We're all looking forward to spring and being able to open up the windows-- the number of computers we have in one room has hit the double digits, so a little ventilation goes a long way. Anyway, to business! Something we've been working on over the last few weeks is a way to better visualize pathable area. Given the fully destructible nature of the game, it's possible for the player to create corridors through the environment. Up to now however, it hasn't always been clear what areas are walkable or not, or in the case of anti-gravs what areas can be flown over. The varying heights of rubble exacerbates this problem. Our solution to this problem will look something like this:
Like the directional indicator and most other visualizers will be toggle-able of course. It's not a perfect solution but I'm not sure there is one for this kind of problem which is inherent to isometric games. As we get closer to the end of development there's a lot of these little quality of life things that we're working to address in order to make gameplay as smooth as possible. Another small but significant change in the pipe is a revision to how smoke and EMP work against enemy units. Currently there's a known tactic (*cough* you know who you are -___-) to deploy smoke and simply stand within it while engaging enemy targets. Since the original implementation of smoke blocks line of site entirely this functionally made the player invisible. Our solution to this problem boils down to allowing the AI to approximate the player's location when they are receiving fire from or can hear the player. So far this seems to work well enough, though we'll continue to tweak it once we start getting player feedback. On the EMP side it's a small but simple change: boss/captain units will be affected for a shorter duration than other units, possibly as low as 1/2 the duration. Those numbers will be tuned over time. ----- Probably the most important part of this post is that we're putting updates on hold until the end of March. The main reason being there's a lot of different logs in the fire right now, and it's much easier for us to temporarily halt the update rotation in order to focus solely on finishing new features. If all goes well, by the time the end of March update rolls around we'll have all 3 factions available to fight, several more playable vehicles and weapons, a first draft on the new soundscape, some new missions, and possibly even a first pass on the unlocks system if we're lucky. In the mean time we'll of course still be active on the threads if you have any questions. Thanks for bearing with us, and we hope you're as excited for what's ahead as we are. Cheers!