As we approach the release of a public demo for MENACE, the pace has picked up, and the team has shifted from implementing new features to bug fixing, polishing, and balancing.
Preparing the Demo – Tactical Focus and Replayability
As we announced earlier, there will be a public MENACE demo in late September. We are currently working intensely on preparing and testing the demo to ensure it offers a substantial amount of playtime and has as few bugs and issues as possible.
The demo will focus on the tactical combat aspect of the game and will feature a full-scale operation comprising a series of procedurally generated missions. The missions themselves will be different every time you start the demo -- just like the item rewards, enemy army compositions, maps, and so on. Replaying the demo is highly encouraged, as you will find and encounter new things with every run!
The demo is set in an advanced game state, where players have already completed 8-10 operations. Players will have a wide variety of squads and equipment to choose from, and the tactical battles will be of a decent size.
Pirate Idle Variations – Distinct Faction Identity
Up until now, all human entities in the game drew from the same set of animations. This was necessary as we need to make the most of the limited resources available. With the zoomed-out view of the game, individual soldier animations are not a top priority for optimization.
However, we always loved how, in other games, different factions feature different animation sets, especially their idle animations. This helps to quickly identify units of different factions and also really helps build the world, as the animations are a visual tool to tell players about the factions.
A pirate will have a completely different body language than a combat-trained Marine. The pirates are wild, undisciplined, drugged up, and not well-trained. This should reflect in their animations. They have to be immediately recognizable, even at a distance, by breaking up the classic “combat-ready” marine silhouette we have been using so far.
This is why we started adding unique idle animations to this faction.
We hope to keep expanding on this system to include more factions and more animations as development continues:
Alien Wildlife - New Enemy Units
For the alien wildlife faction, we started creating a flying creature that gives the faction a lot more mobility and speed to disrupt the players' plans. Up until now, the aliens have been restricted to moving on the ground, which makes it easy to predict their next move and assess their threat range.
The new flying creatures will move over long distances, ignoring obstacles in their path, and are a lot less predictable.
Testing and Balancing - Polishing Before Early Access
We have now reached the point at which we have shifted our development focus to playtesting and balancing to improve progression, game flow, difficulty, and so on.
The whole game in its Early Access state is now playable, but it still lacks a lot of polish, minor fixes, and improvements. This includes such trivial things as missing item icons -- and yes, the EA build will have some placeholder icons in it. But it also extends to finding out why certain lights do not work properly under some lighting conditions or why an enemy unit refuses to use a certain skill effectively, which can take a lot of time.
In order to minimize the impact of new content messing up balancing, breaking up systems, or introducing new bugs, we almost stopped adding new things to the game and instead focused on improving everything that is in the game.
After launching into Early Access, we will go back to regular large content updates, of course.
Squadleader VOs – Bringing Characters to Life
All the Squadleaders and Pilots in the game will come with voiced combat barks. There will also be VO for certain characters and situations outside of combat. Over the past week, we had numerous recording sessions with professional voice actors, alongside SIDE, who have already worked on games such as Cyberpunk, Kingdom Come, and Baldur's Gate 3.
The voice lines really help bring the characters to life and push the immersion to a new level. With the extreme range of different backgrounds that have to come together to fight the MENACE, bringing on a new SL into combat always brings a fresh angle and new barks. Each character has their own lingo, attitude, expression, and speech patterns.
Engage, Explore, and Stay Informed
That's it for now! We'll see you next Friday.
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