Hostile Mars Devlog #04: More Mars Plants, Shock Turrets, and Further Improvements on DOTS IK

This week was spent on a number of improvements with a goal to get the build into playtesting soon. 

I've also created a road map for the development up until PC and Console launch. I wasn't happy with how the enemy interactions were so I reworked the behavior coding on how they react to bullet hits, seeing the player, and pursuing the player. It's getting better day by day!

Here are a few of the things that were completed this week:

Turrets

A new model for the Tesla Turret:

Moving along to the turrets! I want to have the base turrets in the game and upgradable within the next few weeks, which include:

1. Projectile Turrets (laser bullets, physics-based)
2. Beam Turrets (continuous laser beam, hitscan)
3. Tesla Turrets (shock turret, hitscan )
4. Rocket Launcher Turrets (rockets, physics-based)
5. Glue Turret (Coming Soon!)

I hope to have the VFX done in the next few weeks to show this one in action!

Environment

There are also a few new variants to the plant life on Mars, as seen here:

Looks like the terraforming activities paid off! I wonder if these can be harvested for use ...

Performance

I've also further polished the IK Conversion to be Data-Oriented and am seeing great results. Here is a test showing the performance difference between the traditional game object/object-oriented paradigm coding and data-oriented focused coding:

Development Road Map

As promised, here is the roadmap for development:

And More

Next week I am going to be implementing more enemy behaviors, focused on the ground enemies. Ground enemies take more damage from most damage-based traps while being more resistant to physics-based traps such as force traps and other movement-altering traps.

After that I will be introducing combining enemies, a new enemy type that gets stronger with units packed closer together.

That's it for this week, another update on progress next week!

Take care,

-Jake