January 2015 update

Aaand we're back! We're neither dead nor sleeping. Lots of work has already been put into the game this year and here's a quick summary for you loyal fans and honorable guests.

General progress

The first month of the year 2015 is dedicated to finalizing the last important aspects of the core game mechanics. This means making all the characters, enemies and their abilities to look and behave the way they were designed to, so that we can move forward on to making the remaining maps for the first episode. It also means that we're finally implementing the real hacking system to the game.


As you might have noticed in our first gameplay videos, when the player hacks consoles, there is no visual element nor more than a press-and-hold type mechanic required to make it happen. This was ultimately deemed rather mundane, and we decided to implement an an element to the game instead that doesn't cut the flow of the game, but makes you work a bit for your success in a fun but also in a bit more challenging way!

The testing for this prototype yielded positive results, but the required GUI elements for it are still in development, so further details (with screenshots) will be posted in the coming weeks.

-Timo

Character art

Lots of progress has gone on the high resolution cinematic models of the two main protagonists. Since we've developed the storyline further, our main characters have also been refined and the graphical design has to reflect that.

So here's Baxter in his work-in-progress T-pose state (I've just started working on the textures):

Baxter is a mechanical engineer whose main thing is to blow up security consoles and locked doors instead of hacking. We have some other things planned for him as well, but we'll be doing a proper character introduction post when both of our main characters are finalized.

While I enjoy using MODO and Blender, I've been feeling somewhat stuck creatively lately. To mix things up a bit I took a good gander at my 3d modeling tools. I decided to incorporate Maya LT for the character modeling task, just for giggles. I've been meaning to learn Maya and the LT version is a good way to start. It's been surprisingly easy and Maya really clicks for me. I think I'll definitely continue my subscription for now, even though MODO and Blender will continue to play major roles in this project.

But that's it for this post. More updates soon, thanks for reading!

- Sami