next »

[RetroNeo Games]

10 days since my last post. Wow. Well I've had a throat infection and my GIF creating software crapped out on me so I've had less work done and nothing juicy to share. However, this is a dev diary so text must count too, right?

I've tried out using models instead of sprites for the rolling starfighters but while they look better they present their own problems with clipping and render orders. Next I want to try just getting a sprite sheet from the rolling model and swapping in sprites for the rolling animation so the game remains all sprites.

Also work proceeds on the Strategy layer. It's tricky as hell trying to make it make sense as a progression, let alone build it out. Must keep banging away at it.
Essentially what I'm building right now is a system of unexplored sectors that you schedule patrol missions to and set up spy drones to monitor. These flights don't always result in a discovery or battle, but boy when they do...

Anyway. Scouting for the enemy position is just part 1. Haven't finished prototyping it so I'll hold off sharing info on parts 2-however many. Needless to say there'll be strikes, raids, captures, base assaults, etc.

[RetroNeo Games]

There's exciting things in the works as regards finally getting a team together but it's premature to say anything just yet.

In the meantime, a new build of the demo is available here.
Note: old build removed. Get newest demo build from the link in the top post on Page 1.

This build will be shown at State Of Play 2016 in Dublin tomorrow. Drop in if you're around.
After that I'll be heading to the Inis Spraoi event for some much needed r&r and will return refreshed next Tuesday to kick some game devving butt!

[RetroNeo Games]

I've made a new build recently for State of Play in Dublin. As part of that I have the ships all rolling with a sprite-swap animation. NO MORE FLAT SHIPS ROTATING.

The new demo level has a simpler objective (that makes sense). No longer do you have to get x4 kills yourself to "Scare away" the enemies. No, just escort the fleet out of the asteroid field.
"Oh no, an escort mission" I hear you say. Well don't worry. In space there's no pathfinding to screw up and these particular convoy ships (for this level) can't die, so just sit back and enjoy.

I've also  decided to push the physics a bit. Now instead of fading out destroyed fighter gibs they start to rotate, can bounce off asteroids, and never get destroyed unless they collider with an asteroid a couple of times. Enjoy!
I've love feedback on that. I never dip below 60FPS on my systems so I'd like to hear if you do. I doubt you will though.

[RetroNeo Games]

People ask me about the game's story sometimes. It's not fully written or anything but I know what it is, basically, at a macro level.
So no spoilers, but this is EXACTLY what the game's message is. Or at least the inspiring theme..

Everyone thinks that they are the good guy.

[RetroNeo Games]

Since the last post I've created a Main Menu template. I didn't need one yet really but it holds the Character Pool. All along with this game I fully planned to 'steal' Xcom's customisable soldiers. Xcom 2 allows you to Export collections of soldiers to share with your friends.
Now, so does Crow's Nest.



The available sets of facial features are very limited, but into this system can soon be plugged many more assets by a real artist (more on him soon).

Now if you play the combat demo and have made characters in your pool, you can choose to have them come in as your two wingmen. Very limited application so far, but the system is now there and I'm very excited for it.

Current Build link is on the first post.

[RetroNeo Games]

Further to yesterday's post, I've had to make a new build and disable the Character Pool. It's working fine in the editor, and with my first tests in the game, but it turns out the build I put up last night has a broken Character Pool. Nothing comes up when you click it. It's rare that a feature works in the Editor and not in the Player. I've set no editor-specific code that could be messing with it (you can do that. First thing I checked). I've spent hours today trying to work around the problem but not gotten all the way to a solution. I strongly suspect the problem is just down to using a Beta version of Unity 5.4.

Quite annoying to spend so long getting a working Character Pool only to have to disable it the day after I put it out there, but ah well. We'll get there.. Bugs are to be expected. I went on the Beta to get past some OTHER bugs that were slowing things down. That worked, it's just that with Betas you risk swapping one set of problems for another. I'd never dream of changing versions in a release product, but since this is the prototype I went for it.

[RetroNeo Games]

Haven't posted in a while, sorry. Visuals are the most interesting thing to post but we've a new artist joining the team to finally replace my programmer art, so until I had something to show I haven't wanted to post anything.

Well, today's the day. Below is the first concept of the game's re-imagined visual direction. Would love to hear your thoughts.

The style is taking art-deco influences and will contrast dark background colours with bright foreground ones, to help the player keep their eye on the relevant elements of the environment.

[Pixel Noise]

That's pretty slick! Definitely like the color/lighting on it. It really stands out against the background.

[RetroNeo Games]

I'm really itching to post updates but I find they want for a bit of excitement when there's no images. Well we're getting a lot closer to having a complete scene's worth of assets and UI ready so we can start showing the game again sporting its new threads! From that point on updates will be regular until release.

In the meantime I've been playing with the AI. Squads of fighters always came in 3's but as their members dropped off, they'd remain suicidally dedicated to taking on superior numbers.
Well, now low-health units will attempt to evade and retreat from the level, and the remaining parts of their squad will attempt to join up with other under-strength squads to form complete units again.
This is an important step towards my vision, which is to still have a lot of tense action, but with a lower overall body count.
I'd like a situation where in an average mission your 3-6 units take on 12-24 enemies, and assuming you're successful, might only kill half and drive off the others.

The interntion is then in between the missions the others will repair and come back with better stats. It's not in yet, but I intend for all enemy units to have names and skill levels and persist just as the friendly pilots do. You may not always see their names, but say if you were to get full intel on an opposing force, or capture a pilot and get them in your brig, you could see their mission history, who they've killed (if anyone), and even if they'd lost friends or loved ones to you or your pilots.
This is very much in the realm of features that may get cut for time, but I'm happy to have taken a step in that direction.

What will at least be in is a measure of important to killing enemies and not letting them escape. A given combat zone (series of missions) will have X number of enemies in it. Whoever you don't kill in one mission will show up in other missions (or at least the final mission) in that zone.
Think of combat zones like a Tour in the X-Wing games. There's a series of related missions and a goal/boss level, but it's not the entire single player campaign. You'll beat one and go to a new Combat Zone / Tour (haven't chosen a name yet. Whatever feels right when it comes to it).

Back to the Squad AI for a moment, right now the only behaviour is to try and get behind their target and fire. I'm looking forward to squad tactics and "attack patterns" where a trio of enemies might split and have one draw you off while the other two circle around, or all 3 might take a "boom and zoom" approach to fighting you, instead of always predictably trying to get behind you. These would require different tactical approaches to maximise your own squad's chances of survival.
I love doing AI. It's probably my favourite part of game dev!

Well just wanted to get my thoughts out there since it's been a while since the last update. This is still very much happening. Talk soon!

[RetroNeo Games]

About a month ago I posted up the first concept image of the new look for the game, from artist Fred Mangan.
It was an exciting direction, and the art-deco style looked great.
He's been working away to get enough assets done that I could reskin a lot of what's in the game so people (me first! ) can start playing with the new look.

The screenshots I'm finally sharing today are from actual gameplay with the new art, and it's looking sharp!
There's still a few of the old elements not gone yet (a few effects, bullets, etc) and a lot of this is still iterative, but we now have "a look" and can play with it in the engine. Everything that comes from now won't be 'programmer / prototype / placeholder' art, it'll be the real deal from a professional artist.

If you read this Dev Log you'll know I've been waiting for this day for quite some time.


We've most of the background elements done in grayscale which allows me to set the scene's colour and tone dynamically. You can see that all the screens are the same scene with one overall colour change. This should allow for a lot of really nice scenery, and would even allow to change the level's colour mid-mission if there were to be a good reason for that (disco lights credit sequence is the best reason I can think of currently.. joking, don't hold me to that )
I won't be updating the downloadable demo for a while until we have a few more assets and kinks worked out, but rest assured that'll be happening as soon as possible.

One other thing to note is that the Wingmen 'heads' will be returning but the old art I did for them hasn't been replaced yet so for now I've just set a camera to follow around the relevant ship (seen on the right of these screenshots).

Talk soon!

[Pixel Noise]

Love the new art and HUD - things are looking really nice!

[RetroNeo Games]

Thanks PN! Glad you like it!

[RetroNeo Games]

We've got the roll animations for the player's Arrow craft in place now. This GIF may look familiar. I showed off the movement system before with very similar movements, but on the old art.

The new stuff is finally coming together and I'm very excited to share the new look of the game. Next up, enemy fighters!

[RetroNeo Games]

I always want to prepare GIFs to go with new features, but I have very unreliable software for making GIFs and have gotten very mixed results of late, so I'm sometimes slowed down in getting them. Then I compound that failure by allowing it to delay devlog updates.
So I'm going to try and do better, GIFs or no..

So I've actually gotten two new features in recently. I'll post about one now and hopefully get GIFs for the other and post in a day or two.

Today's Feature: RADIAL MENU. If you play the (still available on date of this post) older demo, it has a radio in the bottom left corner that you control with either the 1-4 keys or the controller Dpad. It allowed you to order both wingmen to perform an order (couldn't order them separately in that version) or summon your extraction.
Now I've overcome what I like to call Quaternion Mountain Of Doom and implemented a radial menu that allows a varied amount of orders (0-however many fit on screen, not just 4) and order wingmen individually, so you can retreat the damaged one and keep the healthy one, which was part of the whole idea of managing your squad.

I've completely ditched the old radio, which horrifically relied on a lot of string switch statements, making adding a new order exponentially more complicated, and which you couldn't go back on or cancel except to let it time out. Now I'm using enums and everything feels more flexible and tidier, and my brain is in an overall happier place with comms.

I'll provide images soon but so far the radial options are blank circles with text, so there's not much to see until we get icons in, but it's functional. Might add a GIF of it in action tomorrow for WIP posterity.

[RetroNeo Games]

Well, as promised, here's a GIF of the radial orders, albeit without icons to represent each option. You can just read the text for now though so it's fully functional.
You can also see how it scales depending on how many options are available, and how you can order wingmen individually or together.

[RetroNeo Games]

Two posts back, I said I'd share another new thing. I still will, but waiting to get a clearer (reasonably sized) GIF that ACTUALLY shows off the feature.

So for now, here's the new rolling animation for the first enemy fighter in the game (blue one). Codename is the Mantis, thought it replaces the Stormwall from my prototype, and I'm not sure which name I prefer. Thoughts?

Here you can see the player's Arrow fighter (gold) trading shots with the enemy AI, and everyone successfully dodging. Nobody was hurt in the filming of this GIF.

[RetroNeo Games]

I've recently started live streaming the game's development on Twitch, Beam, and YouTube. Links are in the first post.

Streaming times at the moment are Mondays at 3pm and Thursdays at 8pm Irish Time.
These are subject to change. Just trying to get a feel for while people are more likely to log in.

I've done 6 episdoes so far to small audiences. Over the next few days I'll upload those 6 do YouTube, and hopefully all the new ones should automatically upload too. Here's episode 1.

Edit: I've linked now instead to episode 5. This is the earliest episode where I have a good microphone and acceptable audio levels. I've set previous episodes have been set to 'unlisted' status on YouTube.

[RetroNeo Games]

Glad I started working on my own Editor Window in Unity. Not only was it worth learning how to start doing, but it lays out the info I need conveniently for tweaking, and it's just starting to look damn sexy now that I can even get background textures for the window and icons for the relevant ships!

[RetroNeo Games]

The last couple of days, including on the last livestream, I've been playing around with a fly-in camera intro for our upcoming demo level. What do you think?

[RetroNeo Games]

A few posts back (two weeks ago), I posted a GIF of the radial orders system with no icons. Now we have some icons in so I'm sharing. Behold!