In the last post I mentioned that we were going to start by making the bosses and enemies first before the rest of the chapter as it is a more efficient way for us to develop the game. For Chapter 1 we had made most of the overworld assets, but they are uncolored and we decided to shift our focus to making the enemies as they require more work from all of us. Plus we get more things to show off so it looks like we are making a lot of progress. I've also began keeping track of everything the team is working on and the dates of when things will be done. This helps us, mostly me, have an idea as to when to expect things to be completed so we don't lose track of the current state of development.

At the start of this month I began to rework the enemies system to work with state machines like the player. After we released the first demo, I had reworked the enemies to make it easier for us to build new enemies with, but it was still very limited. If a new enemy had to move in a very specific way, I would have to modify the enemy code to be able to handle that. This all results in bloated and messy code where things can break. Now enemies have been broken down into states, like the player, and making new and unique enemies will require less work and less things to break. The new sniper enemy shows off a new movement type, the crawl. The enemy slowly moves towards the player when it reaches a certain frame on its animation. In this case the frame where the sniper steps forward. The sniper also tries to keep his distance from the player to get a good shot, but this is handled in the main enemy controller. All of the current enemies have been updated to work with the new system, except for the boss I will begin to rework the bosses later.

The funnest part of my job is working on the visuals. When Urban asked if it would be possible to make the elite zombies plasma lights glow, I said yes. However there are a few ways to go about doing this. The first way would be to make a shader that takes in a black and white texture that tells the shader where it should glow, but this method is very taxing on Urban and the GPU as now you need to double the amount of sprites per enemy. The second way is by having the shader generate a black and white mask from using the color data of the main texture. In our case we want the shader to find the areas on the sprite where it is pure white. Let's see how this works.

We first start with the base sprite. Notice that the parts that are pure white are where we want to light up.

Next we use the shader to dynamically generate the light mask by finding the brightest areas of the image. This can be adjusted to pick up darker colors as well if needed. If you've been following development you might remember a UV light shader I've made a while back. I'm using the same code that generates the light mask here.

Finally we tell the shader what color we want the light to be and how bright. The shader then combines the two images to give us the final output. It's not glowing here due to the fact that the current scene doesn't render post-processing effects.

Here it is in game and animated. Pretty cool huh? Some of the limitations of this method are that we can't choose what color we want to use to replace with. As you can see Andrei's eye is glowing because we applied this shader to him as well. However, when he punches the swing effects are also white so the shader makes them glow too. In this case we could tell the shader to use a pure green color instead, but I have yet to get this working. Maybe one day.

This is the Drill bot. This common robot was once used for construction then repurposed for the war, but after the fall of robot society it has been in a deep slumber waiting for the enemy to show up. They only have one attack, but they are quick so be sure to eliminate them before they overwhelm you.

This is the Sniper bot. This construction bot is equipped with an upgraded optics sensor and an overclocked plasma rivet gun that packs a powerful punch. The sniper will always keep its distance so be sure to dodge its shots.

This is the Elite bot. A purpose built military robot that was once on the frontlines of the war. Their only directive, kill all humans. While they are large in size, they have incredible speed. They can launch themselves far back and use their cutting edge plasma mortar to a unleash an energy strike or storm on their opponents. However, due to their rushed development they can't handle the energy feedback from their weapon.

This is the Scrap Rat. An invasive creature of unknown origin capable of eating molten metal and constructing metal nests. Watch out as they have a short temper and begin to build up heat. They can dish out a nasty bite and spit out a puddle of molten metal. Watch your step around these creatures.

Bunny Janitor by Glaciarie.

Uncle Janitor with hair by Glaciarie.

Chairman Thel By Ivy(Bitches).

CEO and Jerome By Ivy(Bitches).

The Junes by W3Rn1ckz.

aLis: ✨The One And Only✨ by W3Rn1ckz.

YIIK Dog or something idk by Zimzagoon.

Uncle Janitor by Zimzagoon.

Absolute Power by 【ｂｏｏｋ】.

Aunty Janitor by 【ｂｏｏｋ】.

Finally making some big progress now. Hopefully we will have a mostly finished chapter by the end of July. A lot of great art as always and I double dipped this time just because there was just so much stuff to showcase. If you have any questions, comments, concerns or testimonies let us know in our Discord.