Happy new year, everyone! 

I had wanted to get this progress report out much sooner, but certain things required more time to develop. Let's get right into what's been worked on the past few months...

Maser beam

I’ve always loved the look of the maser tanks in the old Godzilla films, the big satellite dish that shoots concentrated lightning is just iconic. In the world of Landsword, maser weapons would be mostly useless in conventional combat since they're so close-range, but they're perfect for pest control since they minimize collateral damage by not using soil-contaminating depleted uranium rounds or blinding lasers.

JGSDF maser tanks featured in Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995)

I imagine the origin of this weapon would actually be for combat engineering, its purpose being to electrify and detonate minefields or explosives for convoys to safely cross, sort of like how in Godzilla films the maser tanks were originally intended to intercept ICBMs.

Flash-frying tanks

It differs from the thermal projector and the laser in that it automatically snaps to targets and has a much shorter range. While it isn’t as powerful or broadly useful as the laser, it has a very different feel in use, and I think it’s a lot of fun. This is the eleventh weapon out of what will be a total of fifteen different primary weapons. I want to keep each of these weapons as unique feeling as possible even if some are obviously better than others. I’m still looking for concepts for the final four, so I’d love to hear any suggestions.

Team system

On the previous post, I showed how enemies were rewritten to use a new system of node based A* pathfinding, along with the implementation of steering behavior for better obstacle avoidance. Something else that I wanted to rewrite was how they select and search for targets. Currently in the demo they simply do a radius and angle check solely for the player, but having things like remote drones, turrets, or allied units to fight alongside us means we can't have enemies searching just for the player.

The solution to this problem is relatively easy though. We simply assign every enemy object a team variable with a number set, have them do a radius check, then return the IDs of all the objects found, and finally compare if the numbers on each ID are equal to their own. If they're not and the object is visible to them, then that object is set as their target. Simple and very optimized.

(Detection radius shrunk for demonstration)

Now, I started on this originally so enemies could change targets to other things belonging to the player (spider bombs do this right now by brute force overriding their target coordinates and setting their movement speed to negative) but with this team system we can actually have different factions of enemies fight each other on the battlefield:

I guess tanks really are better than mechs after all, huh?

This of course means it's possible to have allied units fighting beside you. It'd definitely be cool to see a few missions where reinforcements are sent in to support you during combat, and while testing I found that we can even have helicopters carry in friendly units after I accidentally set the wrong team for the transports that command centers call in.

Speaking of friendly units —

Auto-turrets

These things are hilariously overpowered and nonsensical, but they're just so much fun to use. You can put down a dozen of them on the spot and watch as literal thousands of bullets are mercilessly focused on one target. 

You can push them around to different areas once you deploy them.

I'll have to probably keep these unavailable until the last few missions in the game since I think they break the balance of combat too much, but they're easily the best secondary weapon you can have.

A massacre.

Creature Feature

At the moment, the only combat in the game that doesn't involve fighting human targets is the second mission where you de-exist waves of incoming chemical grubs. I've stated before that there will be other organic enemies to fight aside from the grubs repeatedly, so I figured now's about time to start work on them, as I've become a little burnt out in trying to create new levels and missions. It might sound surprising, but the most enduring challenge I've had developing this game so far has just been designing new stages and making sure they're not repetitive, both visually with assets and the actual layout of levels. It's a constant struggle, despite me being able to figure out almost everything else.

Chemical grubs are very simple in terms of their animation. It's just stretching and squashing their x and y image scale by tying it to their speed with a touch of randomization. They're basically the perfect dumb homing enemy to battle hordes of, but aside from sometimes becoming overwhelming in numbers, they're not really anything difficult or interesting to fight. It also doesn't help that the level they're in right now is still a placeholder and not particularly fun to fight in.

I think we all want to see something better. Something with actual legs and inverse kinematics firing on screen.

Leg movement

The motion of an eight legged creature such as a spider looks rather complex at a glance, but really the eight legs are just divided into two pairs which alternate back and forth to pull the body forward. This brief video from 16 years ago is still incredibly helpful for understanding how to animate a creature like this, and it does become quite simple once you see how they're broken up into pairs.

Now, this initial test already feels quite natural, but you'll notice that the legs aren't really adjusting to the body rotating. It can't walk sideways, backwards, or rotate to face something else while moving in the same direction. It's basic canned motion using lines and points that face one way, with a vertical y offset on the knees to look more 3D.

For gameplay purposes, we'll need something that's a lot more dynamic and responsive to changes in movement and direction, such as getting hit by bullets or being able to turn on the spot to face the player. We also need something that can be modified on the fly to adapt to different numbers of legs — after all, what's the point of having a creature with multiple legs if you can't shoot them off?

Creature maker

Just like Spore.

I figured since there will be more than one kind of walking enemy in the game, it's best to just make a tool to create and modify legged enemies in realtime. You'll note that now the body can rotate to face the cursor, and the legs will adjust dynamically even when moving in place. It may seem minor on the surface, but it adds a lot to making the motion feel more believable.

Since we simply split the walk cycle of the legs into an alternating pair, we can have basically any number of legs on the creature and have it look pretty realistic. We can also change how grouped together the legs are, the direction of how they spread apart, and how far they extend to meet a step. This is without any additional effects like smoothing the position or adding extra movement to the body.

Five legs also look pretty nice.

Eight legged movement

This last one is a bit closer to what I envisioned in my head. We can put some feet on the creature by just drawing a sprite at the end of each leg's coordinates.

Right now these loose collections of circles and lines aren't much to look at when idle, so let's give it some textures and juice up the movement a bit more...

Mega Crustacean

He's actually very friendly...

Now we're getting somewhere. The difference between raw programmer art and a finished/textured enemy can be huge sometimes. It's like making a robot endoskeleton and then putting skin over it.

I'll probably adjust the colors and shape of the sprite a bit further, but I've always loved the look of coconut crabs and the massive Japanese spider crab. Coconut crabs in particular are especially vicious to wildlife when they haven't eaten for awhile, and can apparently detect the faintest scent of blood from over a mile away. They're sometimes referred to as "robber crabs" as well due to their tendency to steal items away from humans, likely due to smelling traces of food on them.

Birgus latro (Coconut crab)

I've had this photo of someone who brought a giant Japanese spider crab to a Legoland city set saved to my reference folder for several years now. I've always wanted to have something similar to this in the game, it's just such a strong visual I think. A lot of the environments, scale, and layout of the actual missions in the game were also inspired by looking at tabletop dioramas of cities. I'll go more into depth on that another time...

Oversized antagonist crustacean

I'd like to imagine that these overgrown hybrids on Mars build nests out of concrete, scrap metal, and vehicles that they scavenge from human habitats that are nearby. Their existence probably keeps the rent prices pretty low since you never know when a piece of your house could get stolen away in the middle of the night. I've got a fun lore reason for why these and other very hostile creatures such as grubs exist, but I don't want to give it away yet. I think I've come up with an interesting twist on the giant bug trope that while admittedly absurd, will feel oddly believable.

Stationary rotation to face target position

For readability purposes, I made their grabbing claws black tipped like that of stone crabs, and their legs each have little pincers as feet for additional visual flair.

I do wish it would be possible to give the legs individual outlines so the merging effect would be less noticeable, but doing so would require resetting and calling the outline shader each time for every leg, which would be very bad for performance. The good thing is when it's in motion during gameplay it's mostly invisible.

Let's see how they look so far in game...

The perfect enemy for the maser.

I noticed after recording that the claws on their feet lag behind the legs due to accidentally drawing them before the final position is calculated. I've since fixed it, though I wish I saw it sooner before recording most of this footage.

Crab Rangoon made easy

Legs and claws can be shot off by bullets or blown straight off by explosions. Since the gait system is adaptable, we can have them walk around with random legs missing and still have it look pretty decent:

Randomized shambling

This one's mad

We can even add some randomization to their gaits. When they lose a leg, they get additional variable tweaks such as step size and leg spread being offset, so each one has a slightly different personality with its movement.

I'm sure some of you are wondering — does this mean we'll get to see enemy walkers that actually walk around the level? 

I've already begun working on a few concepts for mech enemies that will reuse the creature tech, since fighting actual walkers would be a nice contrast to the normal wheeled crawler units in the game already.

It's like that scene in Akira where the Tokyo police all open fire at the guy on the ground.

As shown earlier, since all the enemies now run on a team system, we can have allied crawler units or even neutral units that fight other factions and the player. If we wanted, we could even set the team of the crabs to be on the player's. Maybe eventually there'll be a mission like in Half Life 2 where you use ant lions to attack the Combine, who knows...

Technical Manual

Right now the game lacks any form of tutorial. It's sort of a trial by fire where we throw people into the first level and have them figure it out on their own, but I've noticed some people never use the overdrive or grenade function so I figured it's time we add some kind of guide for new players. There were many different directions I considered for the tutorial of the game. I thought about sending the player into a VR simulation where you go over all the different systems one by one, a live-fire training range with the other crewmembers at your base, or even a flashback sequence before all the conflict on Mars. However, I realized all of them would probably drag on and likely reduce the thrill of combat in the game if everything is controlled and constantly pauses for you to click through text prompts explaining everything.

I decided instead I wanted to take a very different direction, and figured out a way I could tie the game's lore in and have a cool in-universe sort of explanation for how everything works.

Enter, the operator's manual for the M97 Maneuver Crawler:

(Work in progress)

Now, I know to newcomers some of this is going to be pretty incomprehensible, especially once I draw additional illustrations showing the cockpit of the crawler and diagrams of some instrument panels, but I think to those of you who've played the demo all the way through, everything shown here should make complete sense. From what I’ve seen, most players get a handle on the controls and gameplay within just a few minutes, so I’m not too worried about every system being immediately obvious. I think it'll be more fun and overall interesting to just flip through this fictional TM and soak in each page for yourself rather than being told "Press LMB to fire your primary weapon."

Page effect

In case people are wondering, this 3D page effect actually uses no shaders, and no 3D models.

Essentially, each page is its own sprite which is 472 pixels wide and 523 pixels tall. I divide the pages into vertical strips that are each 3 pixels wide (I can adjust the resolution to be lower or higher) in a for() loop and then draw them as a horizontal sequence with draw_sprite_general, rotating each strip 180 degrees to the other side of the page with a delay.

Page flipping motion

If you imagine every pixel of this flipping line to be a vertical strip, that's basically what's happening above with a few additional effects. Since we can rotate the strips using draw_sprite_general, I also implemented a horizontal twist to them relative to how far they are from the center of the screen, and have a gradient by tying the lightness of each strip to how high they curve upward. I still want to make the actual book and pages appear much thicker than they are currently since it still looks pretty flat, but that's something for later. Also I know there's more optimized methods to achieve a book effect by using a shader or vertex buffers in Game Maker, but since it'll never be present in the actual combat section of the game it's not really necessary to do it with a faster method.

I have other plans for this book tech elsewhere in the game besides this tutorial section, but I don't want to spoil too much yet. I promise it'll be equally as cool as the manual though.

Other miscellaneous additions

Airstrikes

These can be pretty OP so I'll have to limit the amount that a player can carry to around four or five markers, but they're extremely useful for clearing out whole neighborhoods that are blocking your path. The smoke marker is a work in progress also.

Certain enemies will be able to call these on your position if they see you too, so you've only got a few moments to escape before you're hit by a salvo of ALCMs.

Pseudo 3D arcs on overworld map

A very minor effect, but something I've wanted to add since the map was implemented. The overworld map icons and the general system that missions use will be overhauled very soon.

Smoothbore cannon muzzle blast

Conclusion

This concludes the first quarterly(?) progress report of 2026. I'm sorry to the people who were hoping for a new build this time around. As you can see, development is still ongoing, and while I do really want to put out a new build for everyone to play, I just feel there hasn't been enough changes implemented yet. I hope you all understand, and thank you for your continued interest and support.

As an end to this post, here's one of the shots of the intro sequence I've been quietly working on:

This shot is going to be on screen for roughly ~2.3 seconds.

And as an extra bonus, here's what was going to be a scrolling shot from a cutscene that ended up becoming too detailed and turned instead into a sort of promo shot-