Energy skills

Another skill tree branch for the first chapter of the game is now finished. This time it's the energy skills branch. It includes skills that affect energy, or more precisely, its generation and consumption, as well as everything related to speed, whether it's tank moving speed, fire rate or skills reload time. For instance - shown earlier and appeared in the gameplay demo guns overload skill is now part of it. Its effect, however, has been somewhat revised - now it does not consume energy for activation, but increases its consumption by overloaded guns, automatically turning off when the energy reserves are exhausted.

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Rika introduction cutscene

Some time ago, I showed you Rika - the goblin merchant. And now I finished the cutscene where she is freed from enslavement. Or not freed - anything can happen in the heat of battle. Sorry, Ugylk, but the dwarf really promised you nothing about women. Anyway, the cutscene is actually not about the goblin girl, but about the victory over the cyclops, the final boss of the forest location.

And as usual, while making the cutscene, I've add another pack of features to the cutscene editor. For example, now I'm able to loop separate cutscene fragments until the desired number of repetitions is reached, check the number of mobs that have escaped from the battle, and move actors along curves, including a height emulation curve - made special for May and other flying entities, if any appears in future.

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Offroad wheels

Finished work on new offroad wheels - with greater speed, offroad ability and spikes damaging enemies as a nice addition. Trying to explain "offroad" part within used technological level I achieved a rather funny result - the wheels are covered with metal and wrapped around with rope. I'm not sure how much such tricks actually increases the offroad ability of wooden wheels, but within the game let's think it's "quite a lot".

Due to some features of the new part, or rather, the recently changed way structures damage mobs, I had to try Unity animator layers for the first time - before that, all my animations were replacing each other. I'm not sure if this functionality will be required anywhere else, however, the knowledge is useful.

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Fairy skills

In the meantime, work on the skill tree continues. For now I'm finishing May's skill branch for the first chapter of the game. Among the others, it includes the Freeze skill which I've shown before, a couple of buff active skills, some passive skills to improve various parameters and something special - the Knowledge is power skill adds a number of stupid and obvious fairy's statements to the set of loading screen tips, which however give a small buffs for the entire battle to the stats they mention.

Another thing of interest is the Enchanted Arrows skill - it woks similar to the Ugylk's projectile modifying skill, but instead of poisoning enemies, it adds bonus ice damage to projectiles, as well as a small chance to freeze the enemy. This time I put more efforts in visual effects on projectiles. And it took some extra work to impement applying effects not only on projectiles, but on areas of effect they spawn too.

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Retractable spikes

Recently, I promised to add a couple more tank parts to the game, and now one of them is ready - retractable spikes. It's a reforge of regular spikes, causing significantly more damage to enemies. Another important difference from regular spikes is that retractable spikes consume energy to work in proportion to their number on the tank - which depends on the size of its chassis.

And I should probably mention some details of this parts type, since it seems that I've never done this before. Bumper-type parts are attached to the forepart of the tank and play an important role in its protection - they deal damage to enemies in range, grants bonuses to total tank health and armor. They also reduce damage from collisions with objects in attack mode.

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Blueprints screen

The last element of the progression screen - blueprints tab - is ready. There you can check the dwarf's mission of gathering back his blueprints progress, get a couple of clues about their location and content, and reassemble some of them from scraps. Same with the skills tab, to this moment its UI has already been working, and now I've just unified some of its elements with the rest of the UI. Also I've arranged the blueprints in some sort of tree. Right now it already contains blueprints of almost all the parts that will be available in the forest location, at the moment their amount is 17. Soon I will add a couple more, and the rest will appear later, as part of working on the following locations.

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Backyard rework

Surely almost no one remembers already that in addition to the forest location there is a training location - the backyard of the dwarf's dwelling. It happened because when I started to publish posts about the game, the location was almost complete, and there was nothing to add. And after, with the implementation of shadows and some other features, its completeness was seriously affected, and a lot of things was in need of rework. Which is what I've been doing lately. And now - here it is, extended and looped for the attack mode, with shadows, standalone decorations, new grass and some other changes.

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Goblin girl Rika

Not much to show from the past weeks, but here is another minor story character. Her name is Rika, and she represents female part of the goblin tribe, enslaved by the cyclops. Once freed from slavery, she will provide some nice offers of common resources in the market. And maybe a couple of funny moments of interactions with other goblins in the team, if there is any.

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Onager in action

Onager in action. Unlike other guns, it throws projectiles by parabolic trajectory and the projectile hits directly at the point it was sent to, damaging all enemies in a certain area. In addition, survivors are also stunned and unable to do anything for a while. Being a large gun also means high damage, significant energy consumption and low fire rate.

The game currently offers two control schemes for the large guns - a gun and a skill. In first scheme, the onager works like any other gun - it constantly consumes energy and shoots while fire button is pressed. With the second option it activates on pressing skill button, the energy for the shot is consumed immediately, and the rest is going similar to Ugylk's grenade throwing.

And as always, creating seemingly a single entity, in addition to the model and icon, also demanded some new sounds, a new AOE variant with specific effects, and a bunch of code to implement the desired behavior.

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Onager

Onager asset is ready to battle, although battlefield is not yet ready to take it. Designing a gun in 3D from the beginning is new experience for me, and of course it was accompanied with some mistakes and sudden findings, which had to be handled by some workarounds. In result the onager became longer than I expected, obtained a few more beams in the base and a black hole to hide its lack of insides, and I had to dive into shaders to create dynamic outlines for particular parts. Now it's time for the most interesting part - to make this huge thing work in the game as intended.

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