January 2025 & Playtest Recap

Before we talk about what we've been working on for the last couple of weeks, we have an important announcement for everyone that participated in PaintSquad 3.0's first ever public test event: The player satisfaction survey is now live. You can check it out here.

This survey is not only dedicated to getting feedback for the current state of PaintSquad, but also gives you the ability to choose what you would like to see in the next test event. However, please keep in mind that we won't be able to implement all of the features mentioned in the survey for the next playtest. The survey will be open for the next 6 days and will be closed on Sunday (20:00 GMT+1, February 16th, 2025).

 

 

Playtest retrospective

 

PaintSquad 3.0's first test event has been a major success. With a total of 649 unique players participating, 2443 matches played and an incredible amount of support provided by the community we've reached a new milestone for not just PaintSquad, but Xenyria in general. Shortly after the start of the playtest, we broke our online player record with 42 unique players playing at the same time. These are absolutely incredible numbers for us and we would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to everyone who helped in making this possible.

 

While this first test event was an absolutely incredible experience for both our staff team & community, we've identified several problems we need to solve before we can host the next test event. The good news is that some of these issues were fixed a few days after the playtest launched, but there is still a lot of work ahead of us.

 

Some of you might remember encountering various issues with downloading the resource pack. Although we've been able to fix some of the problems that players encountered, certain hardware combinations (e.g. Intel-integrated graphics) are still causing issues with no known way of fixing what is causing the problem. For this reason, we've updated our game compatibility guide to help players to check whether their system's hardware meets the minimum requirements for playing on the server.

 

 

Everything is starting to take shape

 

Before we talk about our next goal for PaintSquad, it's time to look back at what we've been working on in January. Since we skipped the last recap post due to the playtest event launch, you probably have seen some of these changes in-game already. 

 

Here is a short summary of the most important changes:

 

• 3 weapon classes were re-implemented. (snipers, blasters, bows)
• 2 sub weapons were re-implemented.
• 2 special weapons were re-implemented.
• A new match system has been implemented.
• A new stage map system has been implemented.
• The bot system has been re-implemented from scratch.
• The training area has been added to the game, along with many new in-world user interfaces.
• A completely new match intro & outro animation has been added to the game.
• A new tab list system has been implemented.
• A ton of new & old music has been implemented.

 

Since covering every piece of progress in detail would go beyond the scope of this blog post, we will instead focus on two changes that are related to PaintSquad's UI.

 

 

New stage map

 

If you have played PaintSquad before, you will probably remember the old stage map. Back then, we used a 128x128 display in the form of a Minecraft map item to display the paintable area of the stage to the player.

 

 

A few years ago, this seemed like the best solution for implementing a live map into PaintSquad, however it turned out to not work as well as we expected. Most stages exceed the size limit of 128x128 blocks so we had to resort to displaying multiple blocks in one pixel which caused a lot of information getting lost. Unfortunately this also meant that this solution could only provide players with an inaccuracte representation of the stage. Additionally it's very difficult to represent depth on a 2D image, given the maximum resolution of the map.

 

For PaintSquad 3.0, we wanted to go with a completely different approach. We set our goal towards creating a 3D view of the stage. But that's not all, this system would also need to be flexible enough to allow us to change the color of certain blocks & display players in real time. We quickly noticed that this would prove very challenging given Minecraft's technical limitations. After a few days of trial & error back in November last year, we managed to create a working prototype that met all of our requirements by utilizing some of the tricks we've learned during the development process of PaintSquad 2.0 & Rush. However, this was only a small step towards integrating this system into the game.

 

In January, we started working on getting this new system into a state that allowed it to be used in PaintSquad. Since our approach uses dynamically generated resource packs & shaders, we had to implement a system that could generate the necessary files for every stage in PaintSquad and bundle them in the game's resource pack. Although it required a lot more time to implement than we thought, we managed to achieve our goal. Here is a short video that shows how the new stage map looks in-game:

 

 

As you might have noticed, this new version of the stage map also comes with the added benefit of being able to view the stage map while waiting to respawn. We're also planning on adding a feature that allows players to queue a jump to a player while respawning so that players can use the time before respawning more efficiently.

 

It's also important to note that this system is still in a very early state of development. The design is still in its prototype state and lacks a lot of polishing, some functions like the process of selecting & jumping to a player are not very intuitive as of now, but given enough time we should be able to fix all of these problems.

 

 

New weapon UI (crosshair & hit marker)

 

Let's continue with more UI elements: Since we've started adding new weapons to the game, we also needed to come up with new crosshair designs to communicate certain game mechanics such as projectile spread, orientation and weapon charge to the player. Although we took some inspiration from the previous crosshair designs from PaintSquad 2.1, we have adapted them to the new style of PaintSquad and specialized them a little more depending on the weapon used.

Let's take the new bow crosshair for example:

This new crosshair design covers three different variables: 

• The orientation of the weapon (e.g. if projectiles will be fired in a vertical or horizontal arrangement)
• The charge of the weapon
• The spread of the weapon

Although the design is not finalized yet, it gives players way more information about the current state of their weapon compared to the previous version. We've also added a visual hit indicator for all weapons to help players notice when they land a hit on an enemy.

 

 

New music

 

In the last months, our artist YellowPurple worked on several new additions to PaintSquad's soundtrack. While most of you were already able to listen to PaintSquad's new soundtrack in-game, we'd still like to cover one of our first completely original battle themes, called "Cooking" performed by the in-game band "RockBots".

 

 

Currently, PaintSquad's soundtrack features a mix of both custom & noteblock-themed music. One of our goals with PaintSquad's playtest satisfaction survey is to find out which direction we should take with future songs. Although the playtest is over, you can still check out all of PaintSquad's new songs on the Xenyria Soundtrack channel.

 

 

The next big milestone

 

Another very important topic is input lag. For the next test event, we want to host a second server located in the US to improve connection quality for players in that specific region. Usually this would mean that players on both servers are isolated from each other, however this is not a viable option for us considering our current player count. Therefore we made necessary preparations to PaintSquad's code to make it possible to split a single match across multiple servers, allowing players from two or more servers to play together. In theory, this should reduce the input latency for server-controlled actions like firing weapons, movement and hit detection, but only future playtests will tell how much of an impact this design decision makes. 

 

Depending on the communities' feedback, we might also work on an updated version of our experience enhancement mod (XEEM) for the next playtest. While this mod doesn't add anything game changing, it comes with slight improvements to weapon handling, Discord rich presence and automatic camera perspective switching when entering or leaving swim form.

 

 

Beginning of a new era

 

That's all for today, we will likely share more information about the next playtest event for PaintSquad in the next recap post. We hope all of you had an amazing start into 2025. Thanks again to all of you for your amazing support. Rest assured that this first playtest event is only the beginning of a new era for Xenyria. 💚