's version was never in rotations due to a bug that existed online involving the bed healing. After I removed the healing, I reworked part of the exterior yard to have more of a port-dock to it. Then it sat on my hard drive for awhile and I slowly became frustrated at it. I don't know how else to describe it. I ended up taking small parts of that one and reworking them into a new map while keeping an interior shrine the main focus of this newer version.
A giant pink tree in what could be considered your front yard.
A small portion of the inside of the shrine.
At least I can have this sort of shot now.
ASHES TO ASHES
"What if the volcano was erupting, that's relatively unexplored"
Yeah that's really all I can say here. I made this map super early on in 4.5 and it's still held up fairly well through the years, so it's sticking through to the final version.
Don't eat the snow or you'll find more than you bargained for.
Magmaman was pretty cool.
There's two small pockets of the map with openings in the lava like the left side here. If you use Skull Barrier, you'll get a brief amount of invuln that allows you to run right through these. These shortcuts don't give you too much distance, but they do change sightlines for people looking to hunt you down. Fun little mobility quirks that only really affects weapon token based gameplay.
THE QUEEN'S STUDY
The old version had a few vertical hiccups that weren't able to be easily fixed. The texturing could've used quite a bit of work on that version too. Now my eyes hurt a bit whenever I look at that version. I went ahead and applied an entirely custom tileset to a newer layout, one that befits a more royal library hallway place. A weapon experiment that I planted here was all three main killer weapons - Screw Crusher, Ballade Cracker, and Mirror Buster - are located here. I'll go over weapon stuff more at the end, but all three of those fit into appropriate weapon slots that shouldn't frustrate the user when scrolling through them.
What a nice lady.
These bookcases can be used both for cover on the bottom floor and for traversal on the top floor. Now that's efficient!
I would show the nice giant marble statue to the right, but the colors on it aren't quite all there yet so I've pushed it out.
SPRING FEVER
This map's layout hasn't changed all that much except for what's shown in the second screenshot, but it did get a nice texture update. That's what I'm showing off here. Despite that layout change, LMS modes will now have all of their doors raised for further convenience and less hiding.
Nice on.
The button isn't a dead-end anymore. No more hiding in there. It leads back out into the center room, as shown by the bottom of the pole.
I should also note that on any map that has a large amount of playable underwater area, the water filter has been removed. Now your weapon colors will be as clear as day.
M3CH.IO
Welcome to Steampunkland, located possibly inside the neural network or someplace inside a mech. There's a mysterious blue voltage liquid that gets processed, either as a vital liquid to the machine similar to blood or as a liquid coolant. Either way, it's pretty important. However, it holds enough energy to be turned into electricity, making it extremely efficient. There's a new type of jump pad here which I'm calling a steam pad. It's just a jump pad that goes off after a rather frequent certain amount of time.
The main center room that I kept designing multiple versions of this map around until I was finally satisfied.
There's little marks in the pipe floor that show where the steam pads are located.
It doubles as a small recycling plant too!
MISC STUFF
You may have noticed the weird black machine with purple rings in Ashes to Ashes. I'm here to elaborate a bit on there. Rozpack now holds custom jump pads that are unique to it. A nice purple ring shoots out from it just like those other arena shooter jump pads.
The map card has been finished too. Now you too can finally know when my maps pop up and act upon them as you wish. Here's a non-animated preview.
Rozpack 4.5 implements a mini-update known as THE GREAT CAPSULE AND WEAPON UPDATE. In this update, the max amount of weapons on each map is now at a firm eight. Each weapon now corresponds to a weapon slot for ease of use, so you as a player no longer need to switch through four weapons that just so happen to be on the same slot to get the one you want. But wait, you say, there's only seven slots and eight weapons. One slot per map holds two weapons for mild variety and each map now has an associated weapon set name that corresponds with the slot that has two weapons for it. Once 4.5 is released, official weapon slot lists will exist on the front page for reference purposes for whatever people would want to see them for. The capsule half of this update refers to me no longer randomly scattering health and ammo in an ammo/health/ammo formation across the map. There are now a few designated locations for health, of which it is my hope that these become general points of interest when fighting across the map. There's more big ammo and big health in general but the other local capsule surroundings have been taken into account. The final thing I want to mention regarding this mini-update is that I'm now in charge of the weapons. This means no more third party to intervene and do them for me, so I'll take full responsibility for any dumb weapon quirks that pop up. I'm not expecting a perfect run my first try on this, but it is definitely loads better than what exist on most maps these days, I would think.
Another important addition is, of course, team spawns. Some maps will include one big patch of 16 for each team while other maps include two small patches of 8 for each team. Cossack and King will get a small limited amount, but will not be the primary focus due to four player team modes not being all that popular.
CLOSING
I think that's everything I wanted to talk about. There's plenty more I could show, but if I spoiled everything, there wouldn't be any surprises left. Speaking of which, I'm almost finished with this thing. It just involves texturing one map and a few small sweeps to apply to every map. If things go smoothly, I expect a release date, for real this time, around
Late June to Early July. That's what, a few weeks away? Cool. I hope you look forward to it.
The forums are sort of dead these days considering Discord has taken over and all, so I'm not entirely expecting people to respond to this post. If you wish to contact me regarding anything about any of my projects, to either give feedback or to scream, here's my Discord:
Rozark #0873Thanks for reading and have a great day!
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