Weekly Bulletin 31/08/2015 news

Nod Campaign. GDI Campaign. Snow Theatre. Veinhole Monster.
These are some of the big things which we've always given as excuses for delaying release. They're also all things we've been working on this month. The reason for the lack of frequent updates, beyond laziness, has been the gargantuan size of these projects.

The Nod campaign was shown off last time, and not much has changed. I've shuffled missions around to flow slightly better, and I've added small details to some of the maps. I've even finished off one or two more since last time. In the most recent build, a bunch of valuable assets have been added officially - like the Landing Craft below:

The GDI campaign has developed in leaps and bounds. We started with a bunch of old missions and broken sequences and vague ideas about progression, but we've taken into account some public opinion and we've hammered things into a shape which even vaguely looks like a campaign.

As turmoil in North Africa comes to a head, you must weather the changing times and maintain order on a continent slipping into chaos. The Mutants, spurred on by some unseen upheaval, push westwards into GDI controlled Algeria. Scavengers along the coast have begun activating CABAL Relays and an army of cyborgs is marching towards the port of Algiers. GDI has no idea what is ahead of them when the mutants arrive.

And the mutants roll over their ill equipped border posts.

We chose this opening because it allows a similar trajectory to that of the Nod story, beginning from nothing in an uncaring world, but rising to be one of the most important people on the planet. This means that when the campaign begins you cannot expect droppods to rain from the sky to bail your crappy little base out. GDI doesn't give a shit that they've lost some tiny outpost in the wastelands of Algeria. GDI hardly even cares about Europe, Asia, or the Americas, let alone Africa. Why waste the energy dropping anything back to Earth when it took so much effort to get it into space in the first place?

The actions you take as this local GDI commander will impact your credibility in the eyes of GDI High Command, the Rank-and-File of GDI, and the Forgotten (Cabal is berserk and Nod hates you by default). But everything comes at a price. GDI is slowly trying to distance itself from the Forgotten, so helping the mutants will earn some disdain from GDI. But killing mutants isn't what the average GDI soldier signed up for, so doing so will earn some distrust and disrespect from your troops and subordinates. And the Forgotten... who knows what they want.

We've also been doing stuff with the mutated environments of the temperate theatre. These developments came about as I worked on the snow theatre and realised that the current flora will not look very good in the less vivid palette of the snow. So both I and SCIPCIÓN (of Global Crisis) have been producing some additional flora and fauna. Some of them will work for snow, but we're still feeling our way towards what snow-borne Tiberium flora should actually look like.

Another Tiberium development are the Tiberium Columnae. These huge monoliths are extremely rare, although GDI has managed to artificially shape Tiberium Mortifera using resonance technology to control its growth. The science is, I'm sure, fascinating. In any case, these things are extremely volatile and prone to spontaneously shatter, coating their surroundings in deadly strains of Tiberium.

Last of all, the snow theatre got a lot of love, with replacement ice, ice shores, and ice/water cliffs. This brings almost everything into line in the snow theatre. Next is the not inconsequential task of converting the urban assets from the temperate to the snow theatre, but even that is starting to look like a less Sisyphean task.

Thanks for bearing with us, hopefully we'll have another bulletin next week!