MENACE - Dev Diary #20

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Dev diary #20 for MENACE:

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Dev Diary #20: Work in Progress

This week, we give you a snapshot of our active development and show you what we are working on right now. As always, everything we show here is a work in progress.

UI
We are in full swing implementing the second iteration of the tactical combat UI and HUD. As soon as we make enough progress and the UI is in a proper shape, we will be able to share actual gameplay footage. This is also one of the final puzzle pieces we need to prepare a small combat demo for the game.

As part of the UI rework, we overhauled all unit icons. Inspired by NATO military symbology, the player should be able to roughly estimate a unit's role by just looking at its icon.

Art
We are implementing more squad leaders all the time while at the same time trying to keep up with creating the corresponding character illustrations. For now, a lot of these are implemented as work-in-progress versions and will be finished later.

Concept
As we are in the process of onboarding a technical artist, we are preparing some rough concepts for different subtypes of biomes for each of the game's classic biomes.

In this example, the basic biome would be called "temperate" as you would find it on the planet "Backbone". The different subtypes of biomes would be temperate highlands and temperate marshlands.

Bear in mind that these concepts are just a very basic guideline for tech art, intended to illustrate roughly what we are aiming for.

Level Design
Our main focus at the moment is adding more operation types to the game. Right now, we are working on another operation type for the pirate faction. Each enemy faction will have multiple different types of operations, each consisting of a unique set of missions. Of course, we will keep adding more operations during development.

Below, you can see a screenshot from our chunk system editor, which we use to create templates for procedurally generated parts of the map. In this case, it's a rogue forces defense line for the "breakthrough" mission type.

3D
The 3D department is focusing on implementing the dynamic vehicle weapon system, which allows the player to equip their vehicle chassis as freely as possible with all available weapons.

We showed a basic concept in an earlier Dev Diary. Now, the system is actually shaping up and will soon be ready to be implemented. This gives the same freedom you already have when equipping squads to the vehicles and allows for an insane number of weapon load-outs.

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