This post has been copied from the private Exclusive Donor's Section to the public Announcements section. Donors saw this post on 3/23/2014. I will continue to copy these Devblogs to the Announcements section as they become old enough that the donor exclusivity was long enough.

Hello guys - this week was spring break for some of the team and a lot of work was done, but there isn't a lot that I want to divulge about it at this time. Delta has been hard at work with the redesign of the UGX Map Manager and it's coming along really well. We hope that it will be ready for testing within the next couple months if not sooner.

As far as the mod progress - not much was made this week. My entire week was devoted to working on improving the test map (that will later be released as a real map) with detail, more buildings, a better layout, objectives, and an EE.

I don't want to spoil too much for you guys yet, but here's one picture for you:



Our plans for the map should not take more than a couple weeks to complete, and I am more focused on getting the story and EE done before the map detailing because the story will be geared towards taking you on a journey through all the most interesting and innovative new features of UGX Mod v1.1

As far as remaining work for the mod before I am ready to beta test, here is a short list:

• I need to finish designing the HUD and team mechanics of King of the Hill mode - this involves a lot of effort and I may just disable the gamemode until after the first beta is released to get the beta out faster.
• CHAOS Mode still needs a non-competitive team-based mode where you can work as a team to make one huge score and keep each other alive with a single timer. Again this may just be postponed for the first beta.
• Akimbo Dual-Wielding is not finished to our liking yet and we have not had time to make more weapons with it yet. This may just be disabled for the first beta.
• The Gravity Bomb causes a game crash after using it for an extended period of time and I still have yet to figure out why.
• We still have plans to redefine the way you buy weapons off of the walls (bye bye weapon chalks), but have not been able to agree on what the model for this should look like (we have a prototype that we are not totally happy with).
• All of the weapon damages and stock ammo amounts still need to be evaluated and balanced
• The Xbox 360 controller support is still a bit quirky in some menus and situations.
• There are numerous small bugs that we find during our internal testing that I still want to fix as much as possible before releasing a beta.

I think since we are almost into April and more than a few months past our initial beta release date estimate that it's time for me to start making some decisions to disable certain features which are not ready/finished during the first beta - unless you would want to have them even if it may result in a buggy gameplay experience. What I REALLY don't want to end up with is a bunch of people reporting the same bugs over and over again that I'm already aware of - so the best way to do that is to just not include anything which we know we will receive a lot of complaints/reports on yet to save ourselves the trouble.

Can't wait for people to use the new axe, feels so fluent and realistic.