Hello soldiers,
First, let me start by saying that I hope everyone is doing okay given the current Covid-19 situation. It's my hope that everyone is as healthy as they can be. Remember to minimize unnecessary travel, practice social distancing, and wash your hands!
Update about Brass Brigade Development
For those of you who do not know, Brass Brigade is made by one person - me. I work at one of the Big Three American Automotive manufacturers and I (like many others), am working from home for the foreseeable future. Fortunate as I am to be able to keep my day job, I am now required to spend the majority of my day programming from home for work, which makes it difficult to then pivot and continue working on Brass Brigade in the evenings. The inability to conduct other activities outside of my house means that I am being very careful to balance the amount of time I spend working on my computer with other activities that give my mind, eyes, and hands a break from keyboard & screen. What this means is that development of Brass Brigade has slowed down as I work to limit my screen time. Rest assured that work is still continuing, but it won't be continuing at the rate that I was able to move at earlier. I hope you understand my need to balance my health and screen time with my desire to bring you guys more Brass Brigade. It's a strange time indeed. With that said, I do want to show you what I have been inching towards over these last few weeks.
Troop Commanding
I have been working to add in basic troop commands to Brass Brigade. The player can bring up a command-rose widget and issue orders to nearby troops. Once a troop is under the player's influence, they will remain so until they die, the player dies, or they are dismissed. At the moment, the player can tell troops to follow them, move to a specific point, hold at the player's current position, and be dismissed (go back to behaving like normal).
While these behaviors may be changed/tweaked as time goes on, even these basic commands open up fun side-avenues of strategy and gameplay scenarios. You can gather a group of bots to follow you around a flank that bots don't normally take. You can get a group of bots to hold a point with you instead of rushing out into the fray. You can send them to attack a point and cover them from your vantage point. The list goes on.
I've made a short video that showcases the current state of the troop commanding. The art is very basic & placeholder in some areas, but the bot functionality works fairly well at this stage of development. I hope you enjoy watching and please, feel free to offer any feedback you may have. I'm looking to start simple with this feature and develop it over time.
The release date of this feature is still TBD.
Performance Bump
A very strange but sensible performance increase was achieved in the game by slowing down bullet projectile speeds to better match their real world counterparts. By slowing down the speed of bullets to better match their real-world speeds, the space the physics engine needs to analyze for collisions is smaller frame-to-frame. Less time spent calculating physics means a higher average frame-rate.
The Future
For the time being, we must do all we can to curb the spread of Covid-19. I will continue to work on Brass Brigade when I can. Stay healthy & safe everyone!
Until next time,
Henry K.