Weekly Bulletin 14/11/2014 news

Welcome back folks, another week has passed and we're still working hard on finishing a few very important parts of the project.

The interior theatre continues to be worked on. It's reaching a state of actual usefulness, with a full set of tiles. It's still not quite there, but the development going on around it is still going strong and starting to look pretty good.

On to unit graphic news.

With Nod losing the Cyborg and the Cyborg Commando for story reasons, the Brotherhood required new units to fill the rolls of early and late game heavy infantry. Early game, Nod has been given the Hellspit. These flamethrower infantry can easily reduce any other soldier to a charred mess with the greatest of ease. Fire, it turns out, is the great equaliser. The downsides to this weapon are obviously its range, which is quite short, and its ineffectiveness against vehicles.

This week, I modeled and rigged the infantry, and rendered most of its frames. Here's a sneak peek at what he'll look like:

He's based on the unused Weedguy sprite but with a little bit more detail and texture. He's far from done, but in my opinion he's already looking great.

Late game, Nod needs something which can contend with most vehicles and infantry. This unit is the Elite Cadre. Armed with a highly advanced, highly secret, and highly dangerous lightning gun, the Elite Cadre is suited to both offensive and defensive rolls. He deals with infantry a little better than vehicles, but in either case his lightning gun shouldn't be trifled with. The energy it shoots can arc from unit to unit, doing incredible damage.

He's been modeled and rigged for a while, and I've had a lot of his frames all ready to use ingame too. This week I finished one of the larger tasks, painting the firing effects onto the shp by hand, since my attempts at doing it all in 3D failed miserably. Anyway, here's a teaser of him too:

From a lore perspective, the Elite Cadre is a bionically augmented soldier armed with a gauss weapon developed by a sect of Nod which is shrouded in secrecy. These energy weapons are rare within the ranks of Nod, the only other unit know to carry one is the massive Scarab tank.

That's not all we've done this week. We've also been mapping. I'm still working on DM: Night of the Mutants II (6), and Morpher is working on a rough and mountainous map called DM: Landslide (2).

Here's a quick shot of one of the other Forgotten roadblocks leading into the region where Night of the Mutants is set:

Before I sign off, I have a quick question for you all. I'm playing with the idea of livestreaming a few hours of me doing development-y things: probably a bunch of mapping and ingame testing, and doing a bit of live Q and A. Would anyone be interested in tuning in for something like that?

Anyway, that's what we did this week!