Don't talk to me or my son ever again.
School holidays have struck. It's the first time they've meant anything to me in nearly twenty years, which.. even writing that makes my back ache. This means I'm short a few days this week and last. In what time I have had though I've spent working on all sorts of little graphical bits and bobs for Exoloper, starting with Enemies.
Don't talk to me or my son ever again.
I made these models at the end of last year, but never had the time to fully get them into the game, so it's been a real pleasure seeing the tanks running around doing their thing in full detail. A consequence of this has been that there's now three classes of tank enemies in the game, with light tanks now supporting their medium and superheavy siblings in firefights. These little guys rip away at your feet and are super annoying (by design).
I can't stress quite enough how nice it is to finally see the game coming together visually after all this time staring at grey boxes. In my minds eye I could see how it all worked, maybe not exactly as it's turning out, but a vague kind of outline, and to see that outline resolving into something tangible is really exciting.
Of course slapping some models into the game that I built four months ago isn't all i've been doing. I've spent a fair amount of time getting the first exo up and running, most of which revolves around setting up the cockpit. A lot of this work was just getting the scale right for the interior, making sure that everything feels roughly correct. After that, modelling up the details, adding in sub components and then finally adding in the tiny reactions (stuff like the tubing wiggling around when you get hit or move) topped off with damage effects.
All of it links into the core unit's internal messaging systems, so there's no crazy single class like I had in Interloper for handling cockpit effects, just a bunch of elements listening for a "hey we got hit" message. It's simple, it's easy, it's extensible.
The intensity got ratcheted up a fair bit with the inclusion of all the cockpit bits.
With all of this done, I estimate I've got about three to four more weeks worth of work to fill out all the assets for launch. That feels pretty nice to be honest. After that it's all bugfixing and beta testing until launch.
I'll say it again because it's hard to convey, but I'm pretty happy with how it's all coming along. It really feels like I've made something special here, and I hope the market sees it the same way.