Hi!

This week was a lot about Chapter two. After beating Jearl Hyatt in Station 23B, our hero will be asked to investigate Mantaurus Prime, capture enemy bases and find their headquarter.

This chapter will be outdoor, the gunfights will be more intense, with the presence of heavier weaponry. The maps are, as chapter one, procedurally generated. The main goal is to find the enemy HQ, and capture bases along the way for bonus credits & loot; captured bases will also serve has rally point, once captured a group of 7SidesCorp troop will guard the zone.

Here is a preview of what is coming:

I also worked on balancing weapons combo.  I doped the plasma gun which now have an explosion on the poisoning version. And I added a new toy: Submachine Gun: a middle way between Pistol & Assault Rifle. Still, Assault rifle is shiny…

AI has been cleaned a bit, their is still latency on Bots reaction, though. This will be worked out. Bots learnt to throw grenades on turrets, they still need practice I guess, cause they are killing themselves more than often.

Till next week!

Play the Demo right now!

Hello!

A new threat for you to overcome: turrets. Don’t be caught on their line of sight, especially the gattling one which spits 7.56 candies at 600 rounds per minute. You got choices, thought: wasting a good bunch of precious ammo an explode it or flank and hack it making a good ally in the process!

Much more turrets type to come! Stay tuned!

With this build a load of fixes, tweaks and improvement have been done. Most notable one coming into my mind: PumpGun has been doped with better firerate (90bpm), greater range (30m) and better ammo load(8). This is assorted with a 3 seconds immunity on KnockDown effect, though.

I’m also working on the next chapter which will be exterior, here is a preview:

Once dealt with Jearl Hyatt, the first boss, you’ll have the opportunity to travel there… the boss fight has been improved also, and will be again in the near future.

Thanks for reading, greater THX for playing, and please, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts, ideas and feedback, it’s REALLY appreciated (I cannot afford play testers ya know ^^)!

Play ShootOut now!

Cheers!

Hello!

The first boss is ready for you to fight! At mission level 5, if you get through it, you’ll initiate the fight against Jearl Hyatt, the raiders leader.

I also worked on the introduction sequence, it’s more detailed now. As well as the Player’s vessell-HQ “Wanderlust”. It has a bridge now! From there you’ll be able to fly between chapters.

A new threat has been implemented: explosive trap! trigger it and you got 2 sec before a blast. If you’re caught unaware it will hurt and you’ll fly. But the worst is coming: the blast can be heard pretty far and will surely drag some scums.

It’s quite a milestone for me. The first chapter loop is done. There is still a lot of polish and additions to do, though. But it’s a good base and I’ll work on adding an another chapter. This first chapter will constitute the game demo.

Until next week, take care! And please give some feedback, opinions, ideas!

Play ShootOut now!

Hello!

This week I focalized quite a lot on Quality of Life. A lot has been done to make the experience “gemütlich” (comfortable).

Now you’ll see the maximum allowed ammunitions next to the carried ammo, when approaching an ammo pick up it will display in red if you’e already full, weapons pick ups will also be displayed in red when you carry a better or equal ranked one in the appropriate slot (one hand or two hands).

In dungeons when you discover the exit, a tag will appear on the screen so you can still explore without risking to be lost again.

The Mission terminal is a lot clearer: useless buttons will disappear and appear again when needed.

I also added quite a bunch of notifications when needed.

The two firsts tutorial chapters have been tweaked also. A third and probably last one will be added soon.

Some tweaks have been made to the AI, it is now more responsive, take care. I also tweaked the weapons loudness, be careful, shooting a Pistol won’t attract foes from really far, but an Assault Rifle will be heard from 45m and an Alarm will from 90m!

Yes, the first trap has been added, it’s a laser that will trigger a powerful alarm. With a Scanner Drone you can hack it, though.

It’s about all, there are still things to discover!

Thx for reading,

Don’t hesitate to try out the game and give feedback, opinions, ideas…

Play ShootOut Now!

Hello !


Long time I did not update, sorry for that. I was quite struggling to pull out things, to be honest Struggling led to no pleasure and motivation lost. I was still working on the project but not advancing, really. Then a neat blog post from Chris Zukowski i’m following : very good link here! I decided to do just what Zukalous said: Cut every features not ready and polish a game loop with what I got so far.

So, I’ll just get rid of almost all the narration which is quite above what I could build until I got some more miles in my counter.

I got this pretty solid shooter mechanic, a satisfying and fun AI, a working weapon and equipment system, a squad system and a very good procedural dungeon/map generator. The game will turn around those features. I’ll use the three months lasting before release to polish and refine the user experience around those axes. With a simple story which will be more a context.

With this devlog I published a first rough of what to expect in the next builds: The player will own a Headquarter where he’ll manage his crew, rest, equip and launch procedural mission map from there. The missions will be increasingly difficult with increasingly good equipment drops. He will be able to recruit squad members and upgrade them if they survive the mission.

Freed from the overwhelmed goal I pursued, i’m back to work with all my will! thanks Zukalous!

Aye!

Play the current version : ShootOut

When I decided to devote some time and love to the Narration System I was quite naive due to inexperience (I levelled up!). I did not realise that the Story System, to achieve what I envision for it, is encapsulating quite a bunch of Sub Systems.

• A Cut Scenes System (what I originally limited the task to)
• A Mission System (To set goals, Objectives & validate or not the outcome)
• A Npc Script System (To make bots perform some precise tasks that would be an over killing effort to implement on a generic AI)
• A Spawn System (To be able to spawn characters and set them up depending of the state of the story)
• And of course the Story System that encapsulate and make use of them all.

That explains why I could not publish a build for you to test since one month now. As I need a week to at least draft each system IF I subdivide well the work, which I obviously did not in this case, resulting to be overwhelmed by diverse and too different tasks.

But everything is coming together. The StoryTeller Actor I told you about in some previous DevLog as fatten up. It is now not only checking StoryStates and triggering a Sequence, but it can also Spawn actors, Start Scripts on them, Start Mission and check it states. It literally does the job of a Game Master in tabletop role playing game in fact. It is working well and will grow even fatter in the future.

Still a lot of work making all this more sexy. But the StoryTeller is doing its job, and all its little soldiers be them Mission, Spawner, Cut Scenes components also. They all implement their useful functions and variable and communicate to each other as needed. They are quite easy to set up, reusable at envy and of course eagerly awaiting expansion.

Hopefully next week all this will be ready for you to test! I’m quite impatient to publish a build because some parallel improvements has been done.

Until next week, take care in these strange times!

Play the current version : ShootOut

Get the news letter!

Hey everyone ! This week won’t bring new build for you, sorry for that ! But the wait will worth it!

The first chapter is almost done, roughly, there will have a lot of polishing to be done. You will soon discover how the story will be handled!

Play the current version : ShootOut

The plot is quite basic. Amanda and Romeo are hired to break into 7SidesCorp building. Sophie is an employee of 7Sides, she will have to protect a precious and mysterious alien artifact. Jack, as a police officer works inderectly for the Corp, he hears about a coup in 7Sides and investigate.

This is the chart I use, a simple Inkscape document (I love Inkscape)!  I manage the StoryState with 4 main variables :

• A character Name
• A chapter integer
• An alignment integer
• a step integer

Names, chapters and steps are quite obvious, with them I can know who’s playing and where he/she stands in the story. In the chart above you can see that, for this first chapter, there are some branching and two possible conclusion. Some boxes are outlined with green, this will be used if you already played the chapter with another character. If so, the game will use the outcome you had.

For example if you succeeded to investigate with Jack, the alarm will be active when you try to break into 7Sides with Romeo… and so on.

Later I’ll add one another possible outcome : each character will have the opportunity at key time to switch side, hence the alignment variable. But this is for an another chapter.

A first version should be ready for you to test next week! ’til then don’t hesitate to play the current build and leave feedback!

Play the current version : ShootOut