Developer Blog - New enemy type, weapons redesigns and introducing ‘Test Lab’ (Patreon)

I’m happy to finally be doing traditional blog posts again. We have a lot of new stuff to show so this blog post will largely revolve around images, rather than text, so let's jump straight in!

As usual, here is an Imgur album containing all the gifs and images in case they do not load on your mobile device: 

https://imgur.com/a/bddFCRu

New Enemy: Air Drone (name pending)

The Air Drone is one of our more simplistic enemy types. They see a target and they shoot at the target! Of course, this being Selaco, they will have a couple of more “advanced” moments, like being able to fire while moving, strafing when taking damage, and thrusting themselves forward at a faster speed to get behind you.

They have about the same amount of health as a regular Alien grunt but their damage per second output is lower compared to most enemies, making them relatively easy to deal with as long as you don't engage a larger group of Air Drones.

The Air Drone is currently being modeled and textured in 3D. Similarly to what we did for the Crawler Mine, I’ll be showing a full turnaround once it is finished. I’m expecting this to happen by the next blog post, as well as a better name than ‘Air Drone’.

New Enemy: Invader Turret

Humans have one major advantage over the Alien Invaders: AOS. This supercomputer is capable of doing extensive research for any subject and is capable of providing the best possible solution to any engineering problem. It is the reason why Exon Weaponry managed to perfect the effectiveness of bullet weapons, as well as creating top of the line Sentry Turrets.

While the enemy faction has strength in numbers and tactics, their hardware is far more primitive as a result of not having their own super intelligent AI system. Their Sentry Turret is weaker and much easier to destroy than your average ACE Security Sentry Turret, but packs the same amount of punch because it fires much faster. Given Dawn's lack of understanding of their technology, you cannot hack these unlike the ACE Security Sentry Turrets that have been converted by the enemy. The only way to dispatch the Invader Sentry is by destroying them.

Pro-tip: Alien tech is almost never waterproof and you can use this to your advantage. Throw a drinking mug at them, toss them in the water, use anything you can to make them come into contact with water since it will fry their circuits which causes them to go haywire. They will no longer exclusively target you, they will also target aliens before eventually exploding. The game does not tell you this, so consider this a Patreon Exclusive gameplay tip!

The Sentry Turret is currently being turned into a voxel by Borion. The GIF below is a Work in Progress

Weapon Revision: DMR

We have shown this weapon in a previous blog post and while we did like the design, we felt like we could do better. We made a few design changes as well as a full repaint.

For comparison sake, here is the old design:

Scrapped Content: Railgun

DON'T BE ALARMED! Selaco will absolutely have a railgun, but the design we currently have is going to be scrapped entirely. The model above was made almost 4 years ago and aged poorly. It does not match our current standards at all and rather than sticking with it, we decided to fully redo it.

We don't want to botch the landing with the railgun, so we redesigned it and we almost have a design ready. We’re not sure about showing it off post-launch though! It’s a powerful weapon that you find later on, and I don't want to spoil the entire arsenal. Just know that Silvia made a design that completely blows the design above out of the water!

Weapon showcase: Plasma Rifle

The Plasma Rifle is a fully automatic weapon that fires plasma bolts at high speed. However, out of all the automatic weapons we have so far, the Plasma Rifle has the lowest Rate of Fire. Make no mistake however, its damage potential is much higher than any other of our automatic weapons so far. There are two drawbacks to this, however. You have to factor in slower moving projectiles, which can get quite tricky at medium to longer range combat since enemies always try to move around a lot. Secondly, while far from rare, the ammo supply is much more limited. Unlike the more traditional bullet type weapons in your arsenal, you will not be able to use the Plasma Rifle for each encounter unless you have saved up on a lot of credits and have plenty to buy at a Safe Room.

A lot of guns in Selaco have a unique trait. The SMG, for example, has a taser and the Penetrator Nailgun has increased headshot damage and ignores armor. The Plasma Rifle has a more situational trait. Destroying environmental hazards like Explosive Barrels, Fire Extinguishers and what not, produces a much larger explosion when destroyed with the Plasma Rifle. The increased radius does not apply to the player character, so you will not have to distance yourself further from hazards.

Most of the animations for the Plasma Rifle are done. The only thing left is a cleaned up reload animation, and a few exclusive death animations for when you kill enemies with the Plasma Rifle.

When the Plasma Rifle is done, I will get to animating the Grenade Launcher. Below is a gif of the weapon in action.

<Animations are WIP>

Patreon Content: Extended Demo

Now that the ‘’Early Access Demo’’ is no longer relevant, we have replaced it with a new reward. Introducing: ‘’Extended Demo Access’’!

The Extended Demo will arrive sometime in 2023, a more exact date is pending, and will run on a newer build and have an additional level to play. If you have seen some of the preview content on YouTube, you might have seen this level from time to time. We believe it’s a much better map and we cannot wait to show it off.

Extended Demo Access is given to everybody who cumulatively pledged at least $10 or more after the month of May.

Patreon Content: Test Lab

For many months, Admirals have helped us test the demo and it has been a tremendous amount of help. We have been able to add additional polish to the game, as well as iron out bugs and add fun ideas suggested by Admirals.

Now with the demo out of the way, I would like to introduce the Test Lab feature. All Admirals who still actively pledge $5 a month will gain access to a super secret Steam Beta called ‘Test Lab’. The Test Lab will be a severely stripped down build of Selaco with the focus being on testing a new feature, like a weapon or enemy type. It will consist of a Sandbox Level where these new features can be played around with and tested.

We are not entirely sure how often we can commit to having a Test Lab build ready, so it’s best to not assume something will happen every month, but we will try to keep it maintained and introduce a new toy to play with from time to time. It’s the least we can do after all that the Admirals have done for us. Thank you!

You will receive an email in the future with the password.

Conclusion

Great progress was made these past 2 weeks! Of course, not everything we have been working on is shown here. While all of the above was being worked on, I was actively busy with level design. I don't want to show off all the areas that we are making so I’m keeping those under wraps, but I will provide an ultrawide screenshot of a cute little kitchen that I have built.

Cockatrice has been diving into the back-end and GZDoom and started adding basic multi-threading to GZDoom so sprites and sound files can be properly loaded without causing a stutter to the entire game. This was a common problem during the demo where players would often report hitches when certain sprites (like effects or enemies) would load for the first time in the level. We are confident this will greatly improve the smoothness of the game. We will now work on adding the content shown above and hope to have them presentable for you next week!

Thank you again for your amazing support. None of this would have been possible without you!

Wesley de Waart