Been a while. Life has been busy and this is unfortunately not able to be my top priority right now. Thankfully, I got some technical help with the project now, and so we've managed to get the ball rolling again. To start, we got a few small additions to the sandbox: a new flyer enemy, the "Cephalopulture," as well as two weapons, the trench gun and flechette rifle.

The Cephalopulture

Trench Gun and Flechette Rifle

What's Next

We've fixed up the save/load functionality and added a little more flair to combat. Nothing vital, but helps us get more of the foundation in place for further development. It required a lot of mucking around in the core systems so there's a good chance a few new regression bugs have popped up that we couldn't find in our testing, so feel free to report those as you find them.

[previewyoutube=Bk69QOB7iwY;full][/previewyoutube] tl;dw

• Guns now have laser sights to indicate where you're aiming with each having varying lengths and colors.
• Reloading weapons now have a visual progress bar instead of just an audio cue.
• The pistol now has a HUD indicator that it is the one gun with infinite clips.
• Purchased weapons now auto-equip to the first empty slot if there is one.
• There will now be a visual indicator in the main office menu if your base is below 90% health, just in case you wanna repair it.

Game testing is always fun for me seeing how people process all of the little details of the game. In a 2D platformer I worked on in college, it was eye opening to discover how many people had difficulty jumping over a box at the start because of how I implemented jumping (no air-control; WASD controls). Now here with Defense of Nations I've discovered a fairly major oversight that should have been pretty obvious when I made it: People having been missing half the game thanks to my wording of the "Exploration" button

So that's been improved, along with some changes to bring the menu border colors in-line with the rest of the UI and the mouse navigation of the Exploration Menu should be less finicky as the "zones" for determining which element the mouse is on have been cleaned up. As much as I like non-square UI elements, they sure are a pain to make work right with your average UI system.

You ever had a moment where your car was giving you problems, so you took a look when you got home only to wonder how you even made it home in the first place? That was me investigating reports of issues with loading saves. Turns out a piece of behavior in the engine that was reliable in editor was in fact not reliable behavior (not that it was promised to be, but I will put forth that it was somewhat implied to be) and frankly I'm now surprised myself and other players have any success loading a save. Thankfully, this is a 15 minute Demo and not a 90 hour RPG so to avoid making promises I can't keep during your playthrough, I'm just gonna... turn saves off for now.

• Fixed some issues with loading or starting new games after quitting to main menu.
• Fixed an issue with loading into a negotiation.
• Fixed a game stopper where all available missions on Month 5 could be used up. A generic mission will now be replayable if that ends up being the case.
• Your first equipped weapon will now always be selected upon starting a mission instead of whatever you used last, and you can no longer select empty slots on PC (whoops, meant to get that earlier)
• Known issue: Having one equipped weapon in the second or third slot willfor whatever reasonbreak the loadout menu a bit. You can workaround this by requpping something to the first slot then closing and reopening the menu.

[previewyoutube=EX5pqTMwhQQ;full][/previewyoutube] Well, this has been a long time coming for me (not that more than a handful of people would even be aware ) but I'm now proud to say the Preview Demo for Defense of Nations is now LIVE! If you're new here, glad you stopped by. I'll assume if you're here you already saw the store page and just say that this has been quite an experience for me to put together and push out into the worldeven just this far. Not sure what the future holds for this project (thus not going Early Access right out the gate) but I'm optimisitic I'll turn it into something neat eventually. In the meantime, give it a try and feel free to tear it apart (or I guess you could say something nice if you do have fun).