Dev Blog #49 - Paint, Cars, artwork and More! (Patreon)

I have failed you! You trusted me and I have failed you.

I wanted to get 2 blog posts done in March, but for the first time in 2 years of running a Patreon page, I have failed to meet our quota! Hopefully we can make it up to you with a spicy blog post. If the blog post does not leave you satisfied, call me a dick in the comments and I'll apologize to you personally!

Also.. We are on Blog Post 49 and you know what that means? Our 50th Development Blog post is upcoming which is very exciting! It's always a lot of fun to write these, since outside of the people in the team, nobody gets to see what we're doing. Patreon Blogs are the perfect excuse to still talk about the things we've made that excite us. I appreciate you all for reading these.

Update on my Health Update

In the last blog post I shared a ""short"" little update in regards to my health and want to provide an update on my update. I began my treatment at the end of last week and it has had a positive impact so far. My symptoms have gotten significantly less worse which means the infection is potentially in a decline. It's still present, but no longer bad enough that it prevents me from getting any work done.

I'm very thankful for all the kind messages I received from our Patrons. It did me good and that means a lot <3

Gameplay Trailer

We are currently working on a proper 2-minute gameplay trailer for Selaco! We have to prepare something for [REDACTED] and can’t wait to show it to you. When the trailer launches, we will also be giving the Steam Page a face lift with new screenshots, art and descriptions. It has gotten quite dated and it's time for something fresh.

Fun fact: The trailer will unveil our release date, which is very exciting! Just a couple of months until we can announce it…

Isaac The Robot

[A picture of ISAAC, being unable to get any work done due to programmers not giving him AI yet.]

We’ve shown concept art of ISAAC in an older blog post, and today I’m glad to share with you that ISAAC has a voxel model now, and is fully capable of driving around and... absolutely nothing else! We haven’t given them AI yet, but by the time we launch Selaco, you bet they will do everything in their power to repair Selaco. One panel at the time!

Paint Destruction

We’ve added paint cans, and they’re destructible! Because of course they are.

When I was working on this, the most ridiculous idea popped into my head and I’m not entirely sure if I can squeeze in the time to implement such a feature. Hear me out; imagine that you’re just casually playing the game and you stumble upon a table with a bunch of paint buckets and a paintbrush. You pick up that paintbrush and…holy shit, you can actually paint on the walls with this thing! Want a different color? Touch a paint bucket and it will inherit its color! You can unleash creativity in-between all the alien killing.

I know how silly that is, but it’s such a wonderful touch that compliments the interactive nature of Selaco that it just excites me way more than it probably should. Whether this feature will make it in, time will tell. Once the game is out there, find yourself a paint brush and give it a go. Who knows what’ll happen!

Shooting paint buckets will spray paint all over the floor, walls and ceiling. So regardless of the feature being added or not, at least shooting them is a ton of fun.

Fire

This still needs some work, but I’m already very happy with the direction it’s going. We finally replaced our fire sprites to something that looks more proper.

You remember the demo level right? Ever noticed how there is barely any fire? The reason for that is because we weren’t quite satisfied with how fire used to look and wanted to be very careful with where we put these things.

Here is what it used to look like:

It’s not bad-bad, but it didn’t quite feel devastating enough. For a game that’s all about being extreme and spectacular, this effect completely went against that. It was rather tame.

Here is what fire looks like now:

We think the new one does a much better job at showing the devastation that flames can have. It now looks more uninviting and threatening. While you can still go straight through it if you want to (albeit at the expense of some health!), this effect makes it much more obvious that it’s going to hurt and you will probably prefer to find a way around it.

… Or just use a fire extinguisher like any sane human would do!

Permanent Destruction

A commonly requested feature was to allow players to enable an option that makes destruction and gore last forever. A year ago we made a pretty significant engine change that allowed actors to ‘sleep’. Sleeping objects (called ‘Actors’) would no longer require precious CPU resources so we could populate our level with a large amount of objects at less costs.

This also applies to gore and destruction; it sleeps for a couple of seconds, then despawns. This is obviously done to save performance, because actors that the player can see, will still have to be rendered which takes some of our frames away.

The new Permanent Destruction setting keeps these things intact at all times. Want to travel back to the first level? Most of the damage you’ve caused will still be there. This is quite demanding, but after a lot of testing we’ve learned that it’s actually quite manageable on a powerful rig. All the carnage persisting truly adds a lot to the game, so if you have a machine that is capable of running this, do give it a shot!

DMR Zooming

We’re still tinkering with the DMR every now and again. Now, it finally has a proper scope graphic and animation, along with being able to zoom in further by tapping the Zoom button again, like in the Halo games.

It still needs some tweaking of course. The ‘’PLACEHOLDER TEXT’’ will not stay in the final game.

Cover Art

Another fun fact: The artwork on our Steam Page (and your mug, if you've been a patron for a while!) was actually meant to be used exclusively on our Realms Deep 2021 gameplay trailer. It's a fun piece, but for something that is getting seen by everyone, we felt like we needed something more action packed.

Here is the current version:

Here is what we are currently working on:

(Remember: This is just a sketch. A proposal by one of our artists)

Selaco is about action so it only felt right to come up with something that illustrates that better. Smoke, tracers and bullet impacts will be all over the place as Dawn slides towards a poor victim that is being riddled by her bullets. 

Will show the full thing when it’s ready! 

Cars

This process is still on-going and took some figuring out. The Selaco Exterior is basically Manhattan if it were a gigantic dome in space. Not having any vehicles in the city levels would be a little weird, so we had to find a way to do it.

You’ve seen cars in video games before and there is usually nothing alien about the process. You model a car and you put it in, right? Unfortunately, it is not that easy for us. Selaco’s visual design has rules. We did not want to use any 3D meshes in the game and we’ve been rather strict about that. If 3D meshes aren’t used anywhere, having this one random 3D car would surely stick out. Voxels? Too expensive to render given the amount of triangles they have.

The intent was to model every car manually within the editor, using Doom Sectors. This felt like the most plausible idea, until we realized just how much time this is going to take. We would have to redraw cars a hundred different times just to make this work and given the limitations of Ultimate Doom Builder (the tool we use to design levels) we cannot simply ‘move’ a car if we ever decide to reposition them. If we want to ship the game between now and 230 years, we’d have to find a better solution.

What we ended up doing was make a very blocky model in Blender where Doom Sector rules were carefully considered and respected. The idea here is that we make a car that would technically be possible to make with Doom sectors within the editor. Not too many slopes, not too many angles and it has to touch the floor. If you see the car, you should be able to look at it and think ‘’Yeah, that’s the usual Doom sector!’’. This solution makes it extremely simple to add and reposition vehicles, saving us a lot of development time.

I think we’re getting somewhere. They look like they belong both in terms of shape and texture work, but still feel like we can improve it a little more. Once everything is nailed down, we work on some vehicle variants.

Other Improvements:

• Shield Mounting. Soldiers can now choose to mount on an Energy Shield. In the current demo build, soldiers could place Energy Shields down but they would not properly make use of them. They place and forget, so to speak. Now I’ve added a Shield Mounting system where, if there is nobody using the shield, soldiers can choose to get behind it and attack the player being protected by the shield.
• Improved grenade throwing. Soldiers were pretty well capable of throwing grenades, but had one major flaw; soldiers did not factor in the distance between them and their target. Whether you were close or far away, the soldier would always throw the grenade at the same speed. Meaning that if you were far away, the grenade would not even get close to you. This has no been fixed where they properly adjust based on target distance
• Fully dynamic crosshairs. We’ve teased this in a previous blog post, but it has not been fully implemented. Every weapon will now properly display Weapon Spread information through crosshairs. As you fire, the crosshair grows, then shrinks again when you stop firing. This also means that upgrades, like decreased spread or recoil, will now be properly displayed on the crosshair!
• Ceiling Blood has finally been added! If you kill the enemy hard enough, some of their blood splatters will end up on the ceiling and still start dripping on the floor. Utterly disgusting, but fun!

Conclusion

It has been a good couple of weeks. I must admit, I’m very nervous about the Gameplay Trailer. It’s the first time we actually get to show a truckload of things we’ve been working on, and will be our most revealing trailer so far; showcasing new environments, new weapons and a whole bunch of combat. As backers, you've seen bits and pieces of it, but this time you get to see them in actual context. I'll make sure to upload a test version here so we can get some input.

The upcoming couple of weeks will be all about wrapping up the systems and mechanics we want to showcase in the trailer. We haven’t done trailers often, but we absolutely want to show something that feels professional and polished. It’s time to get to work and improve my rusty editing skills.

Have a great week everyone! <3