Happy Friday everyone! This week we have a full dev diary available to show off the features we've been working on for the BIG Update.
All of this is covered in the video but we're happy to announce that we have have many exciting things to show for our time. Firstly we’ve been able to work on a bunch of bug fixes, small features, and quality of life improvements.
Updates to the mech icons in the menu that should also improve performance.
Fixes to the rubble so it no longer despawns and can now show different kinds of rubble for different building types.
Adding logic so that the monster’s forearms now do damage to buildings when swinging your fist through them!
We fixed the hunter missiles so they actually hit their targets now.
And we made the red vignette flash when you take damage so you can now tell when you’re being hit from behind.
Oh! And we made the helicopter blades act like chainsaws now!
But those pale in comparison to the other features we have been working on for this update. Firstly, as promised, we have been working on the new map!
We have also been working on the architecture for the missions system. We’re taking a bit longer to build it out because we are designing it to be moddable!
When we started working on Monster: Titan’s Playground we had to make a lot of compromises to ensure we could get to early access in a timely manner. One of those compromises was not architecting the game to be modding friendly. Because of that, we may never be able to add full modding support. However the mission system at least is an entirely new system, and we are architecting it to be as robust and modular as possible.
Each mission is defined by an xml file that tells the game where it should appear on the missions window, as well as what the starting objectives are.
Each objective is its own xml file that can define what text to display when it’s started as well as what objectives should start after they are completed. And multiple objectives can be run at the same time.
Objectives can also talk to each other. For example one objective can be to tell the game to spawn a bunch of enemies, and another objective can reference that objective to check if you’ve destroyed all the enemies it spawned. And all of this can be easily modified by simply editing an xml file in a text editor of your choice.
What’s more is that missions are all part of mission trees. And each tree will define what tree comes before it and what tree comes next. There is another xml file that tells the game what the first mission tree is. Which means a modder can edit that file to replace the starting tree, and thus replace our entire campaign with a campaign of their own making.
So that’s what we’ve been working on for the past few months! We still have a lot of work to go before we release the BIG Update, but we’re really excited to see what all of you do with the missions system once it’s out. Not to mention being excited to use it to build the first two chapters of the official campaign ourselves!
Until then, we look forward to seeing you in the next dev diary!