Weekly Bulletin 13/12/2014 news

Three things have come to my attention. The first is that I am not good at estimating the length of a week. The second is that Tiberian Odyssey made it to the top 100. Which is absolutely bloody fantastic, and I would like to thank everyone who voted for having faith in our endeavor. This is a massive boost in confidence for everyone who has contributed to the project. I'm very pleased!

The third thing is that while last time I ended by showing off GDI's heaviest mech, the "Atlas", I didn't spend any time explaining the development process. Since I believe that these bulletins are a good place to show off to the public the paths we've taken, I'm going to fix that. You're going to see a lot of blue background this week.

It started almost a year ago, when I finished my second attempt at the Atlas mech. I posted this gif in the TO staff forum because I was pretty happy with it. The response was luke warm at best.

Resolving to take on the staff's criticisms, I began prototyping other possibilities. The main suggestion was to shift away from the standard quadruped into something more X shaped. This swung from a conventional spider mech towards a hexapedal monstrosity before finally settling on the design we ran with. I also overhauled the turret to bring it more into line with the Ares's turret, and differentiate it from the work of other 3D artists.

People involved in the design process were: Team Black, Morpher, Regulus, Blubb, Hassan_2030, Bittah Commander, and Holy_Master. It took me most of a year to get it all working and ready to use in the game. Every element of the design was scrutinised and commented upon and critiqued by these fine folks, and I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out.

GDI has been coming together in leaps and bounds lately, but we haven't forgotten Nod. Among other things, I don't believe we've shown off the deploy animations which I produced. The Tick Tank, Artillery, and Stealth Tank all deploy, and a few weeks before we launched these bulletins I wrapped up the animations on all three. Here they are:

The Tick and Artillery both have turrets. The Stealth Tank deploys into a small stealth generator, and is unarmed. It doesn't need a turret, but it gets a pulsating orb anim instead.

Today I tidied up the Nod Laser Fence, a power draining but cloakable alternative to Nod's standard walls. It's not all entirely done, and will take a bit of photoshopping to get the lasers looking good, but this is how it looks so far:

Hopefully soon we'll have some shots from the campaign to show you all. Now, however, it's time to wrap this bulletin up. Thanks for voting for us, everybody! Feel free to keep voting for us!

Anyway, that's some of the stuff we've done this week!