A couple of development milestones have been reached since the last actual dev update post. The first being that all of the episode 1 updating has been completed, with the campaign file being fully playable from start to finish. A few missions have been added, a few have been completely reworked and overall I'd say it's just a better experience now. Work on updating episode 1 and making episode 2 have been happening simultaneously all this time, so it was good for my mental state to finally being to check that one off the list.
Another one, which took a bit longer than initially calculated, were the visual novel backgrounds for episode 2. The backgrounds for episode 1 Axem made in Space Engineers, which didn't take too long to setup. For the interior of the Guardian Angel, he wanted to try his hand at Unreal engine 4. This was a bit of a learning experience for him, so it took some time. But I think it came out
pretty great. And with some transparancy, lets us do things like at the 2:49 mark in the above video.
One of the locations in the Unreal EditorAxem also did some amazing work on asteroid textures, improving basically all of the existing asteroids in some way, and adding a few more for specific purposes. As seen at the 3:24 mark, he replaced the original 'Scar asteroid' (from beyond the red line) and eventually got so fed up with making the inside of that asteroid not look like arse, that he just outright replaced the whole interior. Which was much needed, because it was very easy to get lost inside the interior, which could make the mission a bit frustrating. But now everyone can just focus on finding them precious ores.
Escaping the clutches of FRED's awful briefing editor, we're moving onto JAD style briefings now.Dahblount also did some neat programming. Adding a 'failure rate' feature, allowing weapons to have a defined random chance to substitute out for another weapon. Which I use for the Ezchalon scattershot (the shotgun type weapon that was shown last post) to have some shells misfire and explode in your own face. The perils of using blackmarket weapons.
And on the subject of weapons, notice how in the first clip there's an ammo switching feature for the Bakaka weapon. Use the right ammo type against the right targets for the best damage. Another nifty script by the lua wizard Axem.
You can take part in a time attack race to earn some extra money to buy these weaponsEpisode 2 at this point only has two missions left that need to be made (assuming I don't change my mind on that randomly), while the rest are 'complete' but will still need that sweet sweet polishing. The visual novel parts are the biggest amount of work left, which is just a time consuming process with no real shortcuts. In addition to writing, there's the spellchecking/editing, adding the syntax and testing it over and over to make sure it works. Work Work.
I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch of other things that have already been done in recent times, but eventually everything just kind of starts to blur together, and after working on WoD for so long I start to forget what is new and has been around for a while. (Also I'm typing this post at 03:00). In short, things are still steadily progressing, despite things occasionally taking a bit longer than initially expected.
I hope you will all look forward to the eventual end result.
