#taproute

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Behold the Jet Fighters! They fly! They strafe! They dodge! They fill the role of 'elite' enemy, bringing super-aggressive damage potential in a small/nimble profile. Luckily they are rather fragile so any good AOE weapon can prevent them from being an overwhelming challenge.

Ignore the weird bullets and disappearing fighter, they still need death animations as of posting.

I will post some spec-bio stuff soon! It's been too long since I've shared what I initially made this blog for.

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I appear to have accidentally made some sort of lightning gun, but it's fun so we may be rolling with it!

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Been working on a lot of silent refactoring this month. We how have a train editor that lets you pick your cars, and the projectile system was reworked multiple times into something very high quality.

Some new content was added in the form of two new enemies. The composite enemy shown has multiple different 'modules' it can spawn with. Current loadouts for this enemy include nuclear bombs which KO your entire train if they land, but can do the same to enemies if shot down early, shield generators that absorb X hits regardless of damage before burning out, drone spawners, and a missile launcher to keep you on your toes.

(PS Pay the rapid-fire cannon no mind. I'm still working on rebuilding the old guns to use the new weapon system and just needed a test weapon to show how you can juggle nukes)

It almost feels like a full game! Now that we can customize/load trains and build levels, all that seems missing is the polish and environment art + actual levels. I hope to get a playtest launched sometime before febuary? No promises.

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Not dead!

I spent most of the month working on something called gradient descent optimization. It took way too much effort, but I'm extremely proud of how it turned out and now I can use this tool a lot easier in the future, which is cool!

What does it do?

This test enemy has three thrusters placed sorta randomly, yet it knows how to fly! This is pretty impossible to figure out a clean math equation to do, especially with arbitrary positions and thrusters.

But even when a thruster is destroyed, our gradient descent code immediately knows how to re-configure the thrusters into something that lets it stay airborne. We can place any amount of thrusters in any configuration and our ship knows exactly what to do.

I can try to explain how this problem was solved in more detail if it's of anybody's interest, but essentially we boiled each thruster down to float variables in an array, and each frame the game does multiple iterations of wiggling the variables and comparing if these new variables would make the ship move closer to a desired direction/rotation (this is called minimizing the error).

Also shown here is a WIP shield unique to this enemy, which will try to get in the way of the last cannon to shoot at them.

Audio still very WIP.

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Progress update

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Also:

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Some super early tests of a bomb-dropping enemy from our Scalepiercer sequel, codenamed Taproute for now.

This lad showcases a lot of the planned changes/improvements from the original game, namely that enemies are now made of individually destructable parts, use thrusters to control physics-simulated movement, and utilize normal maps for real-time lighting.

These systems combine in really neat ways, e.g: enemies are now more of a 'shooting puzzle' where you can choose to disable specific parts to change their functionality. We have a ton of variations of these planned and are excited to show you in the future!

PS:

I'll try to share more of my writing/personal worldbuilding stuff mixed between the game dev stuff too. I'm glad people seem to have interest according to the poll! Lately I've been working on some social ethology stuff for Stekh, and how it compares homologously to eyebrow-flashing type behaviors in humans.

Until text time!