Tag Archives: Game Development

Auto Fire, Build Update, Game Development

Big UI Update! (it’s about time)

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It’s been a long time coming, but Auto Fire is back in action with a bunch of updates and improvements!

There has been a major UI revision for just about all of the supporting screens and menus. Consumable gear was added so you can manually heal up in the field if you have the right items. There is a significant and growing tutorial that pops up how to play the game as situations present themselves. (And yes, you can turn them off in the settings!) More is in the works, including the long-promised arenas, hope you enjoy!

Loadout, repair and all the city interfaces are revised and much cleaner and easier to parse.

Gameplay

  • Some garages and repair outlets have a limited amount of gas or ordnance they can sell you.
  • Consumable gear was created that can repair your internals, drop mines or smokescreens, or basically enact any normal equipment’s function.
  • You can also target yourself on specific sides for armor repair gear, and the UI reflects it on your armor display.
  • When you complete an encounter, the loot is generated immediately rather than waiting until you move.
  • Radar is now a dedicated equipment type and slot called “Sensors”.  All cars have a default radar sensors package, but this can do a lot of different things.

Combat

  • Desert encounters now include combat moments that will drive you into a fight.
  • AI Updated for more responsiveness when spotting the player.
  • AI consider facing when planning their navigation routes, meaning that vehicles will plot paths more naturally and loop around their targets.
  • The line flamethrower can now target the ground.

Content/Tuning

  • Starter car only has 1 plate of armor all around, and no minedropper.  You’ll have to buy your own upgrades to get the good stuff.
  • Equipment crates now drop more items (versus from normal vehicle drops)
  • Crates on the field should never be empty.
  • First outpost in the starter sector now requires some vehicles to be killed before the boss emerges.
  • Old instant repair and armor pickups removed from drops in favor of the repair consumables.
  • Desert sectors should no longer have random encounters, only emplaced ones (that is, glints and smoke columns rather than just rolling dice)
  • Adjusted grip recharge rate to be a bit more generous.
  • Significantly more parts are awarded on the field.
  • Controls:
  • Big cleanup to allow for gamepad control of menus without losing focus.
  • Made accelerating into a skid work better, should not infinitely skid if you thrust against it.
  • Acceleration now waits until the next move to reduce your move’s time slice, so as a player you cannot reach max speed in a single turn the way you previously could.

HUD

  • Rework of the HUD colors and aiming interface.
  • Shrank the HUD components (gear, armor, social) slightly to allow for more playable space.
  • Changed social feed to dark mode, because the bright display was distracting from the gameplay.
  • The boss is removed from the HUD once you wipe them from a location.
  • Event-based tutorial popups appear when the player experiences various events, from taking damage to skidding to picking up gear.
  • The player’s challenge is now expressed with skulls, which is conveyed in the travel/gas popup to tell you what you’re getting into.
  • Added a real date display that updates based on player turns.
  • AL has a new look.

Menus

  • Complete rework of the character and loadout screens.
  • Complete rework of the repair experience.
  • Complete rework of the vehicle stable, to show all stats for all vehicles.
  • Complete rework of inventory, buy and sell screens to add categories and better controls.
  • Complete rework of the loading dock experience to show a map where you must deliver your chosen item.
  • Automap re-envisioned to use a higher quality smooth shader.
  • Automap locations are now interactive and can be hovered for popup info, and they ping indicating where quests are directing you to go.
  • Quest display revised to display a map telling you where you must go.
  • Quest steps are now crossed off in the Quest character panel.
  • Faction and skills are now shown in the character panel.
  • Entirely new inventory icons, for a punchier and yet colorful look
  • All item UI buttons are have a new shiny shader.
  • Items now display with level badges, indicating the raw progression tier the item has.
  • The loadout view shows pips that indicate when a higher-level item is available to be slotted in that location.
  • The inventory view shows pips that indicate when an item is new and has not yet been examined.
Cleaner HUD and gameplay interactions

Visuals

  • Enemy shouts appear in bubbles both on the HUD and over the enemy vehicles in-world.
  • Agents no longer echo their encounter dialogue into the social feed (it was cluttering the experience too much).
  • Zoom in moments happen after the level fades in rather than zooming when you can’t see.
  • New power lines, cargo containers, and other assets
  • Adjusted lighting on tail lights.

VFX

  • New explosion and fire VFX from toon explosion to a better stylized/realistic hybrid.  (It doesn’t block the player’s view as much)
  • Revised fire oil, burning objects and flamethrower VFX
  • Revised occupation VFX
  • Added decals on the ground from gunfire and explosions.

Audio

  • Vehicle audio uses Realistic Engine Sounds package and adjusts and shifts gear based on speed.
  • Use audio mixer to duck car audio when waiting between turns.
  • A new stinger or tutorial popups and specific informational moments.
  • Revised boss music slightly to stutter less, and use a continuous loop sometimes for quality’s sake.
  • Audio is set properly on startup from the prefs now

Bugs

  • Fixed several bugs with how bosses dole out their quests and get resolved at the end of a combat.
  • Fixed several screens where their text didn’t align properly.
  • When returning to a previously visited map, we handle the population correctly.
  • Fixed speedometer flashing visuals to properly flash at the end of a turn.
  • Made reverse skidding work better, it had some really bad behavior.
Auto Fire, Game Development

New Cars Added

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Some new vehicles have been added to the mix, and these have so many interchangeable parts that it’s been fun setting up some new enemies.  Just a couple examples:

The Jupiter Crux is a common vehicle that gangs use to cruise the badlands for easy prey. Lucky for you they usually only mount a junkthrower and have extremely weak armor… Light ’em up.
Mad Jane rolls with her crew, decked out in an Ace Predator with a basic Ram Plate and the High Noon Industries Bolt Carbine.
Image

Of course, hooking up these vehicles and setting up all the enemy profiles to make proper use of them is a lot of work, and occasionally I might have messed up the scale…  or are we looking at a feature???  Hmmm…

I guess we’ll find out.

Auto Fire, Game Design, Game Development, Video

Auto Fire Status Update – July 2018

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Over the July 4 holiday I managed to get a good, solid, 5-day weekend, which in turn gave me great blocks of time to work on Auto Fire.  It felt great to get some really nagging things out of the way.  There’s a bunch of stuff here that is new since last time I blogged about it:

  • Site System.  I created a new structure for holding what I call “sites”, which is any point of interest on the map.  This can include cities found in the overworld, highway entrances and exits, garages, and even regular landmarks and points of interest.  The sites are what I use to guide road plotting, so roads can connect exits, cities, garages and even just weird old non-functional shacks out in the desert, which I constructed from groups of tiles.  It gave me a system for sprinkling them into a map from a table, which adds more life to most maps.
  • Encounter System.  The encounter system is something that I’ve wanted to do for a while, to allow the player to deal with random stuff that they meet along the way.  Call it FTL-style, although I associate the concept with pen and paper games as well as wayyyy back to ancient games like Odyssey on the Apple II.  This allows players to consider some simple risk-reward propositions, or to choose between acts worthy of fame or notoriety.

  • Stylized Visual Effects.  I took some of the realistic visual effects for weaponry, explosions and smoke and returned them to the stylized versions I had used a year ago.  I found that these stylized VFX had extra punch and grabbed the player’s attention among a lot of noise, but more importantly, fit the oddball scale of the world in Auto Fire.  With buildings and cars and chests all coming in at unrealistic sizes when compared to each other, I found that realistic visuals just made that mismatch even more pronounced.  Somehow having unrealistic smoke and fire just helped with the suspension of disbelief, and I think it can look just as compelling.
  • Western Music.  I took a break from the (really fantastic) western/post-apocalyptic soundtrack by Michael La Manna to try something different, namely an Ennio Morricone-flavored Western soundtrack I found.  I really do love La Manna’s cool-as-ice Badlands music, but those stingers and jaw harps just got me in the feels.  I’ll be playing around with various configurations as time goes on, not sure which way to go.
  • Walled Outpost Generator.  One of the biggest things I got done over the holiday was to finally prepare enough ramshackle walls, dirt roads, windmills and metal-roofed buildings to create a special generator for badlands outposts.  This is a heightmapped terrain map that sets aside a center section as the “core”, where buildings and certain visual points of interest will lie.  Around the perimeter is a wall made of scrap, cars, wood, and anything else…  I had to make a version of my patch generator that would stretch and rotate this wall in any direction with repeating motifs.  Dirt roads are then stretched to the various sites around the map. I’m really happy with how it came out.

  • Smoother Driving Feel.  One thing I did fix in recent months came from feedback I got from right after the 7DRL that spawned Auto Fire…  For some players the movement felt stuttery and halting.  Part of that is unavoidable with a turn-based game, but some of it was fixable.  There is no longer a single-frame stop between various units executing their turn, and if the player cues up multiple moves, it executes smoothly if possible.  The movement from square to square in slightly slower than it was as well, creating an subtle improvement that I feel when running the new build versus an old one.
  • Wall Deflection.  This last one feels intangible as well, but I implemented it because the more I played, the more I felt cheated that the mechanic did not exist.  If the player is heading diagonally towards a wall at high speed, he or she can get deflected off the wall and into a new movement path parallel to the wall.  This is a fairly common occurrence in the city maps in particular, and even lets players use it to their advantage if they wanted to keep shooting rather than steer (this is an option in Auto Fire!)

Okay, so there’s a lot more work to do.  I feel that I’ve hit some fine polish points, but I mainly need to assemble content together into something more playable, to have more of a reason and tension in the overworld.  All that will hopefully come next.