Dev Blog #45 - Grenade Launcher update, Saw Drones, A jukebox and more (Patreon)

Picture of a Safe Room

Time for our new bi-weekly blog post. Or, well, almost tri-weekly for this one. We're slightly overdue for this one.

Last week I made a blog post without editing approval from my team because I did not want to disturb them on the job. It went terribly so let’s do it again. Roast me in the comments for every typo that I made!

We’ve got a good bunch of things to show. A lot of time was spent mapping which will remain behind closed doors for the time being so this blog post might end up being a tiny bit shorter than it usually is. We'll see! Let me dig into the pile of things we've made for the past 2 weeks and see how long this blog post gets.

Grenade Launcher remodeling

The weapon looked good, but in first person view it could look a little dull. We went ahead and made some minor revisions to make the grenade launcher more visually appealing in-game.

New Model

Old Model

And here is the 3D model of the updated Grenade Launcher. Remember that the display is added in post!

Outside of the display, the difference may seem a bit small at first, but trust me that this will make all the difference in first person view!

This Grenade Launcher is going to be very tricky to implement. You see that blue display on the weapon? An actual display will be overlaid onto the sprite and will change based on the Grenade Type that the player is using (Frag, Ice, Acid). The challenge here is that this will require us to do 4 different rendering passes for all of our animations. Once for the grenade launcher without a display, and 3 additional passes with just a display and no weapon.

Quite labor intensive, but that’s the unfortunate reality when using an old engine that uses sprites. Thankfully, I expect the entire rendering process to take no more than a day, two if I’m unlucky. Very curious about the result on this one!

Gravity Manipulation

A few blog posts ago we’ve shown our Gravity Manipulator in action, an alternative fire mode for the Plasma Rifle where the player can pick up props and toss them around.

One of the things we always wanted to do was to add the ability to pick up smaller enemy types and toss them around. Picking up a Crawler Mine, for example, allows you to throw them against the enemy, causing them to explode on their own teammate.

Enemy Behavior has been disabled for demonstration purposes

Starlight

Starlight is 98% finished and we’re ready to move on to the next level. This level consists of 5 sections (6 if you're picky) and will take roughly over an hour to beat. Beating Starlight gives you Selaco’s most powerful weapon, which you will need in order to progress.

Saw Drones

Added and implemented into the game! And yes, you can absolutely destroy them and use their circle saw with your Gravity Manipulator. It would be embarrassing if you couldn’t.

On-screen Keyboard

Image of the on-screen Keyboard is super duper work in progress!

One of the hurdles we have to overcome when aiming for Steam Deck verification, is to implement a proper full screen keyboard within the engine. GZDoom has one built-in, but it’s completely unreadable on Steam Deck and feels rather cumbersome to use, so we’re aiming to modernize a bit.

Jukebox

We’ve added a fully functional Jukebox voxel. Insert a few pennies and listen to a couple of banging tracks! Lawrence made a whole bunch of tracks during his career, but a bunch of tracks that he really liked never saw the light of day. Solution? Jukebox! He had a couple of tracks that work well within the bar setting of the area. Can’t wait for you to hear them! I'll make sure to share a track in #Patreon-showcase over at our Discord channel later this week.

The Jukebox was fun to make. We had to work on a speaker pairing system so that enabling the Jukebox, would play actual music through the speakers spread around the area. If you've gotten sick of the music (why would you!?), you can choose to destroy every single speaker to completely get rid of it. You can continue the rest of the campaign knowing you have questionable taste in music.

Alt Fire System

Weapon Kit pickup voxel. Ignore the very long label, we have to figure out a solution for that later!

One of the bigger gameplay mechanics in Selaco is the ability to find new Alternative Fires (called Alt Fires from here on out) for your guns. Throughout your journey, you will stumble upon plenty of side-area’s (or even a series of encounters) that lead towards a new Alternative Fire mode for a weapon. For example, if you choose to explore that little parking garage in the distance, you may find a new alt fire for your SMG, allowing you to dual-wield it. You can choose to skip these sections entirely, but you will miss out on new tools to use. So make sure you scavenge well. Missed one? No worries, you can always go back to previous levels at a later time to hunt them down.

After picking one up, you will receive a confirmation prompt asking whether you want to equip it right away, or put it in your storage. If you choose to put it in Storage, you can use Safe Rooms to change the Alt Fire for your weapons.

Dawn Plushy

Cannot share too much here! We’ve been approached by a company who specializes in designing, creating and selling plushies of numerous franchises. We haven’t really done merchandising before, it’s not something we have been willing to explore just yet, but the deal seems like a lot of fun so I’ll be having a meeting with them soon to see how it all works. Extra funding for development is always nice to have and what better way than giving a plushy in return?

I’ll keep you posted!

Zooming

We have cheated in our demo. Remember that kickass Alt Fire for the Roaring Cricket that allows you to fire 3 shots in rapid succession? It was not meant to be available to the player right away. You will not be getting it until late into the second level (So roughly 2 hours into the game).

Instead, most weapons start out by having some epic zooming features that are exactly like your primary fire, but more accurate! Whenever you find a new weapon, a new (more interesting?) Alt Fire for that weapon is not usually far off. Assuming, of course, the player pays close attention to their surroundings.

Dawn zooms in with the Roaring Cricket, using both hands. This reduces a tremendous amount of recoil at the expensive of movement speed.

SMG Zooming. Reduces spread. This makes it almost as accurate as a hip firing UC-36 

New Weapon

We’re working on one more weapon. A secret one! We don’t really show easter eggs before launch so all I can do is give a hint. You find this secret weapon in the third level of the full game, but you will have to look very hard for it. This secret weapon completely annihilates every robot enemy in the game, but it will do literally 0 damage to anyone who is not a robot. They will just think you are a child for using it.

Season Patrons who have read plenty of blog posts in the past may be able to piece together what this weapon is going to be. For now, my lips are sealed. If we ever reach our monthly goal of 35.000.000 million a month I'll gladly spill the beans, but alas.

Fixed a sprite issue

A couple of days ago we, jokingly, apologized for having an error in one of reloading sprites. (https://twitter.com/SelacoGame/status/1616852080261730304).

As probably all gun enthusiasts can tell right away, the bullet is being inserted the wrong way around. This issue has been corrected and we’re giving our Patrons a sneak peak at the corrected sprite. Lo and behold, a fixed sprite!

How did this happen? Simple, an animation problem! During the reload, Dawn catches the magazine that's inside the cricket and replaces it with a new one that is hidden underneath the camera. But we need to use the exact same magazine that came out of the weapon right before we put it into the gun, which is a common thing for weapon reloads in video games; the end of the reload should bring you back to the exact same state it was before, including the new magazine. So we pull a switcheroo right before the end and swap them. But we forgot to rotate it accordingly, so it ended up being inserted the wrong way around.

Conclusion

Well I'll be damned, it ended up being of a decent length after all! Like all the blogs before it, things are continuing on a rapid pace and everything is fully set into mention. With Starlight out of the way, tackling the streets will be our next goal.  One of our concept artists is currently working on ironing out the last couple of sketches for the streets so we have a proper point of reference to work with.

Admirals, we are very likely going to launch a new Test Lab soon, where we start testing the Gravity Manipulation device of the Plasma Rifle. Keep an eye on your inbox, I'm expecting this to be done within the next 30 days.

As usual, we are grateful for your support. Thanks you for sticking around and allowing us to do this.

Wesley de Waart