Here's a new teaser video. This time it has more gameplay footage, and a look at the new UI. I'm still making tweaks to the UI, but this is the style I'm going for right now.

wobwobwobwobwob

I enjoyed it. Well done movie, what was the music?

I might have to get on starcraft 2 when this comes out...

"Requiem" by broove. I found it on Newgrounds a while back, but it's probably on there somewhere still.

Pretty good. However, while I love your "intro", it might prevent certain players from listening the whole trailer, thinking it's not their kind of game (because it takes such a long time before revealing the actual gameplay).

Yeah, I decided that for this one I didn't care so much about the pacing of it. A future video for it will definitely be faster paced, however.

Any news?

No.

I've evidence that you have some now.

You mean the UI thing? I posted about that months ago, I just haven't posted any screenshots (other than the trailer video thing).

EDIT:
Here's a basic update on the abilities. Blue means it works as intended, Yellow means it works but has some glitches, and Red means it is not done or needs to be redone.

MECH OPERATIVE

• Missile Array
  
• Shockwave
  
• Laser Cannon
  
• Self-Repair
  
• Flight
  
• Grenades

COVERT OPERATIVE

• Tactical Strike
  
• Mark for Death
  
• Sniper Round [BUG] The ability marker is not showing up properly, but its a simple fix. I just need to change the attach point.
  
• Scope
  
• Cloak
  
• Deploy Mine

INFANTRY COMMANDER

• Railgun
  
• Bull Rush
  
• Cruise Missile
  
• Ironclad
  
• Barrier
  
• Survivalism

MEDICAL TACTICIAN

• Irradiate
  
• Life Leech
  
• EMP Arc
  
• Siphon
  
• Flyby
  
• Deploy Beacon

ASSAULT COMMANDER

• Rocket Leap
  
• Assault Rally
  
• Flamethrower
  
• Speed Burst
  
• Smoke Screen
  
• Deploy Turret

PSIONIC TACTICIAN

• Energy Bomb
  
• Psi Slash
  
• Void Discs
  
• Berserk
  
• Clone
  
• Psionic Storm

Once those are all done, I'll start working on the ult variations, then redo the store triggers. After all that is said and done, I'll create all the mini-bosses and the associated AIs that go with them. I have a feeling that will be the most difficult part of this whole thing.

EDIT:
Changed colors on 4 abilities.

Post has been edited 9 time(s), last time on May 2 2012, 10:08 pm by DevliN.

Finished the base for the Infantry's Survivalism ability. Also finished the active and passive versions of the Medic's Siphon ability.

I also finished a very basic version of Life Leech, but I think I'm going to redo it. As it stands now, the ability basically shoots a projectile at the target, and then the projectile bounces back to the Medic. Though this looks sort of neat, I think it would be awesome to have a tentacle that whips off her arm instead. Before anyone chimes in with suggestions, I already know how to do it, I'm just being lazy at the moment.

Speaking of lazy, I just realized that I keep forgetting to fix the Sniper Round and Flamethrower abilities. Meh.

EDIT:
Covert Operative's "Deploy Mine" is now done. I may modify it to allow multiple mines to be placed at a time, but for now this works just fine.

EDIT2:
Medical Tactician's "Life Leech" is now a tentacle attack. The tentacle launch site isn't following the Medic's arm and I'm too lazy to mess with it now, so I'm moving on to other abilities.

EDIT3:
Medical Tactician's "Deploy Beacon" is done.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on May 1 2012, 9:01 pm by DevliN.

All the level 1 abilities for the heroes are done. I need to fix the target cursor for the Covert's Snipe ability, the damage output of the Assault's Flamethrower ability, and the tentacle attachment of the Medic's Life Leech ability. Other than that, I need to go through and make sure they all have range indicators and splats - mainly cosmetic fixes.

My next step will be to create the variations of the ult abilities. For the most part this should be pretty easy as they are minor changes to the existing ults rather than complete overhauls of the ults themselves. I'll also then do the triggers to switch between them which should be cake as it basically just disables the existing ult ability and enables the variant in its place.

Finally, once those are done, I'll add the levels 2 through 5 versions of each spell. That shouldn't be too bad, with the exception of a couple abilities that have multiple Effects linked.

I've been finding it very difficult to motivate myself and finish this, but eventually it'll get done. Eventually. I have a lot of free time right now that I should be using to work on this. I think part of the problem is that as I play it to test it, I no longer find the game to be fun. But I've also played it hundreds of times.

After the last patch, I uploaded and playtested the map and a handful of things no longer work:

• Infantry's attack animation no longer plays. An easy fix, but still weird.
  
• Mech's laser cannon target line no longer appears. This one was tricky to do the first time, so it'll take some work to fix.
  
• Assault's leap teleports and makes the unit visible as the missile launches simultaneously. This seems to happen after every patch.
  
• Medic's flyby used to uncloak a Banshee that appears before loading the unit. Now it appears, doesn't uncloak, and even though that sort of looks cool, it isn't what I'm going for. Probably an easy fix.
  
• Auto-selecting a hero when the start timer runs out. This may be due to some weirdness that came about when I tried to create a unit group variable with an array of 8192 (or whatever the maximum is).
  
• Default camera will not move to the starting area after the heroes are selected.
  
• Store triggers now display the store even when no units are in the region.

For the most part these are easy to fix. It's just a pain in the ass to have to find out why they stopped working in the first place (especially the damn Leap ability).

In the meantime, I've redone all the movement triggers for the allied units, so they will continue to attack north as each tiered barracks dies. I have yet to do the triggers that set up a new allied base in the area once that happens, but that'll be next on my list, as well as spawning the mini-bosses as that happens.

Also I with I could reset the version count when I upload this to playtest. That's annoying.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Nov 19 2012, 6:45 pm by DevliN.

Apparently I can't update the OP anymore without some SQL bug, and changing it manually in the SQL is a pain in the ass. So here are the updates.

The release of HotS got me active again, and I'm trying to push to finish a majority of this before I inevitably lose steam. I've worked over the past week redoing a ton of the map from scratch, and that's actually led to a lot of better systems than what I had in place before.

I've redone most of the abilities. As shown in my last post, past patches have destroyed my abilities and I had no motivation to fix them. I've since gotten over that and aside from completely redoing the Assault's Flamethrower attack and trying to figure out how to tether the Assault's Reapers, they're all done.

I scrapped the Data Veterancy system and decided to go with a Trigger system instead. This was mostly because of the weird shared exp values that my heroes would get (i.e. .00142 exp when they should be getting 1.0) from shared kills. The new system has flaws but at least I can manage more exact experience values. Because of this, I've also scrapped the Data Learn system and decided to use Triggers to manage when abilities are learned. I'm sure there's a less complex way of doing it compared to what I'm specifically doing now, but it works so whatever.

I made some changes to the UI. In ditching the Data Veterancy, I've decided on just using text for experience, levels, and so on. I think this looks cleaner overall, and gives you a more exact representation of how your hero is doing. The hero selection screen has also been redone, and now has a much simpler look. So far the hero selection works well, but I won't know for sure until I do public testing down the line. In theory it's all fine, though. I also made better use of global variables and frankly can't believe how poorly I structured a lot of the Triggering before without them. Just goes to show that spending so much time neglecting Triggers in favor of Data actually hindered the process ultimately.

I started playing around with the cutscene editor. I think I'll save all the cutscene stuff for the end as they're mostly cosmetic, but at least I'm learning how to do them in the process. As a side note, coming from a world of professional editing the cutscene editor annoys the shit out of me.



In terms of what's ahead, I wrote out a 4-page"to-do" list with all my compiled notes over the years. I still have a lot to do before I release a beta of the map (I'm OCD like that), but most of the base systems are in place. The less cosmetic things that need to happen generally speaking are as follows:

• Add teammate hero frames to UI.
  
• Add minimap markers for active enemy spawn points, enemy counter-attacks, and the heroes.
  
• Actually settle on one idea for the items (as it stands now, I have Weapons modifying damage and attack speed, Armor modifying defense and movement speed, Weapon Addons modifying various combinations of weapon/damage augments, Armor Addons modifying various combinations of defense/health augments, and Accessories being various standalone items for use).
  
• Create the first 3 minibosses/special enemy units. Create AI for these units.
  
• Settle on an idea for how the Store should work, and add a few items to it.
  
• Balance income gains, and settle on what it should be based on. So far heroes gain income per minute based on level, with bonuses for checkpoints captured and bosses killed.
  
• Balance amount of enemies spawned based on number of active players, making sure experience gains don't suffer.
  
• Balance HP, armor, and damage of heroes and NPCs.
  

These are more notes/reminders for myself at this point, but regardless:

• Hero revive base triggers are complete, including giving the proper abilities and learn abilities to the hero as well as returning the proper items. I removed lives completely, and decided to go with a cooldown system. Each time you die (up to 5 times) the respawn timer adds 20 seconds (maximum 100).
  
• Base merchant triggers are done. Now I just need to add the art for the window and fill in the item information.
  
• Income triggers complete. 10 minerals earned per level, and bonus income earned when killing bosses. After 5 deaths, each additional death will reduce your total income as an added incentive to stay alive.
  
• Compiled list of textures for swapping, but I'm sure there are a bunch more to look at before I decide on what I want to change (if anything).
  
• Still trying to balance unit spawn counts, health, and damage. The way the map is now, with one player it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to kill one or two of the three lowest-tiered barracks. Ultimately I want to cap the game at 60 minutes, so I'm thinking I should make it a little easier to get past the first area sooner.

Things to do/fix:

• Reset fog of war in certain parts of the map as the game starts.
  
• Figure out why the first boss cutscene takes a minute after completing to get back into the game.
  
• Make the pings for the checkpoint tiers function better.
  
• Change the default HP/Energy bars above the heroes to something better (i.e. HotS bars).
  
• Add region to tactical strike's target point for a few seconds to add experience to the Covert if anything dies that wasn't killed by the ability.
  

Also, I hate variables with arrays that decide they don't want to work (probably because I'm doing something wrong ). It's funny how many I set up thinking they'd make my life easier originally, but now with 1 variable per array things work fine despite making it take longer to do things. Oh well.

Updates:

• Added the art for the main merchant window and item details window. Still have to design new button skins for the items, however.
  
• Added the art for the allied heroes UI. Also added triggers to display health percent of allies. A tooltip will also display the name and level of the hero. I attempted to have it also show the current HP on the unit, but apparently that isn't possible without a lengthy workaround that I'd rather not deal with at the moment.
  
• Added triggers to randomize hero selection if nothing is chosen when the timer runs out. I still have to add a trigger ending the timer early if every active player has selected a hero. Currently the idea I have to pull this off is overly-complex, so I'll have to look into a more efficient way of doing it.
  
• Added triggers to check and set which items are being used for easy reviving and item purchasing/selling. I have a feeling there are ways to break this, so I'll have to do some testing to try to bug it out.
  
• I'm trying to get the new Siege Tank impact force to work on my abilities, but haven't had any luck so far. I'll have to spend more time dissecting it, unfortunately.
  

So far things are looking good overall. If I keep this up, I should have a playable demo released soon^TM. I think once I start tackling all the busy-work of copying everything I've done so far on the Mech (my testing unit) to the other 5 heroes, my motivation will dwindle a bit but not enough to make me stop completely. I wanna finish this damn thing already.

I want to play it, hurryhurry!

Since I can't update the OP without getting tons of errors, I've remade the thread here.