Articles - The AMC Squad

AMC Squad April 2025 update

First of all, we have a new team member - Wheaton Adams, who will be joining both the real world AMC development team, and the in-game AMC Squad as a playable character! His excellent work has already helped productivity immensely.

There are 2 new user maps to check out! Venus Hi-jinks by Jolteon, and Cairo Dig site Part1 by Wheaton Adams. The former map stars Geoffrey and is set on Venus; the latter takes place on Earth and is playable with any character. They're both excellent maps and will make their way into the main game proper when episode 5 is released as well. You can find them in the usermaps section on our Discord channel

Development Work

As per usual we're putting lots of effort to make sure this next release is the most polished and user friendly yet. The loadout terminal continues to have work put into it:

Alongside the bestiary function mentioned before, the precog screen on the command interface will now tell you exactly what enemies you'll face - with the caveat that only enemies you've already encountered will be revealed. Unknown enemies have a missing icon - however, it will at least reveal what armour type they have. You'll be able to prepare and make sure you have a optimal loadout even if you don't know what the enemy will be yet.

Community and Release

As always, please join our Discord if you wish to join the discussion - we have a friendly and open community and there's always someone around to help newcomers. We're aiming to try and get internal testing begun by the end of the year, but as always we're all adults and life will inevitably get in the way of work. If you're interested in trying to help, by all means join the discord and ask. Have a good summer and stay safe.

Here's some good news for the Linux players out there! A user on our Discord by the name of ektoutie has taken the time and effort to create a Flatpak application of The AMC Squad. Essentially, this now allows you to play AMC Squad on Linux systems via an easy installation process, rather than having to compile it yourself.

To add to this, another one of our users Wheaton Adams has created a Steam input configuration, for use on the Steam Deck. This means that you can now play AMC Squad on the go, which is apparently something some people like to do.

Bear in mind, this work has only recently been done so it's entirely possible that issues will crop up. As usual, we invite you to discuss them on the Discord server.

Grab it all here:
Flathub.org (Flatpak)

Moddb.com (Steam input configuration)

AMC Squad January 2024 update

Time for another minor AMC Squad update! Work of course continues on episode 5, but significant work is still underway on updating and improving the overall experience.

Enemy projectiles

In good news for hitscan haters, all enemies now fire projectiles rather than hitscan bullets (with a few minor exceptions) What does this mean exactly? Enemy bullets originally would fire and instantly strike their target; whilst there was inaccuracy built in, it also meant that being able to tell where you were being attacked from was extremely hard even with the built in damage direction indicator. This no longer happens; you'll be able to tell exactly where enemy fire is coming from even if you can't avoid it. This also avoids the problem shared with Blood where enemy hitscanners can instantly kill you as soon as you step into a room if you happened to be low on health.

Airdrops and Airstrikes

The previously underused mechanic of building airfields has been completely overhauled; you can now dynamically order both airdrops and now airstrikes in any mission within range of an airfield, and as long as you have 30 supplies available. You'll need a steady upkeep of supplies to use these abilities frequently - fortunately, you can also now find supply barrels in missions that can be used outside to send them for fulton pickup.

Allies

Additional work has been put into allies; not only has the HUD been updated so it's easier on the eyes, but there is now support for far more helpers. Certain research abilities will increase how many allies you can have; if you stack this with artifacts and Highwire, who has a natural ability to command 1 extra ally above the default 3, you can potentially command a posse of up to 8 allies.

Research projects

Many enemies without research projects have now received projects - even if you're a returning player, the Bestiary will be more useful as ever since it will now let you know what enemies you need to MIA to acquire a project's details.

As always, please join our Discord if you wish to join the discussion - we have a friendly and open community and there's always someone around to help newcomers. Release is of course still some time away; and we appreciate everyone's patience as we put in hard work on the project. Stay safe and have a good new year.

AMC Squad Autumn update

Welcome to another belated AMC Squad update - hopefully 2023 has been going well for you. There's been some fantastic games released this year (my personnel favourite is Turbo Overkill) however work on AMC is going stronger than ever. As per-usual, clean up and improvement work is being done alongside episode 5 development - one of the main things we've been focussing on is quality of life improvements, to help onboard new players as well as break down some of the more complicated features.

Command interface updates

When you unlock missions, there will now be a flashing icon showing you exactly what screen unseen missions are on; no more frantically searching for any missions you might of missed out on. Alongside this are updated higher visibility icons, and now a more detailed breakdown on how much budget you earned on your last mission. Additionally, the precognition brain screen will now show you weapons/equipment/personnel you might be able to find on missions.

New Research Interface

Our coder Sang has developed a brand new, significantly more user friendly research interface. Not only does it come with a filter so you can easily find what you're looking for, it comes with a dependency viewer too.

Bestiary

Alongside the new research interface comes a detailed Bestiary, listing nearly every single enemy in the game that you'll fight. MIA'ing an enemy will even provide some more information.

Supplies

Supplies now have a permanent, long-term use - using weapon terminals dotted around the game in set locations, you can use your supplies to re-arm yourself with ammunition, equipment, and speciality ammunition. Doing this is relatively costly however, so you'll want to ensure you have a decent amount of supply facilities up and running. Any ammunition type you research will also become available here. You can now also grab a snack at the AMC cafeteria in base for a small supply cost, which will grant you a small but helpful bonus for your next mission.

Quality of Life improvements

Our lead artist sebabdukeboss20 has overhauled nearly every single weapon in the game once again with improved lighting quality; he's also been hard at work with new FMVs - there are now several intro FMVs that play as you progress through AMC. On the initial start up, you'll only see our logo at first, since sitting through two entire introduction cutscenes is a bit much for a first time player. However as you progress, a full length intro cutscene will unlock (and also be available for viewing at anytime in-game)

The usual work has also gone into cleaning up and improving the existing 4 episodes, filling in any cracks and improving any rough spots. As usual, once episode 5 is done you'll be able to import your saved data with no issues - however if you do have time for a full epic replay, it'll be worth doing so. And as per usual, our musician HiveBoSs has been hard at work making excellent new music both for existing episodes as well as future ones.

Want to help?

We're always in need of mappers to help make the scope of the project possible. The same goes for voice actors, we're mainly looking for more female VAs to help out as well as older males to voice some of our more gruff characters. Post on our discord for more info!

As always, we won't offer a release date until episode 5 is in beta testing - late 2025 is looking likely but as always, this isn't final. It could be later, it could be sooner - time will tell, but thanks for your patience and sticking with us. The best is by far yet to come.

AMC Squad Episode 4's reception

First of all, happy new year. We're happy to see that Episode 4 was received very well despite it being a fairly different experience to the previous episodes, especially with the focus on a fantasy setting. Originally the Ringworld was to just be the first half of episode 4, but we decided that it deserved much more space and justice than just being the starting portion of an episode could provide, and ultimately didn't really contribute to any significant delay. We actually managed to push the episode out nearly half a year earlier than the usual 4 year gap, and that was with 2 additional significant updates (the art redux and then the 10th anniversary)

Mikko has published his review of episode 4, which you can see here - if you've made a review of AMC Squad or a YouTube video covering it, by all means share it with us here or on our Discord

8th place in Indiedb of the year!

Needless to say we're incredible grateful to all the votes you've cast for us - we've managed to breach the top hundred before but this is the first time we've made the top ten, beating out some very heavy contenders.

AMC Squad Episode 5

Work on episode 5, Perfect Storm, started not long after the last patch; several of our mappers had already started work on maps for episode 5; release will still be some considerable time away, but we're hoping to beat this episode's record and get the final 2 episodes out much sooner. You can see the first released screenshot as well as the poster for episode 5 by sebabdukeboss20 in our media tab here. As usual we keep pretty quiet with development, so don't feel disheartened if there's big stretches of time without any updates (but as I've plugged before, our discord is active so join there if you want more info or ask us some questions) We've also finally updated the tiny hard to read conversation font for this episode, no more straining your eyes!

Want to help?

We're always in need of mappers to help make the scope of the project possible. The same goes for voice actors, we're mainly looking for more female VAs to help out as well as older males to voice some of our more gruff characters. Post on our discord for more info!