Today we'll be talking a bit about the new Mech parts coming out with the vehicle package!
As mentioned in previous dev blogs, you'll be able to assemble mechs by parts:
1. Heavy, medium and light Legs and Body
2. Backpack
3. Mech flamethrower
4. Mech laser
5. Mech plasma cannon
6. Mech minigun
7. Mech shotgun
You can combine the above pieces in any way you want and build as many mechs as you want! You can see in the above picture the Heavy, Medium and Light versions of the mechs plus an assortment of weapons attached. You can even combine Heavy legs with a Light body if you'd like to mix it up even more. And what's cooler (and useless) is that you can even climb into the Mech and actually use it without any arms! Anyway, every version will have its own advantages and disadvantages.
The Heavy mech is slow but heavily armored, intended to be used during base defense. You can strap up a flamethrower and a shotgun to deal with ground units and build another with a plasma cannon and minigun to deal with attacking spaceships. Its strength is supposed to be equivalent to that of an Ironhammer class ship without the shields and with only 2 weapons.
The Light version is fast but has much less armor. Its intent is to be used as an extension of your own body when you decide to go exploring and gathering resources, with the addition of some really powerful weapons attached.
The Medium version is basically a mix of the Heavy and Light versions. Every mech will be immune to fire, so you can safely spread that flame wherever you want!
To build a mech piece, you'll have to first do some exploration. Every piece will require 3 pieces of 'Ancient Blueprints' much like in Subnautica. You'll be able to find these ancient blueprints inside ancient ruins, scattered across the map. Once all the blueprints of a certain piece have been found, you'll then be able to craft it at the Ancient Assembler. As a side note, with the introduction of ancient ruins, the ancient assembler pieces will now be spawned inside these ruins as well.
In addition to having small, ancient ruins sites, there will also be a CHANCE of spawning a Mega Ancient Ruined City per map... This is to encourage replayability and to reinforce that feeling of discovering something truly rare as you won't be seeing this city every map you play. Each site will have a chance of spawning some extra goodies, such as gold bars or microcontrollers or even something undesired... The bigger the site is, the higher the chance at spawning some extra 'goodies' (Quotations marks because these goodies might not be so good for you after all).
This patch takes a bit longer to implement because there's a lot of extra stuff coming in with the vehicles. It's not just about the vehicles themselves, but it's also about this whole new system of blueprints, new points of interest such as the ancient ruins and new weapon systems such as the flamethrower among many other things.
So what has been accomplished so far? Well, the rover is over (Rhyming skills right there)! Most Mech mechanics have been implemented as well. For the Mech, we still need to implement stats as now all 3 versions are basically the same. All weapons systems have been implemented, including the laser. But the fire mechanic needs quite a bit of adjustment as it was never meant to be used from a flamethrower. In addition to working on the fire itself, we also need to adjust the way fire spreads. We also need to rethink a bit the way we change the texture on the terrain to burnt grass. We'll try and use decals instead, which should also make it more efficient but it's not as easy as it sounds due to the way Unity works with their terrain system. However, once we do successfully implement decals for the terrain, we will be able to add puddles of water and other cool stuff to it. This new Alpha will also bring a way to extinguish fires so there's that to work on too.
Then there are these ruins that have been integrated into the game, but they lack the 'goodies' part mentioned earlier in the blog. So we reckon it will be another 2-3 weeks of development before Alpha 4 can actually go live! We'll end this blog with these ominous looking structures in the distance...
