Sorry I wasn’t able to update last week. I haven’t really found the time to post since my last update what with the end of my exams and the week I spent at my parents’ for the holidays. Nonetheless, we are getting work done – lots of work done actually. Chris is nearly finished with the enemy AI, and I’ve been working on the menu screens pretty much the whole time. Hopefully, we’ll be able to have a feature-complete build done within the

I’ll be honest with you guys – we’ve been holding back. There’s a lot of stuff which we’re planning for Aetherpunk which we haven’t really revealled yet. A lot of these things, you can see in the features list on Aetherpunk’s page (which I should really update by the way). The most salient of these features is probably the Skill System, which I’ll explain for you all today:

Aetherpunk’s skill system will be a lot like Master of Fortresses’ Campaign Honours system. Like Campaign Honours, Skills will be earned through skillful (or simply dedicated) play, as part of a clever plan to get players coming back for more instead of just playing through the whole thing once. Doing certain things (like killing enemies) will give you experience, which can be used to buy skills from a five tier tree with fifteen skills in total. You can kind of get an idea of what that skill tree will look like with the image up top (It’s just a mockup, I swear, the final version will be much prettier), where the player can progress from your tier one “Basic Readiness” skill (as in, ‘Oh! You learned which end of the gun the bullets come out of! Good for you!’) to more specialized and powerful proficiencies.

At about tier three, skills effectively branch into two seperate categories. The first is the continuation of your tier one and two skills, learning how to specialize in particular weapons and getting better at their use, unimaginatively dubbed ‘training skills’. On the other hand, there are also ‘gadgeteering skills’, which gives your character useful gadgets like a targeting monocle (stylish!) or a machine which makes bullets inside a gun (no more reloading!). By creating a branching skill tree and allowing the player to choose which skill to buy, we hope to give the player additional choice over his persistent skill buffs which didn’t exist in MoF. We’re keeping the actual number of skills relatively small so we won’t have to balance a bajillion possible game-breakers (like in MoF), but hopefully, the added thought we put into each skill and the element of choice will make the skill tree a marked improvement over MoF’s system.

More stuff next week, as usual.

Actually no, that tagline is a lie, I still hate GUI design as much as I did when I was doing Master of Fortresses, but at least now, the job is a bit easier and I’m somewhat better at it.

Make no mistake, designing the in-game GUI for Aetherpunk (I did that two months ago btw) was FAR easier than doing the in-game interface for MoF. For one thing, Aetherpunk, being a top-down shooter, could function without pretty well without anything more than the bare bones of a health bar, an ammo counter and a way to get to the menu. By virtue of NOT being a strategy game, I wasn’t forced to cram three million widgets and buttons in every nook and cranny possible. Designing the in-game stuff actually only took me a few hours to get right, compared to the (not kidding) MONTHS of work it took to get the MoF interface workable.

Of course, this ended up only transferring the problem to another place…

Early on, we decided that Aetherpunk would be a relatively lore-heavy game, especially in the context of “mindless” top-down flash shooters. Every enemy and every weapon would have its’ own backstory which would justify its’ strengths and weaknesses. In addition, instead of making weapons stats limited merely to rate of fire, damage and the like, I also had the bright idea of introducing weapon spreads, weapon histories, special effects and damage types. Now you may wonder what the problem is with introducing all these additional specs, and well, frankly, it means that in the spirit of fairness (so players know what they’re getting into when they plunk down three thousand Aether for a new gun) we have to display all this new info in an easy-to-find place on the shop screen. Similarly, we have to provide a LOT of space to put up all the needed info on enemies in a Bestiary section…

…You can see where this is going right?

Over the last week, I have literally spent most of my time putting together layouts and mock-ups to make a shop/menu interface that works. Its’ been frustrating at times, especially during finals week, but I’ve made quite a bit of progress. We have a basic layout for the shop screen done and I’ve been spending much of the last 72 hours trying to put together a Main Menu and Skills Screen which don’t look like ass. On the bright side, I can pretty much guarantee you that the lolhueg blizzard of tooltips MoF had will be quite absent in Aetherpunk. We’re doing our homework this time around, and making sure we have enough room to put all the info on the table without having to “quick-fix” a lot of stuff on using tool tips.

No pics this week (sorry…), but hopefully, we’ll have some finished GUI to show you guys next Wednesday.

I can still call this a weekly update right? I’m sorry for not having updated for the last couple weeks. Both Chris and I are currently beholden to the wonderful semi-publicly funded institution that is Canadian post-secondary education, and we both had finals and term papers at roughly the same time, and the act of writing several large papers on academically hair-tearing subjects and preparing for four exams on the same have left us rather bust over the past half-month. So yes, I was too busy to get too much work done over the last while, sue me.*

Right, and now for why you’re all here: the sixth and last enemy on Aetherpunk’s roster. Man, it is good to finally finish up this series and go on to something else for a change. I mean, it was fun while it lasted, but it started to wear thin after about five or six weeks. The only thing which kept me doing this was that little voice in my head that told me to finish what I had started before moving on to something else. Anyhow, I’m both happy and sad that all the enemies are finished, happy because I was running out of original ideas for unique enemy behaviours and appearances as well as increasingly weary of hand-spriting 20-frames a week on top of school, sad because well, it’s over. I might be done, but not only will I not have a chance to exercise those particular creative muscles again for a while, I’ll actually have to get to work on the actual hard part… (more on that next week)

The creature you see above is a sight which you will learn to dread. You will fear its’ approach, its’ lumbering, plodding gait and the slow progress it makes towards the front lines where its’ lighter comrades face the aetheric death of your massed arsenal. You will learn to fear this creature because when it gets close to that Juggernaut you’ve been bombarding with acid, or flame, or bullets, or that annoying bastard skirmishers which you’ve ALMOST knocked out, it will saunter up, and restore it to full health. Yeah, that thing’s a medic.

Lemme explain.

This creature originated from the Alien homeworld. Domesticated early in the Overlords’ development, they quickly became beasts of burden during the pre-industrial phase of the aliens’ civilization. In short, these things were space oxen. Much like beasts of burden on our world, they became useless as hauling devices as soon as practical motor-powered haulers appeared, and these faithful servants were relegated to hunting reserves and remote agri-colonies for centuries, until a new use was found for them. The main main attractiveness to these space-oxen were the fact that they were strong, which meant they could carry loads and loads of crap. This was used to great advantage by medical units during the overlords’ early invasions, where they were used as ambulances, carrying medical supplies and surgeons into battle. As cybernetically altered creatures began to take the place of sentient overlords in battle, the alien surgeons realized how easily their own mounts too to augmentation. This interesting fact led to the full automation of the battlefield medical system. The guts of the space-oxen were hollowed out and replaced with more durable metal and ceramic parts. Instead of a team of valuable medics, they carried a pair of “swarmers”, autonomous drones loaded with matter transfer beams capable of delivering drugs and healing agents over short distances. With this modification, this ancient beast of burden was a working animal no more, but a weapon of war; the “Swarm Lord”.

Come back next week for something COMPLETELY different!

*Please do not actually sue me. I don’t have enough money to hire a lawyer, so I’ll end up defending myself in court, and that would be bad for everyone involved.