Public Demo
Great news, Martian defenders! The long-awaited public demo of Hostile Mars will finally be available on Steam at the end of July! Get ready to dig into the action and face the robotic onslaught!
Development
This month, we've been mining deep into the core systems of the game, polishing and refining them to perfection. While we don't have a lot of shiny new visuals to show off just yet, we've been hard at work on item progression. Although we can't reveal the details right now, expect some game-changing updates next month! Our goal is to make the early game as straightforward as possible without digging into the complexity and creativity that makes the late game so rewarding.
Reworking Our Grid System
After lots of discussion, the decision was made to pivot all placeable objects to objects that align with a grid to provide a more predictable and precise building experience. The world grid is represented by three main coordinates.
(1) The cell coordinate.
(2) The shared side coordinate which is a combination of a cell coordinate plus an indicator for which face (left, down, back) it represents. And
(3) The inner side coordinate which, like the shared side, is a combination of cell coordinate and face (left, down, back, right, up, forward).
These three types of coordinates allow us to define items that take up entire cells, specific sides between cells, or even a specific side inside of a cell. This gives us a lot of control over the placement requirements that must be met for an object placement to be valid and also allows us to get very granular with the rules we build. Can I place a trap on this wall if the floor already has this other trap? Does this wall support having a trap placed on either side or only one of the sides? etc. There are many more exciting aspects of the grid system that we will discuss as development continues.
More Wave Information
We want to give players tools to better understand how their base design performs against waves, and part of that will be through various overlays showing these details in a heatmap style.
The first one will display where enemies were destroyed, so we added support to track events during a wave. We're still designing the UI and exploring how it'll be rendered, but these overlays will be accessible in the Build Mode, which is being improved into a more general base management mode.
Player Enemy Collisions
The character controller we are using wasn't designed to work with Unity's DOTS packages, which includes the physics system used by all enemies and most of the game. This makes properly integrating the player's movement with the enemies challenging. However, we found a temporary solution to simulate the collisions and resulting forces that we can apply to the character.
While this causes some jitter and definitely doesn't feel like proper physics as the controller wasn't meant to be used this way, this is still a massive improvement as the player now pushes enemies differently based on their mass instead of pushing them all like inflatable balloons.
Running against a big enemy or even in a crowd of smaller bots will be more difficult, and in some cases, the bots can overpower you and push your character around.
Art
Defining Environmental Themes
Our art team is hard at work crafting immersive and stunning locations around the Hostile Mars map. Here are a few sketches of these awe-inspiring environments currently being modeled.
Prop Modeling
UI
Enemy Designs
Our enemies are leveling up! Each robot type will have various ranks and visual identities, gaining more shielding, larger silhouettes, and deadlier weapons as they progress. Check out these concept designs for the first rank of the Transport Bot and the Laser Bot. They're shaping up to be formidable foes, so gear up and prepare for battle!
Stay tuned for more updates, and remember: in the war against evil robots on Mars, it's all about digging deep and mining every opportunity for victory!
That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord:
https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care,
-HM Team