Quite a few things have been going on since the last update!
I'll show some of the changes and additions that have been worked on in the past few weeks. After that, I have some thoughts to share about the last playtest and why I feel that it didn't go well.
Some New Stuff
Spawn Effects
Added an effect for spawning objects, making it a little bit more enjoyable when placing objects.
Object Visualizers
Machines have a "quick view" window that shows the progress of that machine without having to go into the machine's menu. The same concept is being applied to traps and turrets with Object Visualizers. These will show health, ammo, power status, and any other useful information about an item without having to go into the menu.
Scrap Melee Trap
A new melee trap has been added which does high damage to hover bots and will initially be one of the first traps the player will be able to build.
Building Damage
Health on buildings, traps, and turrets is finally enabled. All of them can be repaired manually by the player with a button while looking at the object, or by Ally-Bots later on in the game (which roams around Homebase and repairs damaged stuff). The repairs cost different amounts of materials based on the 'Stage' the object comes from.
For example, Scrap Stage objects will require Scrap Metal while Iron Stage objects require Iron Plates. They will also require some repair-specific items in many cases, such as Machine Parts and Electrical Parts, which are new to the game.
We are also working with a new system that handles streaming the objects and terrain, allowing for more detailed environment areas and giving the room to add new terrain sections when needed.
Tech Tree
Ultimately I want the tech tree to be like it is, a custom chart displayed in an easy-to-read layout. With so many items being added to the game it is starting to become a bottleneck adding each new item one by one. For this reason, I decided to implement a new system that automatically sorts all the technologies by Available to unlock, unlocked, and locked.
When a technology selection is clicked then it will show a chart with the prerequisites and what is unlocked as a result of unlocking that tech.
This will remove an entire step of skill tree grooming each time a new item is added, meaning a quicker turnaround with adding content. I am open to the idea of keeping it this way if it doesn't hurt the experience at all but do feel that it will be better as a traditional skill tree later on.
Proof of Concept
Main Menu
The different UI elements used throughout the game needed to be cleaned up a bit. I've redone some of the menu elements and changed the look of the main menu:
Save System
The save system was (mostly) functional but very clunky, and the way that each save was "static" in a sense made it prone to overwriting with new builds. I've rewrote how the save system works so you name your own saves. No longer are there only 3 save spots.
Power System
I restructured a lot of how the power system works to fix a few of the lingering issues with battery-powered items and items that spawn when loading a saved game. The UI Tab now shows where the device is drawing power from and the remaining battery charge.
Bug Fixes
I've also sorted out a large number of bugs that were found during the playtest, so a huge thank you to anyone that was involved with that. I wouldn't be able to successfully make a quality game without help playtesting, considering the number of people working on the game. I am looking for a part-time QA lead, so if you know anyone with experience that might be interested, please let me know.
The Problem With The Playtest
A few weeks back was the Hostile Mars Prologue playtest. A lot of people played the game over the few weeks it was publicly available. Over 2500 people participated and the feedback is always extremely valuable and encouraging to the future development of the game.
After closing the playtest, I really dove into the prologue playtest and tried to figure out why it didn't feel "right". I was disappointed with how it turned out and I feel that a number of things could have been done better.
Ultimately, I believe that creating a build with an attempt to focus on a particular system of the game doesn't always work.
I wanted to see how wave progression performed and focus on that specific aspect, so I gave a bunch of items to the player and made building elements much quicker than normal. This undermined a lot of what makes Hostile Mars what it is and stole the rewarding nature of unlocking and building items from scratch.
It was also lacking an interesting hook to drive the player to advance and make interesting decisions. There were really no decisions. It was only to defeat the enemies and lay down the items provided.
The enemies still have not been fully fledged out yet either, giving all enemies a simple point-and-shoot interaction. Again, the player has no decisions to make. Each weapon just does damage and the only decision is which gun to use, but really, there are no consequences or choices within even choosing which weapon to choose.
This is definitely not intentional. In fact, the entire premise of the enemy and weapon system is to introduce different problems for the player to solve in interesting ways. Different enemy types will behave differently when in groups or when solo, they will have different behaviors based on the enemy types that are nearby, and they will have strengths and weaknesses between different trap and turret types.
As for the main driving force of the story progression, that has not been introduced in the playtest either, so really it is a sandbox of how damage-based traps and turrets deal damage against damage-prone enemies. And it turned out really stale as a result.
I've decided to go in and implement some of these things that need to be integrated into the game. A lot of it is "done" to where I have the concepts and implementation working in a test scene, but not integrated into the game system as a whole.
To do this in the most effective way, I've been working on environments that allow for quick iteration and testing of newly implemented systems and features. I spent about a week refactoring some of the codebase that provided a lot of resistance when testing and created a sandbox scene decoupled from a lot of the other systems, which took a bit of work.
There are tons of systems integrated together and dependent on one another in the game, and I caught up on a lot of technical debt from implementing some of the game like this.
I've also reworked how items get initialized in the game. There have been quite a few issues regarding power and colliders among other things, and the new system makes it much easier to identify objects that are incorrectly initialized, which should lead to much more stable items in-game.
Today it is looking a lot better. Most of the systems can be enabled or disabled without affecting the other systems in the game, which allows for much better development cycles, along with making it easier to pinpoint bugs as they appear during integration.
Finally, a few first-look pics at things being worked on:
If you want to keep up with development, join us on the Discord:
https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care,
-Jake