It's been a couple weeks again, between some contract work, some Covid at home (not for me though! four years in and still dodging the hell virus) and a bunch of life admin I've had to slow down a bit on Exoloper. I've managed to put a couple rather beefy things into the game though, so thats good.
Lets kick off with how the game's feeling and sounding right now:
I posted this earlier in the week on Mastodon, where someone likened it to Battlezone '98. Definitely the best compliment I could hope for.
There's a couple things to go through here. I added the music I made for the game a long while back, and as always music makes a game feel more complete. I'm kinda surprised that it doesn't sound like crap, and that in-situ it kinda works? Definitely makes me a lot more confident for producing the rest of the games music on my own.
The second thing here is that a ton of SFX have been added / improved / worked on. Once a game starts feeling right it becomes a lot easier to build for it. There's a positive feedback look of "holy moly that was cool, if only I could add more cool stuff to that", that's pretty much my entire development motivation cycle, and also why I gravitate so heavily towards action games. I added a shotgun sound effect, it sounded great for a single shot, I made the gun automatic and the sfx blew me out of the room. Instantly wanted to add more of that.
This week in particular I spent time building out the Forest Campaign's Exosuit, the "Utility Exo". This piece of work has access to six utility slots and two reactor slots. Should be useful for power hungry utilities like Active Camoflauge, Thermal vision, or EM Warfare.
Active camoflague hits hard.
On these utilities, I spent a fair chunk of what little time I had last week working on them, as they all required a little more than the utilities so far. In the case of Thermal Vision, I really wanted that "Predator" feel, and knew that it'd have to include some post-effects work. A simple colour ramp was easy enough to implement, but the point of the system was to make the game much more legible, and so I also had to layer out smoke and debris as much as possible. For those that can't stand the visual mess of the game in regular view, Thermal should help a ton.
Using the same post-effects overlay systems I then added the Active Camouflage utility. Visually it was pretty simple to implement however I needed to add a realtime checker for a unit's visible strength. Under the hood of Exoloper there's a relatively complex signal strength system, both visual and radar-detectable emissions, so a unit won't appear labelled on screen (for the player) unless it's detected via either system, and for AI their detection system relies entirely upon these values. The difficulty here though is that I had it as a set-and forget system within the units' campaign data, only modified under the destruction of unit parts, so for Active Camo, I added a realtime modifier to this that can be modified on the fly by utilities when required. This goes both ways, so a player could use active camo, and be completely invisible to AI for a time, but their radars might pick up a massive energy spike at the location you enabled it, which might encourage some to go check it out.
Another shoutout to NoLeternox for his awesome sketch concepts. Seriously makes the whole process so much easier.
With all this done my only remaining content task for the game is to build out the graphical assets for the Forest Campaign's campaign layer. After that there's a couple weeks worth of bits and bobs, little features that need patching and then onto Open Beta, bug-hunting and balancing.