Greetings, everyone. It's been quite a long while since the last progress report. Much has been worked on in the past six months, with a lot of tweaks to the gameplay and general feel. There's a lot to showcase, so let's get right into it...

[I'm using the website Postimages since Imgur is blocked in the UK. If the GIFs don't load I'll switch to a different site]

Mission 2: v2.0

This is a big one. I've repeatedly stated in the comments that this map will be redone, and since the second(?) demo release which first introduced it, it's always plainly labelled in-game that it's "a placeholder map that'll eventually be worked". It's been over a year and somehow it's still not been remade.

The vision of it in my head has always been a chaotic EDF battle set at the Château de Versailles where the player ironically ends up leveling half the place while trying to save it. Thankfully this area isn't a UNESCO heritage site, and is more of a big overly fancy vacation resort for Martian bureaucrats and government officials so you won't have to feel too bad.

Current map

There's not much to really say here. It's pretty bad, and simply reuses whatever assets were available at the time since there was only about a week to rush it out for a testing jam. This is of course fine as a placeholder, but its low quality has since been exacerbated with the other more complete and asset rich missions that have been added.

Friendlies

A lot of people have asked me before if there's going to be some missions where you don't fight alone. Since things have been overhauled to use a new team system for target selection, having support units is now possible.

At the start of the mission, a convoy of helicopters arrives carrying a randomized set of reinforcements to help.

An Italian-made E.11 Alfierie engaging the grub menace

On their own, these allied units usually struggle to hold the hordes back, but if you stick together and save them from some close calls, they can actually back you up and save you too sometimes. There's a lot of different ways the mission can go depending on what support units arrive and what loadout you go with.

Grubs chasing a transport helicopter

Blood FX

Killing any organic enemies at very close range gradually covers your mech more and more in blood, eventually to the point it can become entirely red.

Since there's big pools scattered around the map and fountains, you can take a dip to clean yourself off.

Grubs swimming

The more of them that you actually kill in water, the further the water will gradually darken. If you splatter around a hundred of them, it'll eventually turn to a dark crimson:

Imagine having to clean this up.

Emergency vehicles

Firetrucks, police cars, ambulances. They all make loud WEE WOO WEE WOO sounds when you're near them, helping add some ambience to the level in between the distant sirens and autocannons going off.

There's also some limousines for officials and larger city buses now, along with a few unmarked government cars. I'll likely make the buses larger, their scale is alright but it doesn't quite feel massive enough to be a true city bus.

Bird flocks

You know that scene at the end of Patlabor 2 where the elevator comes up and the Ingram is all beat up with thousands of birds everywhere?

Since the beginning, I wanted to have giant flocks of birds on the ground that you can scatter by driving through. I sat down to write a special system to render these, and they cost basically zero hit to the game's performance. I can have around 20,000 in a level before the FPS starts to tank.

Like driving through a field of flowers

Flocks on mission six

Changes to enemies

Target boxes

These have been scaled up for better visibility, and they also now have this cool pop-in effect to bring a bit more flair.

Filled tags

Enemies now make little radio chirps when they've spotted the player or a different target, and I've since modified their tags to switch between a filled and outlined version to indicate whether or not they're activated. It's a small thing, but in combat it really does make a difference.

Enemy dialogue chatter

I was pretty hesitant on adding this since I felt it could be too distracting in combat, but after some playtesting I think it's somewhat helpful for pointing out enemies and generally makes them feel more alive.

Depending on their surroundings, they can talk to each other and have idle banter. If they see the player or hear something suspicious they'll also state that they're going to investigate/attack.

They even have their own unique callsigns that are assigned to them depending on their location and team. I'm working on an array system that will generate unique quips for the various factions the player will be fighting, and I'll also be doing separate ones for the friendly units in missions. This can all be turned off in the settings, of course.

Lasers

Another small detail that's been added is enemies will begin to show a visible laser trail and lens flare whenever they've started scanning to fire off a missile at you. This, along with an updated laser warning that's shown below the aim reticule helps give things an extra sense of urgency.

Mantises painting the player.

Lens flare on player's laser

UI additions

Previously, I had shown that the player's mech will have an Active Protection System or APS that blocks incoming projectiles like a shield. In general, I wasn't satisfied with how the original missile warning semi-circle displayed where incoming missiles are though.

This is barely readable, and generally looks quite poor.

It's now been replaced with a pseudo-3D ring that morphs to show the direction of the incoming projectiles. I find it a lot easier to follow and much more interesting to look at in-game. 

Note the little particle trails from the interceptors launching.

Once your APS charges are depleted or it malfunctions from an EMP, it will turn to red. Speaking of EMPs...

EMP effect

Another thing that was shown prior was the addition of EMP grenades for the tertiary weapon slot option. There wasn't much of an effect on the player if you drop one on yourself despite it immobilizing enemies completely, so I wrote a distortion shader for the HUD and restrict weapon usage for a brief period of time.

For now, the only way you can get hit by an EMP is if you drop it on yourself too close, however there will eventually be enemies with mortars that also toss them at you.

Ammo counters

I think a few people have requested this in the past. Primary and secondary weapon ammo can now be shown around the target reticle, you won't need to look to the side to see how many rounds you've got left.

Rear target warning

Sometimes when you're fighting hordes of enemies with your reticle far in the corner of the screen, it can become easy to lose track of ones that are coming up behind you. I've added a little beep and the HUD shows a warning flash to let you know someone is on your six.

Overworld flags

The main mission select and overworld section is still a big work in progress. I've changed the rather poor looking mockup icons for some 2.5D flags to denote each faction and area you're fighting at, and ranks are now displayed above them so you don't have to visit each point to see how you did.

(The blue flags are simple placeholders, they'll be changed for proper faction flags eventually)

Mine flashes

This isn't really a UI change, but I'll put it here anyway. Enemy mines no longer explode instantly whenever you've driven over them. They now make a sound effect and tick down for a few frames with a flash, so if you're fast enough with the overdrive you can dash past them without taking damage. 

Airdrops

Previously, ammo crates would always spawn off screen in levels with jet sounds once you reached a certain low ammo threshold and there were no crates to be found nearby. I've always wanted to see them actually airdrop down to the ground, however at the time I had some trouble figuring out how to do said parachutes on them. 

Early on I had tried using 2.5D models like with the buildings, however the perspective felt off on top of the effect generally being too performance intensive. This time around, I've opted to use a hybrid approach of drawing lines for the cords and 2D sprites for the chutes.

New weapons

Here's a brief compilation of the various additions to the player's in-game arsenal. We're up to 13 out of 15 primary weapons now.

Wire-guided ATGMs

These are very fun to use and are essentially the game's equivalent of a sniper weapon. The camera pans to follow missiles off-screen and you can do some pretty fun trick shots with them.

Mine-launcher

Possibly the strongest secondary in the game now. This is a mortar launcher which fires clusters of mines over buildings. The current mine launcher in game is possibly the least used weapon, and I've had a lot of people tell me it's just not interesting to use. I'll still keep it in the game as there may be a few specialized missions where it'd be useful though.

Chain gun

A slow firing, high-damage cannon with a deep bassy sound. Simple, but  satisfying to use. 200 rounds of ammo isn't a lot to carry, but since it's slow firing and packs quite a punch you'll likely only need to find one or two ammo crates for most missions.

Gun/launcher

Inspired by the MGM-51 Shillelagh carried by the Sheridan light tank, this is basically a missile launcher which functions similar to the wire-guided missiles or smart gun, featuring reticle tracking.

Gunpod

Not every secondary weapon has to be a missile or rocket. You can now have a high power gunpod with excessive amounts of kickback as a backup. It's handy if you're using something slow firing like the railgun.

Plasma dash

This one is something I've seen people request before. It's incredibly goofy and overpowered, but way too much fun not to include. For balancing, it might need to be unlocked after the final mission I think.

Gun arms

Very Tachikoma esque

The fourth slot is technically reserved for "melee" weapons, but gun arms are now an option instead of the plasma slash. The hull of your mech has to rotate to face the aiming reticle, and you've got about 300 rounds in total, enough for an emergency-use weapon.

There's nothing stopping you from equipping the minigun, gunpod, and gun arms, then firing all three weapons at once. You're free to do with them whatever you please.

Small props

Barricades, signs, traffic cones, fences, vending machines - a lot more smaller props have been made to scatter around levels to make things feel less empty. More on this later...

Vending machines

Refined manual + Art

On the previous progress report I had shown that a technical manual was being worked on to serve as the game's tutorial section at the beginning. I've since implemented it on the title screen as something you can view whenever starting a new game.

Start prompt

(Sped up for smaller file size)

Some shading and dithering has been removed for compression sake. It's a lot more polished now with several pages and details added in, and I also figured out a way to render the pages curving and changing their height. Later on, I'll likely have to add a few more for some of the new features and weapons shown earlier. Below is also a non pixel art version of the cover, the left one is an alternate variant I ended up not going with.

Here's two other unrelated pieces I neglected to show here prior:

The E.11 Alfiere, as seen earlier.

I think this one speaks for itself. This massive land train is going to serve as a friendly unit on a few missions, zapping crabs and other pesky megafauna that are a big hazard on Mars.

I'm sorry to everyone who was hoping for more of these art pieces this time around. There haven't been many opportunities for me to sit down, finish, and actually draw a lot of the designs I've made despite there being roughly ~30 at this point sitting on the backburner. I think at another point I'll just put up a big post showing off loose sketches and talking about some of my influences since the design work is something that I really want to showcase.

With that said, I've mentioned in the comments that most of the development time has suddenly become focused around a big feature...

Level design (or lack thereof)

One of the most challenging aspects of development so far has simply been creating new stages to play in. No matter how good the combat or movement feels, if the levels are badly designed then all of that instantly goes to waste.

The stages in the game so far with the exception of possibly the first mission and the underground one are just placeholders meant to test different systems and tech in the game. The same goes for their descriptions and general lack of context or story, it's all going to be shaped into something actually coherent once we have a better pool of assets and other gameplay systems are in place. 

I've wrote about this before when I was building an A* pathfinding system for the enemies to use, but in general for a top down 2D game Landsword is incredibly chaotic with how its levels are laid out. Not just in terms of the buildings being grouped in unrealistic ways, but nothing is aligned to a grid, none of the objects use standardized sizes or templates, and everything has varying hitboxes that are rescaled and rotated. For a 3D game this is normal, but for most 2D or 2.5D games with this sort of perspective they generally tend to go for a more rigid and unified approach. I felt that placing things in grids and using strict sizes wouldn't be as fun to play through or look at, so I chose to go this alternate direction. It makes perfect sense to use isometric perspective and grid aligned objects for a number of reasons, but it's just not something I'm interested in.

Room editor

All of the stages in the demo have been created using the built-in room editor of Game Maker. This editor, while functional and for the most part acceptable to use early on, became gradually less intuitive for making stages with due to how slow it is to pick out and manipulate objects. It's also rather difficult to gauge what a finished area looks like unless we compile the game, as the building objects are not being rendered in sprite stacks.

Timelapse of creating the little town of Exampleville with the GM room editor.

You can plot things out and kind of imagine what it would look like in-game, but it's still difficult to judge and rapidly test what a finished section will look and play as. What's worse, you only have a single undo and no box selection or way to easily manipulate lots of objects. If you wanted to move that entire group of buildings, you'd have to hold shift and manually click each one, and if anything is accidentally mispressed or double clicked, you have to start over.

Exampleville, now in-engine. Horrible town, never move there.

I realized that if I'm to begin making better stages with finer detailing and placement, this stock engine tool is just not going to cut it anymore.

Enter...

L.S.D.T.V.

Also known as the Landsword Diorama Tool & Viewer. This is an in-engine level editor tool that I've been building for the past month and a half as a replacement for the stock GM room editor. I had considered starting work on this tool many times in the past, but I felt the room editor was still adequate up until this point. There's now more than four hundred different assets to work with, and I estimate at least another 300-500 will be needed, so there's no point in not making this tool both for development and the players to use as well.

Tools

A lot of these features have essentially been adapted from image editing software, so if you're familiar with using Photoshop, Paintdotnet, or even MS Paint then you should be able to get the hang of it within a few minutes. In general, my goal with this tool is to have something simple to use but loaded with a lot of quality of life features to reduce the time of building stages from possibly weeks to just a few hours or days of tinkering.

Here's a look at some of the basics...

Object browser

Categories with separate pages and actually rendered previews. No longer does one have to guess what the actual asset looks like without running the game.

Box selection + group manipulation

Holding shift and alt lets you add or remove things to the group selection, and selected objects can be rotated around with Q and E (or A and E if you're using an AZERTY keyboard). Already a major step up from before.

Brush tool

Making dense forests before this was almost impossible. I had attempted to use a series of spawner objects that have a set radius and scatter around various tree objects, but it still failed to produced anything natural looking. This tool also functions as an eraser, so you can lay down massive groups of trees and then carve clear paths through them easily.

Shape tools

Circle, line, box tool

These are pretty simple, they make placing down symmetrical formations of objects fast. It's like the basic tools you have in most image editors.

Spline tool

This one was rather difficult to implement due to the sheer amount of math it required, but it was worth it for making curving object paths easy.

Points can be added or removed, and the curving can be toggled on or off by pressing L. Direction following can also be enabled and tweaked if needed.

Traffic jams can be made in seconds now.

History

This one isn't much to look at, but one feature I was very particular about programming in was unlimited undo/redo memory. I really can't stand it when you're using a program and you've only got three or so uses of the undo history. Anything like a text editor or basic image editing software should have such a feature uncapped, it's usually not a lot of memory.

The entire system functions through a massive array sorted with a parsing script that logs the IDs and positions of the objects being manipulated, so all that's actually happening is just a huge list of different numbers pointing to the different objects being continuously updated. This means there's absolutely no hit to performance at all despite it being unlimited.

I'm an array man, all the way. I don't like ds_lists. I don't like creating them or clearing them. ds_list_find_index? I don't think so.

Variant selection

Vehicles, trees, and other objects all have built-in variants that may be selected through a dropdown menu if you want a specific sprite.

Enemies can also be tweaked through these menus, you're able to set their team number from 0 to 10, and whether or not they're stationary or wander around the level.

Their AI wasn't really designed with this in mind, but you can pit different enemies against each other and watch them fight to the death in the editor. You don't need to have a player object inside a level to run it.

E.11s and Minotaurs fighting mega-crabs

Tiles

Separate from objects, Game Maker has a built-in system for placing down pieces of backgrounds and tilesets. As with handling the objects in the room editor, it's not particularly great to use and feels very clunky at times. There's some rather in depth engine commands for manipulating them during runtime and generally a lot less to worry about than dealing with objects, so building this section of the editor wasn't too difficult.

Randomized tile placing

Layers can be added, removed, cleared, named, and even shifted entirely by clicking and dragging after picking each one in the panel. It's also possible to box select tiles as groups like when handling the objects.

Multiple layer shifting

Backgrounds + Color Controls

Something else that's important in addition to having tiles is being able to change the colors of a level and add different layers of backgrounds beneath everything. 

You can have up to eight different backgrounds and tweak various attributes such as the opacity and even add movement to them to simulate things like sand blowing across the ground.

The overlay colors of a level can also be tweaked through the same menu. It helps to set a certain mood and make each stage more distinct without just making more assets. You can even turn the saturation down to 0 if you want to play in monochromatic colors.

Overlay shader controls

Even outside of playing the levels, it's just fun to sit down and build these little areas. The game was originally inspired by scale dioramas, so now we've sort of taken that a step further and actually build them in the game.

Look at this little town square. It's a classic Martian sight made to vaguely imitate Italian or European aesthetics, and it was probably a very nice place to live up until a few months ago when the mayor decided it'd be a great idea to install a huge fountain in the middle. Unfortunately, the contractors that were hired were highly inexperienced, so they started digging holes all over the ground trying to locate the pipes for the water, and now the entire place is just closed off for construction and you can't even go outside to get a hotdog or use the vending machines anymore. And now suddenly a convoy of trucks filled with soldiers has showed up and they're about to drag the mayor out and throw him in a dirty hole for his crimes.

But I digress...

Conclusion

I'm sorry to everyone that it's been so long and things have been so quiet here. I know it's been an entire year since the last demo release, and it pains me to see that. I'm trying my best to turn this from a vague tech demo into an actually fully fledged game, so there's been a seemingly endless amount of work on it that needs to be done, especially rewriting certain things to be usable in the editor. I don't want to give any dates since I seem to blow past them constantly, but I'm hoping to have a new demo release out maybe in the next two months, depending on how things go. The editor and every new feature shown in this post will be in it.

There's also been a few things I'm working on which haven't been shown in this post such as a dialogue system, but it'll likely be awhile from now before I can show it off.

Bonus: MICLIC

Something else I've been working on in just the past few days while trying to finish writing this post was an extra secondary weapon - mine clearing line charges or MICLIC for short. This is a weapon a few people have requested I add in the comments for some time now, and it's actually been something I've wanted to add since the beginning, for the M97 is based on the USMC's M1150 Assault Breacher Vehicle which carries these in its rear compartment.

I wanted to really do this unique weapon justice, including having actual verlet physics with the rope and seeing it visibly land on top of buildings and other objects when you fire it off. In real life, the charges detach from the vehicle after launching, but in the game you can actually drag it around the level and wait for enemies to get close to you.

Verlet physics and rope interaction.

You can see here how it gets stuck sometimes on buildings and snaps small objects such as the street lights and the crops. It's important that it doesn't feel too frustrating to move around with, so collisions with buildings are done with this "soft" manner where if you pull on a tension point enough it'll eventually go loose and fly over it. For the underground sections I have this turned off so the rope never phases through the large wall objects, but for the outdoor missions this is a lot more fair and generally just feels nicer to use with the speed of the gameplay.

That's about it for this progress report. I hope you all have a great July and rest of the year, and also a happy 4th to those of you in the US too!