Let's talk about 2024 a little.
With the year coming to a close I'm taking a moment to reflect on what I've done and what I plan on doing for 2025. The year started out fairly strong with that bit of birthday art I made for GMOTA's 10th birthday (Jesus Christ), then as January moved on, I modeled my first gun from scratch: The Magmauler! Not only that, I did a few frames of animation inside of Blockbench, which was good practice.
Doomslayer got a few finishing touches and then as March rolled around, I started working on Kustam's redesign. This whole thing took way longer than I anticipated! The first initial plan for Kustam was to keep the meditool and heat gauge, along with reloading his gun. I did quite a bit of experimentation in the coming weeks: Things like tying the heat gauge with the meditool, where heat would drain out into the tool to grant the player heals. Along with this the plan was make the meditool consume any leftover heat and convert it into more ammunition to load into the pistol! I was also planning on changing the behavior of overheating to make it so primary fire would shoot exploding shells that take from your ammunition reserves, and a pulse shield altfire to counter projectiles and punt enemies. I was also going to make it so you'd NEED a bit of heat built up to fire subweapons. I also replaced the staff with a baton built into the pistol, so Kustam would flip the gun and deploy the baton for melee combat. Along with this you'd have to press and hold the fire button with either the gun or the baton for a few moments before the attack was "armed" and you'd be able to use your subweapon.
I scrapped all of this after awhile because it was getting really stupid and messy, it was all starting to feel like the same convoluted nonsense that Kustam suffered from in the past.
I'll spare you the details of the other convoluted systems I tried after this, a lot of them involved experimenting with heat accumulation and expending it for powered attacks or extra HP/ammo. After a few months of this nonsense I ultimately threw it all out and started again. It wasn't until late June when I finally started to settle on the system as it is right now: Two weapon modes (The accurate laser and the wide fan of projectiles spread gun!), altfire being a dedicated melee attack button which uses the opposite ammo type, and building up weapon ammo that way. Though Kustam still had his old hand cannon and the new baton.
(Concept art by HyperUltra64!)
August rolls around and inspiration hits me like a truck: I was watching my buddy Sledge play Warriors Orochi and he was playing as Magoichi Saiga, a character who wields a musket with a bayonet on it, freely firing and slashing with it to fight so smoothly between ranged and melee combat. Didn't take long until I started cooking up a design for the Longarm: Kustam's new musket.
After that the next 4 months were spent designing, drawing, modeling, and animating everything you can currently see in the public build of GMOTA: The new musket, Kustam's hands, the kick attack, and the Sentinel Arms (His BFG!)
All of this leaves me with mixed feelings. I am proud that I managed to further develop my 3D modeling and animation skills, and I managed to make all of Kustam's new assets myself! But I'm disappointed it took me so damn long to figure out a system that feels fun to play with Kustam. I was so certain what I had initially written down would have worked, but putting it into practice was pretty miserable, it was a complete mess. Though on the flip side of that, I'm grateful I took the extra time to make sure Kustam didn't suck, I never want a repeat of Kustam's initial debut ever again.
(Art made by Mimi!)
So with all that out of the way, let's talk about 2025 a little. With any luck I can finish GMOTA this year, I was wanting to finish the mod in 2024, but that didn't pan out very well. But at this point all that remains is Samson, and polishing the monsters up. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself though, but I am eager to start working on GMOTA's fourth and final hero. Happy New Year everyone, here's to making 2025 a good one.
(Also by Mimi!)
