After finishing up some final work in the UI early this week, ending nearly three months worth of work, I decided to do something thats just pure serotonin for my brain. (graphics, UI, pretty much everything, as always is placeholder). Warping onto the battlefield

After selecting a campaign, building your roster, customising your units and readying for a drop, the menu will fade away and you’ll fade into a first person view of the Exobay. There you’ll go through a preflight check inside your Exo, powering up your batteries, igniting your engines, loading your weapons and booting your radar. When the sequence is complete you are warped down to the planets surface, and must immediately contend with clearing out a landing zone.

The plan here is for this to feel something like a mash between the iconic Mechwarrior boot sequence, and some of level intros from the Titanfall series. It’s meant to be both a quick warm up with controls, and an eff-yeah moment to kick off a campaign.

The drop sequence isn’t something I’d planned to have in the game, but after testing a couple campaign playthroughs I found that diving straight into the strategic layer feels… a bit bland, so this is the first step into adding some immersive spice into the game.

There’s still a ton of work that needs to be done here. The Exobay is literally just grey blocks, there’s no reaction from the Exo upon ground impact (yes it needs to be a 3 point landing), the player needs to drop into a bunch of easily squashable enemies, etc etc etc. Getting the core functionality in has been pretty easy and everything clips into the existing modular structures of the game, so it’s been an absolute pleasure working on this new feature.

One upside of working on the drop sequence is that it laid the groundwork for building out a more extensive framework of first person animations, something I’d always wanted to do in Interloper, but couldn’t implement due to a less clean coding system. So I spent about 20 minutes today putting those in, and now, when you Reload, use a Utility, or use Torso Twist, you’ll have first person animations to match.

THUNK

Finally, I spent a bit of time this past two weeks looking over my timelines, and I think Exoloper might be good for launch come mid this year. Not quite the six month timeline I’d envisaged, but definitely much quicker than any of my other options. More to come on this later of course.

Exoloper Tasks completed:

  • Drop Sequence:
    • Drop Sequence: Manager
    • Drop Sequence: IK Hand interactions
    • Drop Sequence: Touch minigames
    • Drop Sequence: Audio assets
    • Drop Sequence: Haptic pass
  • IK hand animations for in-cockpit actions (reload, util, etc)
  • Concept up Campain Drop Sequence
  • controller needs to be able to use unit turntable in roster/exobay
  • Combat: Weapon Groupings
  • UI-Rework: Item Compare
  • UI-Rework: Controller Navigation Campaign submenus
  • UI: Select all in Extraction should be the same kind of button as in Exobay and Salvage
  • UI: Select all button in Exobay isn’t wired up to controller.
  • Reassess Launch date
  • Document out the game loops
  • BUG: Mouse and Keeb no longer work in campaign battles?