Devlog 4: Progress Update

 

It has been a tough few months and I haven't quite had the time that I would have liked to work on Aegis, but now I'm back in the groove of things and making progress.

Since the last updates on the game, things have been busy and I took a break for a bit to focus on other things, but now we are back and chugging along. 

One huge thing that was a total road block for progress was me getting stuck on figuring out what I wanted to do for music and sound effects. While scrapping things together up to now, I had been using placeholder music from the Metal Marines OST as well as public domain sound effects, but I really wanted to make the soundtrack and effects myself so I spent months learning FL Studio and banging my head against it until I could finally make a few tracks I was satisfied with. Music has very much so never been something I have studied or practiced so it was a challenging process to get over the initial road bumps- and there will still be some refinement and updates as I learn more- but I am happy to say the music induced "designer's block" has been cleared for now.

 

Added:

- A huge amount of small touches here and there and optimizations to a variety of parts of the game- too many to count 

- Exfiltration system that handles units leaving the map

        - Wrecks of destroyed mechs which can be salvaged for resources

 

- Objectives that can be captured to grant resources, progress missions, disable enemy buffs, enable friendly buffs, etc.

- Music! A new main menu track, two additional tracks for the tactical battles

- Sound effects for attacks, movement, UI interaction

- Mech assembly allowing loading mechs with different equipment between missions (still needs an art pass to dress it up, otherwise fully functioning aside from a few things that need to get implemented like default palettes, etc.)

- Some initial visual flair to the tactical screen, work in progress

- Intelligence and Objectives tabs to view mission objectives and enemy intel

- Actual victory conditions to end the tactical battle

- Color palettes for unit sprites

- Saving and loading! This was one of the more daunting challenges to undertake and there's still much more to come, but after some time studying and trying things out this turned out to be smoother and took less time to implement than I had thought. 

 

Fixed:

-A ton of small problems that took way too long to figure out and had me going "Who could have done this? Oh wait, me"

-Removed (at least for now) some oddness with how fog of war generation worked and revealed units. Originally the intent was for units to have a much wider sensor view that gives them basic terrain layout and a smaller view within that gives them direct vision and reveals enemy details, but I had been tinkering with "sensor ghosts" in the non-direct vision radius to reveal the presence of an enemy but no further details. I need to rework some things with the vision system and play test it for a bit before deciding to drop this or re-implement it better. 

Future 

Some work still needs to be done on refining the AI's behaviors as, even with how much has gone into it, there are more features that need to be added and some odd edge cases that need handling. All in all though, I'm quite happy with how they function now on a basic level, being able to hunt, correctly assign appropriate weapons to targets, and all while keeping survivability in mind. 

Before moving on to the strategic game:

• Make another pass at tile textures and diversify out of the soggy green mess that makes up pretty much all of the in use textures 
• I'm going to dummy up a few demo missions to test out and get some feedback on game feel, and that should probably be done in the next week or so. 
• Also, I'll be jamming out the necessary world building to start designing the different factions and their tech and mechs. 
• Finally, there will be a necessary art refresh, particularly for the tactical screen as I want to get it more in line with what I drew out for the title screen.