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June Progress Update


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So it's been a while since I posted up a major status update, beyond the changelog with each new build. Here's what's been going on a Goldhawk recently.

The elephant in the room over the past few months was the Kickstarter - and to an extent, it still is. Has it been a success? We raised a lot of money. But it took us a good 6 weeks of planning, of which I think probably three weeks was time spent on other things than development, and then I probably lost a good two weeks during the Kickstarter itself to PR work, and it'll probably be another two weeks after the Kickstarter to deal with all the rewards.

Was it worth the stress and diverted effort? I'd say it has been. It raised a lot of money, put us in touch with a new audience that would not otherwise have seen the game, and it's expanded the scope of the game a bit in several good ways (female soldiers, linux / mac ports that will allow us to do the Humble Bundle in future, adding a variety of in-game systems like suppression etc). There's also a lot to be said for milestones - they're hell at the time, but they're a great motivator.

In a wider business context, it's also forced the issue of how the business is run. Previously I was operating as a sole trader but with the Kickstarter money arriving I've now formally transferred all the assets to Goldhawk Interactive Ltd. This means lots of admin, like opening a whole new set of bank accounts. Two bits of good news - this will let us back onto Paypal, and also we've now got a dollar denominated UK account too. This should save us a bit of money as lots of US people buy our game and we pay a lot of contractors in USD, but previously it always needed to go via GBP first. Foreign exchange fees can account for up to 5% of the value of the transaction every time you do a cross-currency trade, but that should be costing us far less in future. So that'll be nice. But needless to say, all the accounting admin associated with that has been a complete nightmare...but is now finished and is a load off my shoulders.

I'm pleased to announce we're also hiring our first physical employee - our tile artist (he produces the 3D building / prop models that are painted over by the 2D artists). He'll be joining the team on a full-time basis once he's worked his three month notice period at his current job. His role on the team will obviously initially be to get the tilesets finished and populated with a good number of props, but in the long term he'll be taking some of the production and low-level design responsibilities off me.

We're looking at the level designer vacancy at the moment, too. We have two people currently doing test maps for the role, and we'll make a decision as to which one to hire at the end of the week. Once they're hired they'll be in charge of generating new maps and getting the tile sprites etc set up properly and consistently. That's a big drain on my time, so generally I just don't do it. With someone else handling it, it should add a lot more variation to the game and get everything working much better.

On the code front, the game is progressing well - you've probably seen we've added a lot of features to the game in the past two builds, which is always nice. We're currently in the middle of testing the medal system and the bleeding wounds system should be in the next build too. Looking beyond that, there's not a lot more work to do until we're feature complete. I'll post up a full list so people can point out where I've not included things I've promised I would, just so I don't miss anything!

The rendering of the animated sprites is also going well. We've tweaked our render process and this ended up with a 300% render speed increase, so things are rattling along at quite a rate. There are 5 human armour suits that can use all the weapons, and we've done all the rendering for the first three tiers of normal weapons. We're in the middle of rendering out the final tier of guns, and then we'll be onto the more specialist weapons.

The only issue here is the sheer size of the weapon sprites. Each weapon / armour combination is about 10 - 15mb, and the folder with the Xenonaut units in it is already over 1gb in size. I'm currently considering whether we'll want to cut out the Combat Shield and the Assault Shield, as each one of those needs to be rendered with 7 different weapons in the other hand for 5 different armour types, giving a total of 70 extra weapon / armour sets and nearly a 1gb increase to the size of the game to add effectively one item type. Particularly when we can add flashbangs instead. It'd save a bit of time on the coding front too. That'd mean we'd hopefully have all the Xenonaut units rendered and in the game by the end of the month.

In the tile front we've started work on a couple of new tilesets. We started working on the Middle Eastern desert tilesets and then I figured it might be easier just to recolour some of the ground tiles into two desert sets. So we're going to have a Middle Eastern desert tileset (example) and a US / Africa style desert tileset (example). They will have some overlap but should look different enough for it to work. We've also been working on the UFO tiles, so now all the vital components of the UFOs that need to be captured have their tiles done. A lot of them are animated too. I'll be putting all them in the game for testing purposes shortly.

There are two major things that may delay the game - the first are the tilesets, and the sheer scale of them. Our full-time tile artist will solve a lot of these problems when he joins up, but that's still three months away yet.

My biggest concern, however, is the AI. Sadly we've just lost another AI coder, this one just disappearing off the face of the Earth entirely. This happened about five weeks ago now, but one of the difficulties with remote teams is it takes a while to work through. He reported in weekly anyway, so it took about two weeks for me to realise that there was a problem, then another week of enquiry emails asking what was going on before a final week of waiting to see if they respond to your ultimatum. Then there was an extra week of me being in denial, as AI's been such a thorn in our side recently.

Anyway, I'm going to post the job up today along with our other vacancies and will also announce it on Kickstarter and Twitter in the hope of finding a new AI coder promptly. In our favour, I think we'll be able to build on the work done by the last guy rather then starting from scratch, and we can afford a good guy too. But still, it's something I could have done without...

But overall, it's been a good few months. Posting up milestones should make things a bit clearer for everyone where we are too!

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The only issue here is the sheer size of the weapon sprites. Each weapon / armour combination is about 10 - 15mb, and the folder with the Xenonaut units in it is already over 1gb in size. I'm currently considering whether we'll want to cut out the Combat Shield and the Assault Shield, as each one of those needs to be rendered with 7 different weapons in the other hand for 5 different armour types, giving a total of 70 extra weapon / armour sets and nearly a 1gb increase to the size of the game to add effectively one item type.

I don't understand, I thought a soldier is only able to use a pistol with the shield. Do you plan to have a soldier be able to hold a assault rifle and a shield at the same time? Because I've must've gotten the wrong idea somewhere.

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There are two major things that may delay the game - the first are the tilesets, and the sheer scale of them. Our full-time tile artist will solve a lot of these problems when he joins up, but that's still three months away yet.

My biggest concern, however, is the AI. Sadly we've just lost another AI coder, this one just disappearing off the face of the Earth entirely.

I don't think we're likely to see the game this year.

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I don't understand, I thought a soldier is only able to use a pistol with the shield. Do you plan to have a soldier be able to hold a assault rifle and a shield at the same time? Because I've must've gotten the wrong idea somewhere.

Probably correct, but there is the ballistic pistol, the laser pistol, the alien plasma pistol, the human plasma pistol, the tier 4 pistol if there is such a thing... that's five. I can't remember if a soldier holding a grenade has a sprite for that, and of course there is empty handed. Oh, stun rods! They are one-handed too. So still loads of options there.

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I don't understand, I thought a soldier is only able to use a pistol with the shield. Do you plan to have a soldier be able to hold a assault rifle and a shield at the same time? Because I've must've gotten the wrong idea somewhere.
Stun-rod, ballistic pistol, laser pistol, and plasma pistol cover four of those seven weapons, and that's just off the top of my head. ;)

(Correct me if I'm wrong, Chris! :D)

EDIT: Gack! Ninja'd. :eek:

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Wonder if you'd really need to do them all however. A compromise could be to juggle it in a way that the shield obscures the weapon more or less completely, as an example, have it mounted in inside the shield, with a little gun port for it.

Alternatively have the weapon holstered/behind the shield except when firing, so you could reuse the same frames for 95% of the time (for one armor type, anyways)

Edited by Kaguya
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Alternatively have the weapon holstered/behind the shield except when firing, so you could reuse the same frames for 95% of the time (for one armor type, anyways)

I support this idea :) No need to see the weapon when it isn't firing.

Sheeesh Chris is running through AI coders like candy. I think aliens are succeeding in their infiltration.

Oh and i noticed you can afford a good guy, heh heh...heh...heh...i can't code :|

:D:D:D:D:D:D

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Please don't dump the shields Chris unless you really, really need to. They're a unique feature and could have interesting uses beyond CQC.

Unless the combat/assault shields are just two tiers of shield tech rather than all of it. In that case shield tech could be spread more thinly so to speak.

But yeah, I'm thinking no game this year as well. Both because of the AI coder but even more so because of the tile artist needed 3 more months before he can start in earnest.

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>tut< and people wondered if funding a studio environment would be worthwhile...

"hey, has anyone seen Bob the AI coder? Oh, there he is Velcroed to the studio wall. No sneaking off for 5 weeks for you Bob"

Shame that the three months will prevent the sort of impact that being launched along with Enemy Unknown would have brought. Whatever that might have been.

Was there any release deadline for preorders, I'm thinking Desura. I thought I saw a December 2012 deadline sort of thing or you could claim your pennies back. Not that anyone who's played with the alpha is likely to do that.

I'm with Mordac though, it's no big deal, will be well worth the wait, and may result in some additional goodies :)

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An extra gig or two would still vanish into a cobwebbed corner of my drive without causing a problem.

I would prefer to see the combat shields stay in place.

(I am assuming the 4 pistols, a grenade, a medikit and a stun rod as the 7 variations.)

My alternative would be to only allow certain armour types to carry the shields.

For example jump armour would be blocked because of the bulk of the shield.

That cuts at least two sets of animations out without even taking into account the other scout armours and the biggest powered suits.

Incidentally if weapons can be flagged as blocked to certain sets of armour that would be good for modders to create their own niche sets with special roles in mind.

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I don't mind the extra size either.

In earlier versions, there was two times I found sebilians entranched inside their scout and thought I really wanted a shield or flame thrower.:P

Grenades are not enough sometimes.

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My alternative would be to only allow certain armour types to carry the shields.

.

That's an interesting idea. I quite like little bits of balancing like that. I can't say I'm terribly bothered about the file sizes either and my PC isn't exactly a new one.

If you don't have shields, does that mean that something will be done about those choke points getting into the craft? That would be a shame, not to have an alien smart enough to shoot anything coming near the door. Fortunately, it ran out of ammo after we sent in the eight Avon lady...

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The only issue here is the sheer size of the weapon sprites. Each weapon / armour combination is about 10 - 15mb, and the folder with the Xenonaut units in it is already over 1gb in size. I'm currently considering whether we'll want to cut out the Combat Shield and the Assault Shield

Even download-only games nowadays run up to 10-20 GB.

If the feature has to be dropped due to time / coding constraints... *shrug*

File size shouldn't be an argument.

Another workaround to the shield issue:

There are "heavy" variants of the regular armour types. These have extra armour bolted on on the front but that restricts their agility so they can only use one-handed weapons.

Built-in assault shield.

Less cool than "real" shields, of course... =)

Edited by Gazz
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One of the objectives in the game is to capture an alien to study and interrogate ("No one expects the Spanish Inquisition" mod here). Walking in to a choke point with a stun rod and a smile seems sort of unkind to the guy you choose to get the baddie. Yes there will be armor but nothing sez welcome like a riot shield. Also you have a guy out in the open bleeding out you'll need the shield for protection while you administer first aid. Space really isn't an issue anymore. As a matter of fact we kinda expect it if the game is good like this one. We generally have terabytes of space anymore. I have that much just for games.

The thing to remember is to make it good. That's why we're all here supporting Xenonauts. Don't worry how long it takes. It's not like we aren't already playing the game or anything.

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Can't you offer a 'Shield Pack' DLC for free? That way, people who want them, can download them and add them to the game, while those concerned about HDD space of downloading a large game can do without.

given the retro feel of the game, shouldn't it be 'Shield Pack' expansion?

i personally didn't think many people cared about the shields, heck i had figured they would get cut. i personally would like better grenade physics and corner cover. jean-luc is right in that the shields would be unique to xenonauts, and guadlike is right that if coded right it would give a resource to modders.

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+1 for club of people who has lots of free space on their hdd .

Using the shield to counter reaction fire would be extremely useful, so I'd also very much like the shields to be in the game.

And as others: rather wait longer for the "full game", or if an early release is a priority, then a free dlc-pack would be nice.

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I agree that adding one gig these days hardly matters at all. It'll take longer to verify on Desura sure, but that's not really Goldhawk's concern. It's in their best interest to make the game awesome, and if that makes the game take more space, so be it.

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