Hey all!
Jason here. It’s been a long time since we’ve touched base with everyone following Grit Paintball, so I figured it’s time to drop an update of what we’ve been up to.

Progress of a side project is always dependent on what real life is doing, and we’ve both had a fair bit of real life to deal with recently - for example, a few months back I bought my first home with my partner and it’s about 70 years old, so there’s been a fair bit of maintenance to deal with in my spare time. BUT, although it might seem like it, we haven’t been sitting on our hands!

As you may already know, I developed Grit during the initial Covid lockdown in 2020 without any prior game development experience, and just a small amount of programming experience. As such, my code was functional, but pretty terrible for anything or anyone other than exactly what it was designed for. When we formed Infima Labs, one of the first things we needed to address was redoing the code base to make future updates easier to integrate. Anthony has initially spent quite some time actually decoding what I’d done, and then set to work doing part one of his programming wizardry, compartmentalising different areas of the game - a few steps sideways to allow us to run forwards in the future.

The biggest advantage to this approach is what we’re internally calling “Arena Core” - basically, it’s the part of Grit that holds the basic engine of our software, including input and file management, multi and cross-platform functionality, and development tools such as auto testing and building. Arena Core also includes all of the multiplayer functionality, and there has been heaps of work going on to build this foundation as well.
It will support high resolution data transfer and storage, so matches will be able to be saved and archived in small files, while optimising network traffic with a proprietary addressing system that will minimise latency and network traffic without sacrificing any of the feel of VR, and possibly automatically prioritise Grit’s network data if there are issues with the internet - basically, we’re hoping to make multiplayer faster and smoother than pretty much any game available today, which is obviously a big deal in the fast paced world of paintball.

Although Arena Core is also being built as a base to Grit, it’s development is in parallel as almost a standalone game protocol within Unity - meaning all the network optimisation may be available as a Unity asset in the future, and would allow anyone to build software with blazing fast multiplayer. But that will be a while away - the first test bed for Arena Core will be a Grit exclusive.


Other notable, but less important background work includes:

• Constantly keeping updated with the latest Unity builds, asset updates, and XR developments
  
• Rebuilt non-vital models to reduce poly counts between 40-70% to improve performance on all platforms while maintaining good visual fidelity
  
• Multiple user modes to support players, spectators, coaches and broadcast modes

We’ve also been discussing exactly how we’re going to price Grit in the future. We’re considering sponsors and advertising within Grit, but whatever we do, we’re committed to making it non-intrusive, and only have advertising in areas that you would expect to see in real life, along fencelines or tents for example. The main benefits to this would be allowing paintball companies to get more involved in the virtual world, and could also help us hit one of our goals - to make Grit free to use for some game modes. It may be training/field walking mode, the field editor, or possibly even free multiplayer; there’s a lot to unpack in this area but it’s something we are actively looking into!

We still have a bit to achieve before the next release of Grit, mostly due to the multiple platforms that we will be developing and supporting from here on. Creating the ability to work as on standalone VR hardware (ie. Meta Quest) means we also have to redesign the entire menu and interaction system as there’s no external mouse and keyboard to rely on, but it also needs to be integrated well enough that we don’t have to create different UI’s for each platform every time for first person and VR builds. This next release will be a Steam only Beta to test out all the back-end functionality, and then when this looks stable we’ll start looking into releasing for the other platforms.

As always, thanks so much for your support as we work through this project - incredibly our sales have been steady, or even increasing month on month, and this is all directly attributed to our fantastic community spreading the word. Cheers for sticking with us!