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[MekaSkull]

Trying out Spriter to improve our animations.
Making animations in spriter is like 5x faster than frame by frame in photoshop 


Also we updated the game with a new bank heist:

[Vitali Kirpu]

Played co-op with developer in Helsinki Good stuff!  Panda approves!

[SamuSamu]

Oh wow, we haven't updated this devlog in a while.

First, let me introduce myself.
I'm Samu, I've been working as a lead game dev on The Masterplan since October 2014. So, I do the coding and huZba handles art and design. Rest of the team that were previously working on TMP are now free to develop our new game discovery platform Playfield which is in an open beta stage.

Since previous update we've released 5 updates and are now in version EA 10. 11th update should come out later this week.



With EA 6 we introduced "memos". We figured out it would be cool if we would move the story forward with these memos you can find from levels. Also, these memos would open up new levels as you would find for example a paper ad of a jewelry store.
Currently it is a bit of an issue as some player might miss a memo from a level and then think that there is no more levels to be unlocked, but that can be fixed by presenting the info better. We're gonna add small icons to the map screen to tell the player that there is a memo in a level that you haven't found yet.



EA 7 was pretty much a content update. We wanted to create a level(rivaling gang's mansion) where you wouldn't get the cops to arrive and you would not get a penalty of going out guns blazing, since all of the other levels lean heavily on stealth and non-violent approach.
We also changed the inventory to be more accessible UI-wise, based on the feedback we got from players.



EA 8 was one of, if not THE biggest update we've done. It had two new levels, diner and arcade and you could now hire new goons, which was a big step towards our meta-game. Basically, now if your goons would die during a heist, they would stay dead. Also, all the items you collected during heists would be in their inventory when you went back to hideout. You could buy new goons from hideout which generated new goons in a secret underground paper.





EA 9 focused pretty naturally after EA 8 to buying weapons, since after EA 8 if you ran out of bullets there were no way for you to get more(we did have a temporary spawning bullets in hideout though). We wanted to have the same idea as with level unlocks, that you have to find these gun store ads of different weapons from levels, which are then collected to this scrapbook you keep for buying.





EA 10 was again a more content-heavy update, with two new heists, Police Station and The Office. Code-wise there were mostly bug fixes.

So, we are currently doing final tweaks to release EA 11, which will bring out some changes we made for the game to look better when we went to show it to PAX East few weeks ago. So for example we've added lot more dialogs to the characters and they are now presented with speech bubbles instead of floating texts.



Also, we're leaning more to the "comic book" style now. During levels you can see these narrative boxes in the screen corners that tell you something about the heist and things going on. Here's a mockup of it:



One of the things that we've been lacking for a long time has been a proper support for animations in our engine. We've used spritesheets which take tons of memory and makes it hard to have situations where a civilian might grab a shotgun for example and doesn't have a sprite for using a shotgun.
So, we've started to implement support for Spriter and huZba has been working on the animations recently which has had various results:



Sorry for the long absence. 

[SamuSamu]

We've just launched a new update. EA 11 to Steam.



This time we don't have any new heists available, but there's lots of fixes and changes included.
We've made the pathfinding a bit smoother, basically characters should be able to figure out a shorter path during movement and do less of "needless" moves and turns while going to a location.

Biggest gameplay change is that character's who are knocked unconscious with melee attacks or tranquillisers now eventually wake up! So if you are in a situation where you must knock someone out, you have to hurry before he wakes up or lock him in a room so he doesn't make a run for an alarm later. We have some items planned which you can apply to an unconscious character to disable his movement when he wakes up(zip ties/duct tape), but they are not in yet.

There's also a new weapon now in, a Sniper Rifle for some long-range fights.

Graphically we've made a change towards more of a comic-book style. There's narrative boxes when you start a level or when you encounter a certain event in a level. Also, all the dialogs are now displayed with speech bubbles instead of a floating text.
We've also added tons of new dialog in game to support these changes.