Dev Log 11
It's been a few weeks since the last update. I've still been focused on Hostile Mars and have made some great progress. There were a few weeks that I was unavailable due to my first baby boy being born! It was an incredible experience and am extremely grateful to say he is doing well.
The past month has been focused mainly on two things: expanding the environment exploration content and adding more items. A few new features have been added as well and the menu has had a complete revamp to make things easier for players to understand and engage with them.
First I'll start with the visual stuff.
Traps
New models were made for both the Frost Trap and the Magnet Trap. I really like how they both turned out:
Scrap Turrets
I've also added a lot of new items for the beginning of the game to ease the player from a starting point to building the main base elements. A lot of scraps and pick-up items have been added so that the player can make "scrap/makeshift" type weapons and items. For example, you can now create a turret much earlier with just a few scraps from the enemies with similar parts. Here are the projectile and shock scrap turrets:
And as usual, they are upgradeable. Stage 0 and stage 1 turrets shown above.
Hideouts
Tons of new elements have been added to place around the maps and allow the player to explore while discovering new items and technologies.
Here are a few of the hideout spots you will find around the maps. Careful, the Legacy Bots are protecting some of them!
UI Updates
Another big piece that has been done since the last update is the UI.
I received a lot of feedback during the last playtesting regarding different aspects of the machine, turret, and Home Base interface menus. I don't feel that it is a good thing that the menus were one of the more discussed items. A menu is there to connect the player to actions in-game and ideally, should be as seamless and simple as possible. If it is done well then they should be invisible to the player and feel like an extension to their immersion in the game world.
I spoke with a few other game-devs that have studied UX design quite a bit and went through an exercise where I took out as much as possible, then focused on which elements the player would interact with the most then made them the most noticeable elements on the interface.
Here are a few of the updated panels. The Color scheme isn't final so as of right now they are simple greyscale, and I won't worry about that until after the next round of playtesting because if they don't work well and have to be changed then the design piece would have been wasted time.
I also redid much of the code for the UI eliminating (hopefully) any inventory or UI bugs that were there during the last playtest. This also includes adding hotkeys for shortcuts for inventory management, like half stack submit and click transfer (vs only drag).
Here are some of the new layouts:
I've also added a new build menu feature that allows you to see all of the unlocked elements for the player and see which they are currently able to place. This included adding functionality for "free placement" items such as the new scrap turret, which does not require a panel to build on:
A few days were spent cleaning up some of the old code and trying to get everything as clean as possible to reduce regression and unit testing bugs.
Coming Next
Moving forward I plan to finish all of the new items and environment integrations after which I will be adding the automation into the build! This is the core of the game and I am excited to see how players interact with this.
Also, a new "Wave Leader" enemy type is coming soon, more details on that next week🙂
Thanks for all the support! If you want to join us for the next playtest, join the Discord: https://discord.gg/EpmPSmd
Until next week,
Jake