Hello everyone, this is Orac's explanation of what we did this week:
It's been a pretty quiet week for things we can really show in a news post. With education and family commitments getting in the way for the past few months, my output ground to a complete halt and is only just beginning to recover.
Morpher geeked out for a bit over the possibilities of Co-op story based missions, and has been playing with logics for that. The large number of assets for the Forgotten, Cabal, Nod Splinter Groups, and the civilian wing of GDI give us a lot of scope for missions. It has been fun trying to come up with interesting scenarios for multiple human players. There's not much to show for it at the moment, and remains a low priority compared to the singleplayer and the regular multiplayer experience, but it has been a fun thought experiment.
I've been trying to put together a King of the Hill or Capture Points type of game-mode, where players have to defend specific structures to win. I made a special structure for this, styled after the other civilian GDI buildings. It's a large parabolic antenna, I'm quite proud of it.
That's really all I have to show for functioning, ingame assets. A few weeks ago, we showed off a work-in-progress launch gantry for use in some missions. Additional work has gone on with that, and it's now nicely animated. I also created a special terrain tile to surround it.
That's all for new graphics. We have a few more maps in the works. The one I can show off is the one I've been working on, a remake of the TS map "Night of the Mutants". With the substantially expanded roster of mutant units, and the tactics around capturable structures, there's a lot more we can do with a map like this.
The original map had mutant units guarding many of the choke points on the map. In this remake, small numbers guard the paths across the map and larger numbers guard the paths between players. I hope this can encourage players to expand and explore the map, and cut down on direct early game rushes. It should make the map more interesting and give it a bit of life too.
The middle of the map is a Forgotten settlement and a ruined city. It's open enough to allow for interesting skirmishes, and because the settlement is recessed onto the water it is possible to avoid it while traversing the map. Just how much of an impact on the flow of the map the mutants should have will need to be fine tuned by testing I expect, but I'm quite happy with these areas visually.
The rest of the map is pretty rough at the moment, so it'll need to be saved for a future update.
And that's what we did this week!
Woo! Another map! And a sexy one at that. Very nice guys. Plus, muuuuuuuutaaaaaaaaaaaaaants.
Looks amazing tbh.
These updates are one of the few things I look forward to every week, Just thought id get it across how nice it is to have regular progress reports, even if it isnt much. Helps build confidence.
***** really starting to come together!
i really like the look of that mutant base.
about co-op ideas, player 1 could have war factory and barracks while player 2 has a medium sized air base and a refinery each (neither has con yard) to gives air strikes.
defending game mode, each player starts with a city with civilians and has to defend that city from being destroyed from the others or its game over.
Giving one player only air units might make their part in the mission very dull. Aircraft are expensive and can't move to shroud, so you'd constantly be relying on the other player to go do stuff.
Defending a city seems pretty interesting!
This is great!