What is Heavy Shell?Heavy Shell is a tactical turn based strategy rpg featuring mostly large mechs pummeling each other with heavy weapons. There will also be tanks, infantry and more- but the real focus here is mech on mech violence. Players will command their mechs and pilots through branching multi-path missions and broader campaigns while maintaining a main base of operations where they can research / upgrade mechs / level up pilots.
Forever Mech War.Heavy Shell will tell the story of a harsh and odd planet named ASH located near the edges of colonized space during an increasing bitter inter-planetary war. Ash is a very hard place to live. One side of the planet is always bathed in intense heat- while the other lies frozen and cold. A shaded equator where it's always verging on dusk or dawn is where cities, nations and corporations grew into major powers.
Civilization on the badsides of the planet (though mostly the hot)sprouted through canyons, unground passages and via a major techno highway. The atmosphere of the planet is dry, dusty and prone to intense storms making long range aircraft unreliable. Along this major route are mining companies, city states, private military contractors and any entity wishing to be hard to find.
Design GoalsHeavy shell is heavily inspired by a lot of games. The combat lies somwhere between the X-Coms battlefield contextual combat & Front Missions heavy weapons beat down. Mechs will be the sum of their parts- each having their own HP value that attribute to the whole. Loose a part, loose its ability (legs = movement / arm = weapon / body = destruction).
Pilots will be able to eject or get out of their mechs- though will be highly fragile. Loosing a nice mech isn't nearly as bad as loosing a fully leveled pilot.
The missions & overall campaign will unfold from a hub location where you can buy things, upgrade mechs in the mech bay or hire new pilots of replace deadones in the pilots lounge. In the operations center the player will have a main battlemap to use. You can go on sorties (random battles, exploring ? areas on the map) or launch missions.
Missions are mutiple combat encounters in a row. Some will be longer than others and some will have branching options. The player will have a mobile mech vehicle that can repair and re-arm between combat encounters, but only if they can keep it alive.
We have a plan for 3 main acts to the story, plus a prelude campaign that we plan to put out as an alpha at some point (when its ready).
HEAVY SCREENS so far..
WIP of the Badlands_City tileset so far.
WIP of the Mech Bay from the operations hub portion of the game.
Note the NEON GREY logo was the former name of this game.
The 2 units used in prototyping everything so far. (AI enemy on the left, player on the right).
WIP of the title screen. The BG is not in Unity. It is a frame from C4D where im building the main scene. Its looking like im going to need Unity pro to pull off some convincing space.
This is a wip sheet of the current companies / factions in the game. We want things to be identifiable and the factions to have some depth to their character.
And a wallpaper for The Kings Of Hell- one of the major NPC factions in the game.
Who is makin' this thing?Heavy Shell is mostly being developed by just me. Ive been working on it off and on for about a year now, but recently I've been putting the steam on and making more stuff. I've got a partner in crime who helps me develop concepts and work on some art / sound and more.
I come from 3D / VFX / Motion Graphics back ground and picked up Unity + Playmaker about 2 years ago and have been relentlessly making things for awhile now. Nothing released, but im hoping this one makes it out the gate!
I have a tumblr that I post most of my devlogs too- and just recently registered HeavyShell.com (but havent set it up yet with a word press). You can also find me on twitter.
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