Anyway – the Seal Hunter beta is progressing quite nicely at this point -  so far there’s been a total of 12 major beta revisions released. A whole load of bugs has been ironed out, many features have been polished, and quite a bit of balance/stability testing has been done. Currently, what I’m trying to focus on is the balancing of three player games – it’s way harder than what is reasonable (I wouldn’t be surprised if the difficulty of this will force me to limit the game to a total of three participating players – technical issues contribute, too). To make matters worse, I’m in the process of adding a few new weapons, as well.

One of these new weapons would be the Carl Gustav – a high-tier recoilless rifle that packs a lot of raw power while lacking in splash damage. To make envisioning this weapon a bit easier, for $9500 you get a weapon that currently deals approximately 700 damage at its epicenter. It currently has somewhat of a support role, much akin to the AWP, but trading bullet penetration for area affect. It’s still very much beta material, so expect some tweaking to be done on it before the final release. (And maybe even get rid of my programmer art for it.)

Something that I had planned out for quite a long while and then suddenly ended up implementing on a whim was the addition of achievements. There’s 60 of them in the game as of this moment, and they’re all pretty ‘hardcore’ in the sense that many are kinda hard to actually earn. I’ll most likely end up extending the number of achievements even further before the final 1.0 release.

And to abuse the segway – the final release, while not exactly close, shouldn’t be crazy far away any longer. Keep in mind that I’m the only person doing the actual production and coding for Seal Hunter, and with school effectively keeping me busy from 7 to 7, working on SH isn’t my top priority. I am working on it; my time is just severely more limited nowadays.

Again, sorry for not keeping you updated as frequently as I’d like to. If you have any suggestions for future posts, please do tell – I’ll happily accommodate you!

Anyhow, I’ll try to keep this short’n'sweet! To the right hand side, you can see the frag mines in action and this particular flavour being the proximity mine which explodes whenever a creature comes in contact with it. After planting the mine, there is a grace period before the mine will activate (this is to maintain a healthy game balance, as you might guess) and react to enemy contact.

There is also currently a second variant of the mine above currently dubbed “timed mines”; this will explode after a set time no matter what. This means that it can be used to more effectively cause splash damage to enemies without requiring a direct contact, but if mistimed you might end up doing no damage at all.

All of this is still very experimental, and further balancing coupled with the exact details on how the mines will operate will be worked out when the game is nearing completion – more importantly, while I might be able to balance it somewhat decently in singleplayer, Seal Hunter is meant to support up to four players.

Remember that you can further discuss this in a more educated fashion over at the Seal Hunter Forums. Until next time!

And a special thanks to Baneriukas for making the weapon sprites. Whoop whoop!