In development.

New Steam Build Released:

- New character models
- Better performance
- Added a shooting range to the waiting area (so you can shoot at something between rounds)
- You can now change your reticle size and color for holo and red dot sights.  Theres no tutorial on this yet, so I will just explain it here for now.  There is a loadout selection in the waiting area and below it, your weapon in a vice.  You can grab this weapon and calibrate your aim, or you can grab the sight on it and move it up and down the rails (for most sights/weapons). Once you are holding the sight, you can press A/B or X/Y (depending on the hand holding the sight) to make the reticle bigger or smaller.  You can also rotate your joystick with the same hand to change the color of it.  Letting go of it saves it.
- You can now hold your breath while aiming.  This adds like 10x the gun smoothing, and gets rid of any jitter with the weapon.  It also makes quick aiming impossible.  To do this, click in the joystick of your foregrip hand on any riffle while holding with two hands.
- Worked on running animations, and footstep sound occlusion.  I was really successful with the sound occlusion, less so with the running animations.  Im still polishing that piece of it.
- Decided to remove shooting while down.  It felt clunky, it wasn't fun. Either your inventroy sinks into the ground, or it rotates up and everything is hard to grab.  I've made it so you can only grab your radio, and your tablet while down now.  You can still crawl around, but slowly.  I may make it so you drop your syringe when downed, becuase it feels a little frustrating when you get downed, see a syringe in front of you, and your teammate cant revive you beucase they already used one.  They should be able to grab your syringe.  I am open on ideas to solve this.

Lastly, I just want to say most of the work this update actually went into making this game run on quest.... and im pretty much there... it just doesnt look as pretty.
Theres a few people that have tested the quest version already, and thanks for that. Ive passed it out to about a dozen people. I am also developing a method to distribute keys for it, but I am still hesitant to do that, becuase its really not ready yet. In fact the update I just pushed to steam may even entirely break the quest version.

Currently I am updating the quest version to match this latest PC version, I would like to add some more optimizations, and make a few of the shaders a little more complex once I buy myself some more performance headroom. These things will be my focus of attention for the next week or two, then we can run the first cross-platform playtest.

Steam build updated:

We will be playing today at 6pm EST. Please use the command /playtest join if you would like to participate, or mark interested in the event.
You can also view details and join here: https://playtest.556vr.com/playtest-event.html?event=0c239546-1ad7-4371-8cd3-ed3f92c6bbf0

- Four new weapons (Famas, M16, PKM, L85A2)
- C4
- New running animations
- New gunstock calibration system, (Allows for one handed calibrations)
- New grenade bouncing sound effects (this is still a work in progress)
- New explosion sound effects + system
- Players now have a watch, which points north + direction to objective in Defuse
- Ranked lobbies (For tracking stats, or untracked)  Round wins are now recorded as well.
- New gun + attachment prices (but this is constantly being re-worked)
- Added recoil to M249, and increase damage of shotguns
- Added abillity to hit AK-style non-drum mags out of the riffle by hitting them with another mag.
- Added "First to 5" logic in defuse, with abillity to change map and load the lobby into a new one.  This is done through allowing specific players to choose the next map, with the chooser getting rotated through players in the lobby.
- Bug Fixes
- Map optimizations + game optimizations```

Steam build updated: Not much in terms of new features... this is just about getting the performance fixes in.

- Significent performance gains
- Mags carry momentum better when ejecting weapon from guns.  You can flick your wrist while ejecting one, and the mag will feel like its being thrown in that direction.
- Fixed some small glitches, made van windows breakable like they already are for cars and trucks.
- Added a new bug where shooting a M203 will kill yourself if your not running backwards when you shoot it.  (I just discovered this in my smoke test this morning, and I dont want it to hold up the update... so we just have to live with it till next update)

Steam build and website have been updated:

- Now you can optionally sign into website with steam account, which will allow you to pull down the maps your create at https://556vr.com/map-planner and load them to share with others on your team in game.
- Game now has friends lists.. with this comes the ability to share your stats with everyone, or just your friends.  By default stats will now be hidden.  You can also join your firends quickly from the main menu if there is space in their lobby.  Friends can be added in game or on the website.  Preferences such as setting stats visabilty are available in both places as well.
- There is now a watch on your hand with configurable inside/outside wrist, and hand.  This watch shows how much time left in defuse, as well as your ping and framerate.
- There were optimizations put in... somwhere between the range of minor to moderate, but its noticeably better.
- NPCs animations are less stagnant at a distance now.  They used to kinda glide without actually moving their feet from far away.  They are updating at a higher frequency now.
- NPCs were already flinching when they were shot, but now the sometimes will continue to shoot as they flinch, potentially messing up their aim or even teamkilling for it.
- M203 grip will now hold it by then underbarrel if you grab it while its empty.
- Fixed offset hand positions on m249 latch, spray paint cans, and the sight you are using when adjusting the sight on the rails forward/backwards.
- You can now move around in the tent
- Movemnt speed while downed has increased.  Animation speed while players crouchwalked has been slowed.
- Updated shaders on some weapon attachments for better looks + better performance
- Lowered resoltuion of SH lightmaps to reduce VRAM usage significently.. This also shrunk the game size from about 25gbs to 13gbs.
- Created a pistol aim calibration system, its a little complicated, but there are instructions.  You can now move its position + rotation entirely.

Just wanted to talk about some of the changes you guys may have noticed, and I will mix this in with an update blog to show off what's been going on. I changed the name of the game and discord server.... please let me re-introduce, Five Five Six.

Next piece of big news... the playtest is now live on steam. You guys can now download and install the game through steam, like any other.

The one downside... you need a steam key to do this. So... I created a website. https://556vr.com From here there is a link to join the playtest. When you do this, I can approve the request (give it a bit if I am not around) and then there is a discord bot I set up that will send you a steam key (as long as you are in this server). This discord bot will also send you a message, with a button to set up notifications in your time zone of when we are going to run test runs. On my side, it comes through like the screenshot below, so I can see what days/times are the best to schedule. If I sechudule it, the bot will message you to let you know there will be a game at that date and time.

The other features of this site are pretty cool too. It has a map planner. This lets you plan routes and angles for competitive based gameplay. You can save these and download them as images or import them to adjust them later. I am leaning towards making it so you can save them to your game, and pull them up in game, so you can design fancy plans, then bring them directly into a match with a button to show your team.

The site also has a stat tracker... which at the moment lets you see everyone's stats, right down to the accuracy with each weapon. Since I am sort of building this out and I feel keeping everyones stats public may promote toxicity, I will probably keep everyone's stats private unless you opt in to share your stats online. Maybe that will be an in-game setting too later. By default, I want to have in game friends lists, so you can join someones server, but also view their stats, or share map plans.... I really dont know theres a lot of cool ideas flowing around in my head around this.

The site also features an API to pull stats. This requires approval for API access to it, and to be honest I will probably hold off on giving this out for a while.... not that you can do anything malicious with it, its read only.... but I still need to think about what the approval process will be for this and who I want to have god access to player stat data. I think it will be a cool thing you can pull up in OBS to stream games. I am designing a custom OBS streamdeck that ties into this API that I can hand out to potential casters in the competitive scene.

I have also branched the game off into its own spectate branch, which hosts a local API that anyone can use to pull metrics specific to that game.

As for the actual update log part of this... oh man is there a lot. I am going to do my best to spark note this, reading the above update and thinking about what is new since then...

- Co-Op mode + NPCs
- Explodable Cars
- Breakable Windows
- Customizable gun textures
- New tent area
- Drawable map to plan routes before the game
- Added whole back end system with API's logins, Steam + Meta authentication.
- Added 4 new maps (but one is just a night variant, so kinda 3 new maps)  If anyone has played my ownard maps, the maps are now Slums, Cul De Sac (night + day), Kaifuku.  These have all been heavily modified from the onward varinats I made, and they are not done.  I still have a lot of work on each.  The other new map is "Deserted" which is a LARGE 2kmx2km desert in the mountains of Afganistan.
- Vision now blurs, gets discolored, and character grunts, while being shot now.  You will also move slower afterwards.
- Body armor is only 60% as effective as it used to be now.
- Player movement speed has increased (but momentum keeps jiggling impossible)
- Tons of optimization and bug fixes

I am sure there is plenty more, but I have been writing this update log for the last half an hour, and I should really be getting back to work. We could have had a whole new feature instead of this update log.... so I will leave it with this... check out the new videos posted in #Discord-channel

Really appreciate everyone being here to see this and try it out.

Now, go request a playtest key if you haven't already

Ping me if you have questions.

Its been a month since my last update, so figured id share some of the stuff i've been working on. No new update... but its close. Probably sometime this week.

- Network stability was the primary focus over the last month. I would say I implemented host migrations, but that's only partially true. The way it was working was using excessive RPC calls and affecting performance. I am now working on optimizing the network traffic while still keeping it fully functional through migrations. This will be a big milestone once it's complete.

- Map performance... previous updates mainly focused on optimizing my scripts. While I had done some work on map optimization, this update has really pushed that a lot harder. I believe the 7-11 update was probably averaging 1,200 draw calls and 6 million polygons, while this one is a quarter of that in each metric. There's still a lot more I can touch here, but this takes time. I did make the map look better and added a lot of other new effects I'll go into more detail about below, so I wouldn't expect major performance wins this update, but it will run better and be a lot more featured. The previously mentioned networking optimizations, I believe, will allow it to scale to more players better, too. The host used to particularly lag due to what I now calculate was 1,200–1,600 RPC calls being done every second in a 10-person lobby. This has dropped to basically nothing. Last update, I was getting 90 FPS with 3 or fewer people, but 40–60 FPS when I was hosting a lobby with 9. These new wins, I think, should allow us to host lobbies with 10 people and hopefully still maintain a high framerate, even for the host.

- Added new weapons: M14 (DMR), AUG (AR), M590A1 (Shotgun), MK18 (AR), AKM (AR)

- Added ammo types:
  Most Weapons:
  * FMJ: Basically normal ammo
  * Armor Piercing: 50% more penetration, ignores body armor
  * Hollow Point: 80% less penetration, 15% more damage
  * Tracer: Basically just looks cool, points out the enemy

  Shotguns:
  * Buck Shot: Normal shotgun spread ammo
  * Slug: One single large bullet for shotguns
  * Dragon's Breath: Shoots 20% fewer pellets than normal shotgun rounds, but causes a quick, sudden flash of light when on the receiving end of the shots. It's not super disorienting, but it could be.

- Tear Gas + Gas Masks: Tear gas makes character models cough around it and distorts their vision unless that player is wearing a gas mask.

- Added the HK slap mechanic to the AUG. Basically, just slap it and it chambers. I will add this to other weapons as I add them.

- Added per-physics-material bullet holes, so now they match what you shoot.

- Added separate air-burst explosions and made all the explosions dynamic, so it's not the same thing every time. Damage radius has been adjusted, too, but it is not dynamic.

- Reworked the footstep sound system. Footsteps had a weird glitch in previous versions that was causing them to not sound correctly timed due to network frames not being... smooth. This has been redesigned so the footstep pacing is consistent.

- Added a visual distorted wave where bullets travel, so you can see their path. I can't really describe this one. It looks really, really cool and realistic. You will have to see it in-game.

- New lasers look way better than before.

- Added a layer of polish over all the weapons. Made sure their bullets are properly moving from the clip to the chamber as you pull the slide, and an empty casing animates out. Made sure the clips move properly when you eject a mag, went over their sound effects again... honestly, this still isn't 100% polished, but it's in a much better state now. I spent a full weekend just doing this part.

- Gotta say the generic "fixed a million bugs"... because I did. I fixed a million of them.

The new build is not live... I mean I did quietly push a few updates over the last month, but I am not super proud of them. Some of these updates had a few larger bugs. I like to quietly push updates, play with 2 or 3 people, and if all goes well I will put up a game for more later that week. This update still isnt really quite there yet, but I am close, so I would say we may be able to play this weekend or the following. I will post later this week if I think its ready for Sunday.

Made a change to the discord to make things a little more straight forward. I hate pinging lots of people, so decided to make it simpler.

I have removed all testing roles, and made the download to the game publicly accessible instead: https://discord.com/channels/1475269695048257587/1475280589887242502
I recognize that I will still need to ping people to let them know when games are being played, so I decided to change the "tester role" for that.

Since you all have been removed from the testing role, please react here to start getting pinged about test games: https://discord.com/channels/1475269695048257587/1476700936465420329

This leads me to my next bigger announcement:

New update is live and its way more stable than the last one. So much so that I want to start holding bi-weekly to monthly test games, starting tomorrow (Sunday) at 9pm EST.
The new link will be the version we are playing. I did some 1v2 testing last night, and it was almost flawless. As far as system requirments, we had one player playing with a gtx 1080ti last night and said it did pretty well at medium settings.

Please join this event below if you are interested in trying it out.https://discord.gg/tWqg2Qbz?event=1525548897462779904
If we get more than 10, we can start two lobbies. The servers should support up to 100.

Heres the patch notes:

- Doubled to Tripled framerate from last build
- Added downing and reviving mechanic.  You can crawl arond and shoot at people while down.  You get back up automaticly after an amount of time porportional to how hurt you are.  A needle is required to gain back full movement speed, but you can stab yourself with one.  Full visability comes back over time, but takes several minutes to fully recover without a needle.
- Redesigned all the weapon audio to use proper loops in full auto.  Also got some much higher quality bullet impact sounds.  Fine tuned the audio occlusion and distance for footsteps, voices, gunshots, and impacts.
- Added an MCX Assault Riffle
- Made animations WAY smoother.  Players now properly lean when you lean IRL.
- Made throwing mechanics feel a little bit better, but to be honest, I still need another run at this.  Light throws are a little bit hard.
- Made UI look a little nicer.  There are some new added settings as well.

Heres a few rounds to show what gameplay looks like in its current state.

Open attachment: 2026-06-29_00-00-28.mp4

Open attachment: 2026-06-29_00-02-20.mp4

Just released a quickfix fixing a lot of low hanging fruit from yesterdays test. Biggest bugs we encountered yesterday have been resolved, and vram usage has dropped by 30-40%.

Download here: https://discord.com/channels/1475269695048257587/1475280589887242502

New update is live:

Leaving an update note for this one feels futile, but let me try it:

- Added a bolt action sniper (L96A1)
- Added a belt-fed LMG (M249)
- Added a pistol (P350) + Inventory options for the secondary weapon + mags
- Added M203 launcher for frags + smokes (only on Mk16 right now)
- New test map (Slums)
- Added a height option and player scaling.
- New flashbang effects, which will now slow players down and literally disorient them.
- Added class based loadout selection + everything is now money based and runs against a budget:

   [Class specific traits:]
   - Assault: Basically normal everything
   - Heavy: 10% slower, recieves an extra utility on both utility slots
   - Scout: 10% faster, access to specialized weapons (boltys and such)
   - Medic/Engineer: No weapons have been added to this class, but they will recieve extra money.

- Drastically improved animations, added crawling and leaning (just lean in real life, its a pretty smart system)

- Added graphic options, as I recognize no one should be able to run this game at max settings.  I still have to go through and optimize texture resoltuions on stuff so for the mean time this game will be VRam heavy.  


+Heres a few tips on making it run well:

   [Performance Reccomendations:]
  - If you are maxing out vram, lower the MIP max setting and restart the game (A restart of the game is required for this to take effect). This may be the best way to improve performance, but will also be the most noticeable 
   - Keep refelction quality on low.  It doesnt need to be high at all for it to look great.  
   - I reccomend not upscaling the render resolution.  Keep it at 100%.  
   - Theres no need to increase shadow distance becuase there are no realtime shadows yet.  Keep that low (5 meters).
   - LOD bias... I don't expect this to have too much of an impact, but if you bring it in too much you will notice more "popping"
   - Turning off volumetric shadows may increase CPU performance.
   - Each setting has a "?" next to it, which you can hover on to explain that setting.

Besides this stuff, I fixed about a million bugs.  I do want to mention I will probably post another release within a week. There is actually a fair bit of small bugs with this version.  More than I care to write out, but so much has been added, that was sort of expected. Overall this is a massive upgrade from the last version, so figured I would share it.```

Edit: We tested with 4-5 players today, and while its playable, we did find a couple of larger bugs... which honestly was expected with an update this size.... but most of it was low hanging fruit.  Mainly I want to say that you shouldn't even try to play this on high settings.  Make sure you are playing somewhere between low and medium.   Theres a lot of low hanging fruit I can do to patch things up, so expect a polished version of this update later this week.

New Update is live:

- Fixed frags killing people way out of range
- Made throwing feel better
- Added flip scope (but havent set it up to show on other players screens yet)
- Fixed head movement option
- Reduced momentum mechanic
- Fixed particle system on flash-bangs
- Fixed a few other bugs... spawning in with no utility does not cuase issues anymore, not sure if I got the proximity chat bug where proximity chat would randomly stop working.  I may have but need to test.```

Just wanted to mention I just released a new build. I try to tag you guys as little as possible, but this build is actually a big one so figured its worthy.

- Added support for multiplayer in explore mode.
- Added new game mode: Defuse - Team based game mode where players have defuse a bomb by reading a code off of it, and entering that into their tablet.  Defending team must prevent them.
- Added a tablet, which can show teammate positions and bomb location, and gives a medium for defusing the bomb.
- Added crawling animations
- New character models, and flashlight and laser models.
- Throwing utility feels way better now
- Fixed a million small bugs, and a few big ones.  Added a million small quality of life improvements not worth wasting your time reading about them, or my time remembering them.```

Download here: https://discord.com/channels/1475269695048257587/1475280589887242502

New Build is now live:

- Lots of back end work on this one one, should be a lot more stable online in multiplayer lobbies.
- Added smoke grenades
- players names on the scoreboard will light up more on the board when they are talking
- Steam names are now pulled in from steamvr instead of "player 1"...
- Added an "exit lobby" button.

I actually wasnt planning on releasing this update, but I accidentally built one with my produciton build profile, and it was less buggy then the version I have out there now, so I guess why not?
The big change on this version is really about how networked objects are handled. Its made the game way more stable over the network.

Known bugs:

-left and right hands are swapped in settings, just pick the opposite of what you are
-these settings may not update in the main menu, but they will in game
-AK has not been made to work with the new network settings... stick to the MK.
-smoke grenade is off-center for lefties
-smokes stop dissipating smokes mid air for a second or two after release

These actually have really easy fixes, but I again I made this build by accident.

EDIT: 9:50AM EST June 6th - There was actually an issue with the server browser in this update, so I just released a new one with a fix, and I also added tablets. Crossed out items above are now fixed as well too.

June 1st-

- Added a loadout system that incorporates money on equipment.  I plan on  having a lot more you can add before this is done, so for now there is no cap on money spent... for any game mode.
- New attachments: Scopes (with hybrid scope options), lasers, flashlights
- Adjusted momentum mechanics to be less impactful when crouched, and made the amount of momentum relative to your velocity... feels a bit more natural now, and less like ice skating.
- New minimap planner has been implemented.  Now there is a minimap in the waiting area, and you can draw points on it to show your team where you are planning on going.  These lines will actually move around on walkable areas only so it will draw lines on the fastest way to get from point A to point B. You can also watch players move around the map, and see where they are looking. (see video below)

I also ran a test with about 7 people, and it didnt go so great. (but to be fair, what else would you expect from the first real test lobby).  I learned a lot from this, so thanks to those of you that helped.  I learned that I cant just send network packets at 120 ticks a second... stuff gets lost, and the lobby gets confused.  You start to see weird things like guns that dont obey the laws of gravity.   I also learned that with the way I had everything set up, when the host quits, the game was bound to freeze for everyone else.  This ended up making me re-do a lot of the stuff ive set up, and the way a lot of it was coded... which... was a lot of work lol, but its good now.  Things are back to noramlish, and now, the game keeps on playing seamlessly when a host leaves.  It was worth it.

Even though the test above didnt go well for most of it, there were still playable moments where I got a glimpse into what this game will be like, and I wanted to share some video on that as well.```

Open attachment: 2026-06-01_00-58-32.mp4

Open attachment: 2026-06-01_20-34-22.mp4

Open attachment: 2026-06-01_20-37-29.mp4

Sorry for the ping, but I know some of you were asking for this. I pushed a new version (https://discord.com/channels/1475269695048257587/1475280589887242502/1475300879035928680)
I have also added a game mode called "Explore" where you can walk around and experiment with infinate ammo, mags, and throwables. This will let you guys test it by yourself without needing a lobby. Make sure to select this if you want to try it:

I want to mention ive done breif testing on this, and it had a bug where you get floating mags, empty bullet shells, and you cant throw anything. If that happens, just restart the game and that should fix it, and it wont happen ever again I believe.

EDIT: Just updated with a new version. This includes minimap planning, lots of optimization, and better grenade/flashbang thowing trajectories. (Maybe not perfect, but really close to it now)
The striked-out bug above should be fixed... for the most part. It will occastionally spawn you in still without a riffle, but this will be fixed later. If it happens, kill yourself with a grenade and restart the round and that will fix it.

I want to know if anyone still has the striked out issue. Please let me know.

Thanks!

April 26th - DM me if you want a build, but you wont be able to play unless we have a testing night. It requires 2 players to start a game

First monthly update - This is starting to feel like a real game
- Added the first itteration of a loadout screen.  You can select different weapons and attachments.
- Made attachments... so far just silencers, holo sights, and foregrips.  Foregrips reducst recoil.. silencers reduce sound... holosights ... be holosights.
- Added an AK
- I really focused down on weapon and mag handling. I cant emphasize how much better this feels now.  Like, its perfect.  Nades are hosltering and unhosltering just as well, but the throwing still feels a little off.  This will be a focus next month.
- I added momentum to player movement.  0.2 second ramp up and ramp up time... this feels SOOOOO good. It prevents jiggle peaking 100%, and otherwise you wouldnt even notice it.
- Made loading screen much better.  Added background music to it.  Should this be elevator music? It feels like it should be elevator music.
- I brought in a level I made from when I was making custom maps for onward (Marketplace)  I also built a tool to convert this map over to a map for my game.  I have to re-design the shaders I was using, so one thing that still took a bit of work was re-doing a lot of the material settings to use my own shaders.  I have not really polished this up, but I will later.  Dont worry, things will look beautiful later. Another thing I want to say here is that Marketplace will NOT be a map in my game, but I may use assets from it.  This goes for all the custom content I made for Onward. I may add some of those levels in some capacity, but if I do they will be drastically different and way more polished than they were as custom content... if they see the light of day at all.  Many of these maps I made as I was learning unity, and I want my maps to have really well thought out layouts, and profesional quality control and optimization in my actual game. I just brought in Marketplace becuase I wanted to test performance on an already optimized level.
- I did a lot of work on animations this month too.  Players are now movign their feet while rotating, and shfiting to a crawl position when you move your head low enough.  This will need a few more passes before its perfect, but we are better off today than we were a month ago.  IK in genral is much better than it was last update.  Not just on the animations, but the IK itself.
- Adjusted recoil, and sound effects on weapons.  They are feeling much better now.
- Host migrations are working now, but there is an issue with host timeouts failing to trigger host migrations now.  Basically the host can quit, but they cant walk away from their headset.  More work to be done here.
- This is just the tip of the iceberg.  I guess these are the big ticket items I actually remembered working on. I am noticing my memory is not good enough to remember everything I fixed over the coarse of the month.  I am looking back at the last patch notes right now and thinking "what have I done since then?" and I feel like that update was a year ago.

I cant end it without some sort of screenshot or video, so ill tease this. This is the fastest you can jiggle peak in this game. Please ignore the messed up lighting, I am having an issue getting SH lightmaps to get included in the bundle, but obviously I will resolve that later.

Open attachment: 2026-04-26_00-40-25.mp4

March 29th - (New build here: https://discord.com/channels/1475269695048257587/1475280589887242502/1475300879035928680)

- Added vignette and bullet whistle noises when someone shoots near you and misses.  They are reactive based on how close of a call it was.
- Added a paritcle system to flashes that lasts longer and moves with the flash after its gone off.  Also added realtime lighting to both flashes and grenade explosions.
- Added a togable full auto/semi auto firing modes to riffles.
- Made last bullet in a riffle have the option get locked back, and gave it an optional release using a button.
- I started adding prioritization rules and blocking rules to weapon handling, (i.e dont grab a nade off my chest if I am holding a nade already... prioritize pulling the pin on the grenade I am already holdling instead if its in range).  This way you will always grab the pin instead of a new nade accidentally.  I put a lot of these rules in to make things feel more natural.
- 1 handed recoil is now working
- There are things I have implemented to help lock down my code from hackers, but unfortunately I cant talk about those in patch notes.  All I can say is I worked on security.

I know I said I would focus on IK this week, and its like the only thing I didnt work on... but seriously... that will be a focus of next week.```

Open attachment: 2026-03-29_23-54-47.mp4

Open attachment: 2026-03-29_23-56-21.mp4

I am going to host a lobby at 8pm next Sunday if anyone wants to play this out. I think we are in a really playable state now. Please react if interested:

March 22nd - (New build here: https://discord.com/channels/1475269695048257587/1475280589887242502/1475300879035928680)

Bug fixes, new features, new equiptment.  I now am a registered steamworks partner too!
- Added flashbangs.  See Video, this is not the final result, it will need some fine tuning.
- Added heavy breathing when damaged that sorta repsonds to how you were hit.  I still need to add vignette when under fire or hurt.
- Added a inventory renderer, so you can see your inventory slots on a physical body (see video).  Circles now appear when you put an inventory item near its slot, letting you know it can be snapped in there.
- Added a killcam, so you can watch players playing from their point of view while you are in the waiting area.
- Fixed issue where holding a riffle while transitioning from waiting area to map at a round start would cause wonky behaviour.
- Fixed issue remote players couldn't re-hoslter their riffle.  Also holstering items is WAY more responsive now.
- Added 2-handed recoil... 1 handed comming soon

I would like to focus on IK for next week, and touch up a few other samll easy bugs I noticed.  I want to fine tune some sound effects button visuals and effects... there is work to be done everywhere, but we will get there.```

Open attachment: 2026-03-23_01-41-25.mp4

Open attachment: 2026-03-23_01-38-34.mp4

Marth 15th - (still no release)

- I had issues with disaperaring players in lobbies with multiple people.  Weapons not spawning in if you were holding them in the tent... these sorts of bugs have been fixed.
- I started working on host migration paths.... What happens when the host leaves the lobby.  Is permission to start rounds transfered.... stuff of this nature.  Its not working yet, but this will likely be my focus for the next few days.  Its partially working now.
- Improved shaders 
- Improved sound occlusion
- Fixed glitch where grenades dont fly right if they are thrown while running
- Created a tool to apply friction + bounciness to surfaces for a map and apply it to everything so grenades will fly appropirately... TO DO here, make sounds on grenede bounces based on material type.
- Created a few new skins, and changed up spawns to apply random character skins for now.
- Made a fresh duplicate of the project on my test machine so I can test mulitplayer with a more in-line project. (before I was using version control, but not syncing the entire project)```

Marth 8th - (no release yet)

Seems unlikely there will be a test this week. I got stuck compliing shader variants for the last 24 hours, so I didnt get the change to fix a few bigger bugs that came up last test run. I did add a bunch of new features, and wanted to keep track of them here:

-Made a start menu area, and added settings menu, create and join lobby buttons with a working server browser.  
-Now when you join a lobby, it loads a secondary asset bundle.  This is needed to make this stuff run on quest, and not make my entire game run load into memory, but rather load the bits and pieces you need for each level.  This was a big win
-I made the above process asynchronous, so it should able to throw a loading screen inbetween the two scenes, so the screen doesnt completely glitch out when you are loading a map, but rather shows a progress bar and such.  More work is needed to get this looking good though.
-I improved gun shot occlusion.
-Switched entire render pipelline from HDRP to URP for higher perfomrance, then I swapped out the shaders, and started using bakerys shaders, which include better customization to lighitng.   While it probably doesnt look as good as it did ion HDRP now, it performs WAY better, and by adding custom shaders, it probably looks really close to how it did on HDRP now.  HDRP will be deprecated next year.  Unity seems to be focusing on URP now.
-Added volumetric lighting to parts of test level.  This might hit perfomrance hard on quest, so more work to be done there on the quest side
-Created tags, that let me disclude certain things on the quest build to increase performance while also making PCVR still look as good as possible
-Made weapon handing feel a lot better.  This actually comes from two directions: 1- the gates controlling when you can grab/reload have been more fine tuned.  I am working on better grab points, for fingers that wrap around the gun instead of just in the general area.  You cant insert a mag if there is already one in the weapon now... stuff like this.... and 2- I fine tuned the sound effects that are made on various actions... like when you touch the charing handle, when you pull it back, and when you release and such.   I actually might redo some of this work later, as I just came accross a tool that will blend sound effects based on factors.  For example, I could have a sound play as you pull the slide back, and stop if you temporarily stop pulling it back and then continue to play if you continue pulling it back, then I can change the pitch and volume of this if you pull it back slowly etc etc etc.... I think this is going to be really cool.
-Added recoil, and made it really customizable.  I can control the fulcrum of the recoil force and the X,Y,Z recoil all independtnely for different weapons.
-Added footsteps which play more or less quietly based on speed, crouching, etc.
-Added sound occlusion to not only gunshots, but the impact points of the bullets now, as well as footsteps.
-Added a lobby area, where now instead of playing a free for all death match, we will be testing in last man standing scenerios, were we all spawn in at once, and last one left alive wins.  Everyone will be teleported to the lobby area on death, and host will be able to start game from there once there is a winner (this is still in testing and is the reason I am not releasing a version for test tonight)
-Added a scoreboard in the lobby area so we can see who has how many kills, deaths, and round wins (this is just showing "Player 1, Player 2, etc" until I can implement steamvr and oclulus login.```

Sorry for the lack of release this week... I added too many features and didnt fix enough bugs. Stay tuned next week, I think thats when this is going to start feeling like a real game

March 1st - version 0.3:

I thought about doing another test run today, but I was able to try it in a 1v1 earlier and decided I want to wait a week to do next test run with more people. Theres a few quality of life bugs I would like to fix first. That said, ive added a lot in the last week, and I do have a new build you guys can try if you want. Just start a lobby and select "start host" if you want to fool around in it. I have updated the file in https://discord.com/channels/1475269695048257587/1475280589887242502

I will aim for next big test session next Sunday and hopefully have a lot more ironed out.

-All bugs from last week fixed (double gun, one hand issue, cant load weapon by bumping into holster, player auto-recentering, still able to shoot after death, host wont respawn at their death location anymore)
-Added sound occlusion on gun shots
-Better audio sounds for the weapons
-Added grenades
-Made weapon handling work a little more reliable and responsive to holster snaps and such.
-Created LODs for about 70-80% of the highest poly items
-Added physics materials for all prefabs on map
-Enabled realtime reflections + adjusted some other lighting settings
-Made weapons/ammo/utillity despawn 25 seconds after being killed to help with performance
-Made dead bodies rigid bodies get destroyed on respawn, so their physics are not constantly pegging performance.  Bodies will still be there, but they will not have physics around them.
-Added snap turning (move dominiat hands joystick to one side, then click it in)
-Added left hand mode (click in both joysticks for 5 seconds to change from right hnaded to left handed)

Heres a few notes on things that are acting a little glitchy and I havent had time to look into yet:
-Pulling a mag from your weapon appears to glitch out that mag.  Same with loading a mag while you already have one inserted.  
-Grenades do not throw at all accurately if you are running while you throw it.
-Bakery light volumes are new, but they are not working quite right yet.  Thats why im hesitent to add it as an udpate note.  Certain spots on the map they were flawlessly, but other places character models are black when they are standing in direct sunlight.  Ill need to play with this more, and I have been every time I bake lighitng, but since it takes an hour per test, this will take time to fix correctly.
-I suspect that gunshots are almost non-existent accross the map, but I really wanna test this out with other people first.  Sound occlusion is new, and I really need testers to really play around with the various settings I can control it with.
-The strike lever of the grenade is not comming off on start of cooking a grenade, that will be added later

Heres a sneak peak from todays 1v1:

Open attachment: 2026-03-01_17-14-21.mp4