Knights, Mercs, Were waving goodbye to May and welcoming June and so it is time for another monthly progress report. Weve been in a ton of areas, including improvements in animation integration, level building and automation tooling to help our team develop content for the game faster.

May Progress

During May we made substantial progress testing our over-map story and dialog system which is used to inject story events and mission chatter directly into the game map. This required some new loading and asset management code, to ensure that both characters on the map and characters off the map (like your teams Face and Contacts) were still able to appear correctly. Another feature that saw significant improvement during May is the snap to cover movement mechanic. While Cyber Knights: Flashpoint is tileless, weve found in testing that a snap-to-cover mechanic is a necessary one to ensure players expectations are met in regards to taking cover and controlling sight lines. When combined with raycast based line of sight detection and feedback about targets, snap-to-cover gives us a best of both worlds hybrid with the benefits of tiles where players would use them, and with the freedom of tileless where players would want it. Our animation team is completing an overhaul of the weapons targeting suite during May to allow characters to raise or lower their weapons up to 45 degrees when selecting high or low targets. Using reference frames and additive animation techniques, the engine can dynamically slide across the scale between straight out aiming to high or low or anywhere in between.
As our first set of playable levels comes together, were working hard to make sure theyre as beautiful as they are playable. Weve just completed our first four ambient-only lighting setups which will act as the baseline lighting for different levels and thematic feelings established. Unity provides a rich set of tools for both lighting and color grading and were experimenting with different tools to apply LUT and color correction in both cut-scenes and gameplay.
Let's call them, Sea green, Day Blue, Dark Night and Radioactive Haze May also included some heavy lifting on our shader implementation which is a critical pre-alpha task. Finalized physically based rendering (PBR) shaders that are both performant and beautiful and still support our feature requirements are necessary for all the Cyber Knights: Flashpoint platforms to live together. Were experimenting with replacing our custom, hand-built shaders with more flexible ones created in Amplify Shader Editor which might give us more flexibility as we approach the wide variety of platforms and hardware in our target set.
the Amplify Shader Editor Our team has grown substantially for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, but the core machinery of the studio is still the two of us, Andrew and Cory. We dont really plan to change that for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint, and so we continue to put a major focus on automation wherever possible. In May, one area that got some serious attention was the Level Builders light probe placement and alignment system. The levels and environments youve previously seen us demonstrate and show off to Executive Producers and Twitch streams have all used manually placed probes, which weve found takes a lot of time to create and maintain. Recognizing that we will need MANY levels for Cyber Knights: Flashpoint to live up to our ambition, weve created a new light probe automation layer that will save many hours and deliver a level of fidelity in probe placement that would be challenging to achieve consistently by hand.
Each dot in the screenshot is a light probe -- I think we want to automate this one :D If you arent watching Twitch but are still looking to keep a finger close to the pulse, join us on our official Discord server or follow @CyberKnightsRPG on Twitter.

Executive Producers #6

In early May, we met for the 6th Executive Producer summit to take a behind-the-scenes look at Cyber Knights level builder and our process for building levels which weve honed throughout our entire gamedev career, as far back as Cyber Knights classic, Heroes of Steel and Templar Battleforce. Weve included a 5 minute excerpt from this Executive Producers session which ran over an hour in length. In the clip, we discuss how the heist Missions are assembled from smaller content chunks called Levels and the wide variety of Level types we are designing and building out for the game. If youre eager to learn more about how were building the game, this one's for you! Enjoy. [previewyoutube=ev0tqMkJQsM;full][/previewyoutube]

Reward and Stretch Goal Progress

As always, we include the infographic of our progress to ensure it is clear where all of our commitments on stretch goals and rewards stand. With this update, there are no changes to the progress bar as we are getting down to only a few final milestones before the next big thing -- alpha late this year. [previewyoutube=n8nJyMfQdZQ;full][/previewyoutube] Also, we are hammering away still at delivering 3D faces. We have cleared a few technical hurdles related to beards specifically which had stopped delivery for a bit and so things are moving again. If you havent received your email yet, blame your beard? Lol, honestly -- we thank you for your patience. Weve been putting extra effort into getting them perfect, so each one now takes about an hour of work to set up, record and deliver to the backer.