Hello everyone, welcome to our second Dev Diary! May has been a super busy month for us. We’ve finally completed all the functional components of our first vertical slice and moved on to planning our next development steps. Let’s see what’s new!
Completing a vertical slice of the game was extremely important to us. It allowed us to develop and test all our main mechanics in a limited, controlled environment. At this time, the slice includes two fully playable operations (OPs 2 and 3 of the campaign), and all core gameplay components, from customization to combat to AI behaviors. Many of them are just the foundations of the systems we envision for the final release, but it was essential for us to confirm the basics work well. This process also allowed us to understand what we truly need to build maps and missions and to standardize our production pipelines to make future development much easier. Now that this slice is complete, we can finally move on to the next stages of development!
The narrative component is a core element of the gameplay experience and it comes before we draw a single concept for any operation. The main overarching narrative is already well established, but we like to move step by step when truly fleshing out the details and story branches the player can take. This month, we completed the script for operations 1 to 6, including all the variations and paths the story can take based on the player’s actions. We designed the plot to have a mix of clear and immediate consequences and long-term effects. Some decisions might deeply affect the next operation, while others may have a large impact on the later stages of the game only. Each operation can also change depending on the choices you made previously or the overall context of the story, like current faction reputations, for example.
Along with our writing efforts, we’ve started to flesh out the visual presentation for some of the characters involved in these operations. Establishing a common visual language while making every character easy to recognize and understand through their appearance is surely a challenge, but we love seeing how everyone comes to life when transitioning from descriptive text to drawings. We’ve also been working on expanding the SOCMOD armory for the early game and designing non-combat SOCMOD uniforms and individuals, like the Supervisors you can see below. None of these concepts are final yet, but we feel we are getting very close to how we want these guys to look.
Now that the narrative elements for the first operations are finalized, we also jumped right into designing two new maps! We like to start with some visual research and concepts, and then quickly transition to a rough blockout of the whole environment in the game engine. This allows us to get a feeling for how the map plays and to validate and adjust our initial ideas before spending too much time on visual detailing. As soon as we’re confident each map functions as we want it to, we’ll proceed to make it look good. Without spoiling too much about these new settings, here are a few WIP screenshots of the blockouts!
Besides the progress we made in the aforementioned areas, we also developed improvements in various parts of the game. The most important ones are:
Planning Tools: Your plans are now saved between matches. When you start an Operation, your last plan will automatically spawn for you. This allows for very easy iterations on your tactics, makes re-trying missions much less tedious, and lets you plan the operation bit by bit, experimenting and gradually upgrading the plan. This feature is meant more for the Standalone Operation game mode than the Campaign, since in the Campaign you won’t be able to re-play completed OPs.
Map-Making Tools: Now that Slice 1 is completed and we know exactly what we need to build our levels, we have been developing some internal tools to help us optimize the process. The most important addition we made this month is a tool that automatically scans a map’s geometry and spawns Cover locations on all appropriate spots, setting that Cover to the appropriate type (High, Low, Left, Right). This allows for fast and precise placement of hundreds of covers and makes map design much faster and smoother. This tool will also make it much easier for modders to make maps, which is something we really keep in mind while building the game.
Documentation: And finally, the boring bit! Jokes aside, now that we have standardized many of our workflows, we decided to write a detailed document on how each process should be carried out, and on how to produce content for the game, from individual assets to full maps and missions. This is very important for us internally but will also be a resource we will share with the community once modding tools are released, to make it as easy as possible for everyone to mod the game.
This is all for this month!
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