Attack skills

The next branch of skills - the attack branch - contains skills that are responsible for increasing the damage dealt in various ways, from direct damage multipliers for weapons and spikes to active attacking skills. For example, there is a skill that increases the damage from each subsequent hit on the same enemy, or a skill that increases the accuracy of guns. Among the active skills there is a buff for a percentage bonus to projectile impact damage, and something new - the Salvo skill. For a certain amount of energy, it causes all the tank's guns to fire at a certain area for a short period of time, with highly increased fire rate. The guns that were switched off at the time of activation also participate in the salvo, and the base energy consumption of guns is absent during it, which allows this skill to become an alternative way to use guns that are too expensive in terms of energy usage.

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Map

Actually, at first I didn't plan to visualize the progress of the game completion at all, and the only thing that supposed to change during it was the number of the current stage. However, when I designed additional game modes, besides simple story progression, the map turned out to be the most convenient way to access them. So I had to draw one - and here it is. Unlike most of the rest content of the game, the map is already complete and includes all the planned story chapters. So far, it is just a picture, but I'm already working on implementing it into the interface and adding the functionality required.

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Captions

The next feature was planned a long time ago, but I found some time to work on it only now. Behold the floating captions! Made specifically for those who want to know exactly how much and what types of damage that orc received with the stone hitting his head, how much and what valuables dropped from the goblin scavenger, how much health the cyclops restored by devouring the goblin slave, and what kind of strange movements does the goblin with the stone sword. Almost everything is accompanied by captions now - the damage dealt and received, dropped loot and experience, restored health, critical hits and some mob abilities, such as dodging. To prevent the screen from becoming total mess - all of these are configurable, you can switch showing damage by types to just its total value and each type of captions can be turned off - the settings window now have tabs for this. In addition, damage of various types and healing done sequentially, instead of creating a new captions are grouped into one.

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Knowledge skills

The next skill tree branch - knowledge branch - contains everything related to experience, skills, and blueprints. For instance, it is there you can find skills, unlocking additional active skill slots, what makes it quite important. And the skills that affect the experience gained are also very useful. To be honest, maybe some of them even turned out to be too overpowered, and later, while working on game balance, I'll have to nerf them one way or another.

There is also an active skill increasing the experience gained for a short time - I think it will be useful if you need some extra levels before the story challenges insuperable so far.

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New music track

It's been a while since I posted new music tracks. There are several reasons for this - on the one hand, I already have all the music I need for the initial release, on the other - I wasn't really able to write anyhing in these two years. But now I've finished a boss theme for one of the story bosses in human location, which I was occasionally trying to make all this time - and I present it to your attention. It will vary the familiar combination of bowed strings and piano of this location tracks with overdriven guitars and the corresponding percussions. Like the title track of the game, Forsaken Heaven also grows from the distant past, when instead of game making I dreamed about gathering a power metal band and tried to write songs for it. There were even some lyrics drafts, not finished either.

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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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