Advancing Telos is a new series of blog posts that I’ll try to publish around the time I release major updates. The definition of “telos” is an ultimate end goal, and I like cheesy puns, so “Advancing Telos” basically means getting closer to that ultimate end goal for the game. These will essentially be “state of the game” posts where I talk about what’s new, what I think of the current state of the game, and what’s coming next.
In the future, this section will describe some of the new features and content the game has. But since this is the first, I’ll try to give a brief (I said “try”) overview of what’s in the game right now.
I think Arms of Telos has one of the most varied movement systems in a game to date. The maps are zero gravity, but there’s pockets of gravity inside space colonies. The zero gravity in Arms of Telos isn’t just a gravity value modifier like in some other games — it’s full six degrees of freedom zero gravity, which means there’s no up or down and it has a very distinct feel compared to gravity areas. Very few games have done this and, as far as I know, Arms of Telos is the first to mix 6dof zero gravity with normal gravity areas. But even where there’s gravity, the movement is still different than most games — your spidermech’s feet glide along the ground, allowing you to maintain speed; the physics have a sense of grip, so if you’re going too fast and take a sharp turn, you lose traction sort of like a racing game; you can charge your jump, giving you more control over jump height and allowing you to launch yourself to great heights. Moving in and out of these different kinds of areas at blistering speeds is unlike anything else out there. Sometimes I describe it as parkour in outer space, but really it’s something you have to experience yourself. In zero gravity, there’s also special magnet surfaces that you can land on and launch off of to add another layer. Everything described so far is just the current base movement — weapons and equipment expand your options even further. Deployable Speed Gates let you set up a virtual high-way to help your team get around the map more efficiently. Grapple Hooks let you do all sorts of cool moves. There’s nothing quite like swinging around like spider-man in true zero gravity. Even more options will come as new weapons and equipment get added to the game. My goal was to design a movement system from the ground up that rewarded mastery and was fun even if you were alone just fooling around — I think I’m on the right track.
Building around this fast zero-g-racing-hybrid movement system (I still struggle to describe this game in an elevator pitch because it does so much), I’ve made a custom game mode inspired by CTF. There’s three stages for each team — as you capture enemy flags, you progress farther into the enemy base so different areas of the map are in play as the match continues and tensions escalate. Another fundamental difference from vanilla CTF is that it’s not about the number of flags you cap (first to 5 or whatever), but instead uses team health bars. This means that single flags can be worth different amounts of points, which lets me do some cool stuff with the game’s design. If you pick up the enemy flag but decide to stick around the enemy flag stand, it’ll soak up more points and be worth more when you eventually cap it. This creates a nice risk/reward system that opens the game up to different kinds of strategies your team can employ — will you try and have super fast cappers get in and out with smaller caps or come as a group, soak the flag for more points, and escort it back as a team for a bigger reward? The stage 3 flag, the final flag, is special — it’s a single cap, but instead of being captured as soon as you touch your own flag stand with it, it turns into a defend the point as you deposit the points by having the capper stay within range. This gives the game a nice climax at the end where the other team has a chance to stop you and both teams converge at the same location for some epic combat. I’m focusing on this single game mode so I can continue to refine it and make it all it can be rather than implementing the standard game modes simply to check some boxes. This also lets me tune everything else in the game around this one game mode, including things like weapons. Most games have to balance everything to work well in multiple game modes, which inevitably leads to compromises. Not only can I balance things better around a single game mode than I could otherwise, I’ll also be able to design weapons and equipment from the ground up specifically around this one game mode — things like the flag and flag stand can tie directly into features of weapons and equipment. This is something I’ll be excited to explore as development continues — I think there’s a ton of potential here as it’s something you basically never see in other FPS games.
Right now there’s 4 weapons and 4 equipment to choose from — you craft a custom kit with 2 weapons and 2 equipment. Since the selection is relatively small (I eventually want dozens), it mostly covers the basics — but even for those basics, I’ve tried to take them further to make them more interesting than what you’re used to in other games. For example, the Eye of Jupiter primary fire shoots lightning that is a pretty normal rail gun, but if you hold after firing, it will start to charge the thunder — when you let go, it’ll do more damage in that same position you fired the lightning. This opens up some cool options — like you can choose to hit them with the lightning for a bit of damage, or you can lead a moving target to intentionally miss with lightning so you can try to hit them with thunder as they pass to do more damage. You can also keep charged thunder covering the flag or an entrance as a defensive measure almost like a remote mine that you detonate manually. And finally, hitting players with lightning and thunder charges the Eye of Jupiter’s Storm Shot which is really crazy.
Another example is the Teleport Blade — it’s a melee weapon, but instead of simply spamming left click swinging a blade, you stick them with a sticky explosive when you stab an enemy. That explosive charges over time — you can speed up how fast it charges by aiming accurately at the target. The better your aim, the less time they’ll have to try and kill you before it detonates and finishes them off. This also lets you do some neat things like stick an explosive to another player or a deployable (like a Speed Gate) and have it blow up as enemies pass — super handy when you have their flag and you’re being chased. To top it all off, the Teleport Blade also has a short range teleport orb to help you dodge enemy fire and get in close.
Some arena FPS fans might see the 2 weapon kit restriction and think that’s too limiting, but I hope these examples illustrate that the weapons in Arms of Telos often do more than the weapons in other games. I try to look at each weapon almost like it’s a hero in a MOBA, each with multiple skills — I’m trying to think beyond pointing and shooting. And I haven’t even gotten to the equipment yet!
In a lot of first person shooters, almost all of the focus is on the weapons — equipment is usually relegated to side perks that slightly tweak how you play. In Arms of Telos, equipment can have just as much impact on how you play and how the match plays out. The Grapple totally changes how you can move around the environment. The Shield and Light of Apollo can totally change how a fight plays out just like a weapon would. Speed Gates can change how your entire team navigates around the map. There’s so much more I plan to do — I’m just getting started :)
Challenge Mode
Challenge Mode is a big feature in Arms of Telos. It’s where the tutorials live, but it’s also so much more. After designing the game’s movement system I realized it was almost like a racing game hybrid, so I thought why not make a race mode? At first I made a checkpoint-based time trial race mode that could be played offline, but there’s a great racing game called TrackMania that has an interesting format — it’s a time trial race, but everybody is racing together at the same time online. Collisions are disabled, so it’s like racing against ghosts in real time. Arms of Telos borrows this format when playing Challenge Mode online. Arms of Telos’ movement system was inspired by things like surfing in Counter-Strike, skiing in Tribes, and strafe jumping in Quake, so I thought it’d be great to continue the rich history of defrag modes. This mode also has online leaderboards so you can compete for the best times — I have some exciting plans for that. And in the future, I’d like to expand Challenge Mode beyond races and tutorials.
But Challenge Mode also serves another important function. One of the biggest obstacles for indie multiplayer games is empty servers. Someone will join a game, wait a bit for people to show up, but it’s easy to get bored so they’ll leave. There may be enough people wanting to play, but they’re effectively invisible because they’re not in the server. Challenge Mode is meant to help that a bit by giving people something to do while waiting for more people to join. Instead of waiting in an empty server doing nothing, you can join a server and play challenge mode, which will be more likely to hold your interest and keep you in the server, which will then give other players more time to trickle in and fill the server so you can play a real match.
I know that alone won’t be enough to solve this obstacle, but I think it’s an important part of a multi-pronged approach. I’ll also be working with the community to try and address it in other ways.
Also…
Right now there’s only one map. Because of the way the game mode takes advantage of different parts of the map depending on how the match plays out, I think a single map feels less repetitive than in other games. Eventually I do want to have more maps, but first I want to continue to improve this one until it’s super solid. I’m exploring the possibility of a map editor but no concrete plans yet. Because of things like the different gravity areas, designing maps for Arms of Telos is a huge design and technical challenge compared to other games.
There’s no spectator mode yet. I want to try and get a simple spectator mode working soon, but my first priority has been gameplay. I know this is important, but as a solo dev I have to prioritize and I figure a spectator function wouldn’t be very useful if the gameplay wasn’t worth spectating ;)
Community Features
For a multiplayer game, I believe community is key. I want to take it a step further and try and create the foundation for a community that is more helpful, more nice, and more sportsmanlike than what you might be used to in online video games. To help make that a reality, I’m trying to provide solid community tools. I’ve chosen Discourse for the forum software, which has a lot of these same ideals embedded directly into its functional design. Discourse is extremely flexible — it will serve as forums, but it also has a wiki, a question and answer section, and a place for people to post and upvote guides, feature requests, and more.
We also have a Discord server, which will help with things like organizing play sessions.
The closed beta has had playtests about once a week but compared to a live game, that’s still a relatively small amount of testing. I think things are in a decent place balance-wise, but I’m sure issues will arise once more people get their hands on it. I expect balance to be a continuous effort moving forward, especially as more weapons/equipment get added as I’m sure that will effect the current selection as well. I’ll be looking closely at the analytics data as well as player opinion to help inform me, but I’ll also need some patience and understanding here — since this game is in active development, the balance will constantly be in flux. I’ll try to be clear with my intentions and goals with each balance change so it’s easier for us to be all on the same page.
The next major milestone is Steam Greenlight and my main priority there is the game’s visuals. Thus far I’ve focused almost exclusively on gameplay and it’s time for visuals to do some catching up. Visuals certainly aren’t the most important part of a game, but they can still be incredibly important for a few big reasons. First, an ugly game can be a major hurdle for someone thinking about buying a game — the visuals are one of the only ways a game can convey quality to someone that hasn’t played it — that’s just how it is. But having a convincing presentation won’t do much good if nobody knows about it and the game isn’t reaching new eyeballs — thankfully, visuals also make great marketing materials. As a small indie, I’m not going to have a marketing budget where I can produce high quality advertisements and buy ad space to display them — at this stage, it’s things like viral social media posts that I’ll be relying on to spread the word and that’s where tweeting gifs showing things like new graphical effects will generally do better. And third, the visuals are also a key element for the game’s identity. I’ll be sticking with the vibrant low poly style the game has now, but will be adding more details and polish to the art assets and effects and I’ll be trying to refine everything to give it its own unique visual identity. This should improve gameplay by increasing visual clarity and enhancing in-game communication (for example, helping to better orient players to where they are in the environment), but what I mean by the game’s identity are things like communicating player scale. In Arms of Telos, players are piloting 30 ft tall super-agile spidermechs — I think that’s an interesting aspect that differentiates AoT from other games, but right now the game isn’t doing enough to communicate that. There’s a lack of perceived scale in the environments and you barely see your ‘body’ while playing. So at first glance, that aspect is basically invisible to players and it might as well not be different. So a big goal will be to make it feel more like you’re in that 30 ft mech to really capitalize on that unique aspect of the game.
While visuals for Greenlight is the main priority, I’m also really excited to start adding more weapons and equipment to the game. This is a game designed to have dozens of weapons/equipment to choose from, so right now it’s like having a MOBA with only a couple heroes. Fun, but still a far cry from the final vision for the game. These new weapons/equipment will focus on expanding the range of play styles and skill sets accommodated by the game.
But as always, I’ll also be keeping in mind things the players want. The forum has a Feature Request section, so be sure to make your voice heard!
The time is finally here! Arms of Telos has been in semi-closed playtesting for a while now, but I’m ready to open that up to the public. You can now buy Arms of Telos on itch.io!
This is an early access style release, which means parts of the game are rough but I’ll continue to improve things and add new content while it’s available to the public — I consider this a new beginning. I want the game to beat expectations when it hits a larger audience on Steam Early Access, so this soft launch on itch.io will help me get to that point. Arms of Telos will start small, both in terms of content and community, but I hope you will help grow it into something truly special with me. I think what is in the game so far is already a lot of fun, but nothing in Arms of Telos is “done” — you can expect big improvements to the visuals, lots of new weapons and equipment, major features, and more in future updates. But even after it eventually hits Steam Early Access and then full release on Steam, I’d like to continue working on the game for years to come. The full vision I have for the game is huge and I really hope I can make it all a reality, but I’ll need your help.
This soft launch is releasing on itch.io Refinery. “We think early access is broken, and this is our solution.” is their tagline. One of the nice features in Refinery is the ability to have limited keys. Arms of Telos will be released in waves — the first batch will be limited to 100 copies. With a limited release, if something is very broken with the game, I can fix it before too many people have spent their hard earned money — once fixed, I can open it back up. If there’s no major problems with the game after that first batch is sold out, I’ll expand it immediately with a larger wave and continue to play it by ear. Be sure to sign up for our mailing list to be notified when new waves are announced.
I’ve started a new blog post series called Advancing Telos, which will basically be “state of the game” posts where I discuss some of what’s new, what’s planned next, etc. The first one is up already and you can read it here (it’s really long).
This means that the community will definitely be small, especially at first. For a multiplayer game, that’s a big challenge. I have some ideas I want to experiment with to address this — for example, already the game’s challenge mode can be played online between matches so you have something to do while waiting for more people to join a server — but I’ll also need help from the community to overcome this obstacle. Using our forums and Discord server, players can organize play sessions and come up with regular play times for particular days where players can expect there to be more activity — this should help make a small community feel a bit bigger by compressing the playerbase into more focused time slots until the community is big enough to support it 24/7.
Right now it’s priced at $4.99. The plan is to raise that to $9.99 in the future and maybe eventually have it at $15-20, but I don’t imagine going higher than that. Arms of Telos will also, in the future, have other monetization streams. I don’t want to spoil all the surprises (I think I’ve come up with some really special ideas), but I’ll say that the closest model is CS:GO — small upfront cost with premium cosmetics etc (CS:GO uses crate drops, but I have something different planned). Arms of Telos isn’t “pay 2 win” and it’s not even “grind 2 win.” All players have access to all maps, all weapons, all equipment, and anything else that can impair/improve chances to win a match from the very start. New weapons and equipment will be unlocked for everyone as soon as they’re released. Same goes for new maps. Unlockables might go beyond cosmetics (think StatTrak guns in CS:GO), but they’ll never impair/improve your chances of winning a match.
I don’t expect to make much money during this soft launch — I’ll still be doing freelance work to pay rent/bills. The goal is to get the game to a point where the community can grow. So why charge at all? Even if the community is small, a growing playerbase will let me know if the game is at a point where it’s worth paying for and if it’s compelling enough for people to stick around — if it were free, that feedback would be distorted. This will help inform me when the game is ready for a larger audience, at which time I’ll pursue Steam Early Access where the hope is to make enough money to fully support me. Being a solo dev is a ton of work, but a big part of why I’ve stuck with it is that I want to keep the sustainability bar as low as possible — the sales target for a small indie game can be a lot more feasible when it only has to support one person. If I can sell enough copies a month to pay my bills, I’ll be able to devote more of my time to it and increase the speed of development — if I can then keep growing the community, I’ll hopefully be able to hire some help and really get things moving fast. I’ll also be accepting donations from those that have some extra cash and want to show extra support.
It’s been a long road getting here. There’s still a long ways to go, but it’s really exciting getting to finally release this to the public and I couldn’t have gotten this far without a lot of help. Family and friends have had to put up with me being AWOL and stressed out of my mind, yet they’ve still been incredibly supportive. Playtesters have poured in countless hours into putting the game through its paces — seriously, without them, it would have been impossible for me to make this. This is a multiplayer game — I design it, but a multiplayer game is only as good as its playerbase — I’m thankful to have a small but awesome group of playtesters and I can’t wait to see that seed grow into something even better. Clanwarz has been a godsend with my game server needs for playtesting and they’ll also be hosting the official servers (if you want to have your own Arms of Telos server, they’ll be able to hook you up — I’ll also be releasing the server builds so you can host it wherever). So again, thank you so much.
In the latest dev video, I give a sneak peak at the Challenge Mode and then have some fun with the grapple hook!
Let me know what you think!
I’m back with some more footage and commentary. Let me know what you think!
Be sure to join the community:
I put together some clips and added some developer commentary. It’s the first time I actually explain what the Eye of Jupiter does. Hope you enjoy!
Be sure to join the community:
How do you feel about short clips like this? Worth putting on YouTube? Or should I wait and combine them into a montage? You get cheesy funk because I didn’t record audio that playtest
For most people, this might not be something they give much thought — for Tribes and arena FPS players, projectile inheritance can be a big deal. For Arms of Telos, it will be a key component of how a lot of the weapons feel. And I’m a game design nerd so I like talking about this sort of thing.
Line up your crosshair, pull the trigger, and hit the target? Not necessarily. In the real world, if you shoot a bullet while you’re moving, the bullet’s velocity will be relative your movement — in other words, the bullet will inherit your velocity. Consequently, you’ll actually miss a stationary target if you were aiming at it when you pulled the trigger while moving to the side. Compare these gifs where we fire at a stationary target while moving laterally:
Here, there is no inheritance. The bullet lags behind the crosshair (at the moment of impact, my crosshair is now to the right of the target) — instead of inheriting my velocity, it travels to the point I was looking at when I pulled the trigger as if I were not moving.
Here is the same shot with full inheritance. The bullet inherits my velocity and therefor stays centered on the crosshair. When the bullet reaches the target, it has also traveled sideways (as I have) and misses the target. If I wanted to hit the target, I would have to pull the trigger to the left of the target to compensate for my lateral movement.
Some of you may think “ok, I see why it’s realistic, but doesn’t that just make things harder?” — yes and no. It can really depend.
Here is another gif with full inheritance — except this time, both the target and myself are moving in the same direction at the same speed (imagine they just took my flag and I’m chasing them). Relative to each other, we’re not moving — now it’s like firing at a stationary target while not moving ourselves and we just have to point at the target and shoot. On the other hand, if that rocket did not have any inheritance, I would have to lead my target to compensate.
Inheritance is also important for the rare games that let the player move extremely fast. If you’re moving at 350km/h and launch a grenade in front of you that travels only 150km/h, you’re going to eat that grenade if there’s no inheritance.
Games like Quake usually don’t have inheritance. The maps are usually smaller and it’s easier to read the trajectory of a target by using the ground and walls as reference points. In Tribes, the weapons usually have inheritance and this is important because you’re often flying around chasing a target in the sky and your best reference point for the target’s velocity is often your own velocity. Arms of Telos has more variety in this respect — it has both the close quarter combat of Quake with the long range combat of Tribes — so I don’t think Arms of Telos will necessarily lean in one direction or the other.
In a lot of games, projectile weapons have partial inheritance — this means it’ll essentially drag behind your crosshair. I think having partial inheritance makes things more complicated, but I assume their reasoning is that they want to avoid situations where firing backward while going very fast will result in a projectile that has no speed or even travels backward (relative to the world). In the real world, gravity makes it less awkward — when projectiles don’t have gravity, they basically just stay still until they expire. A little weird, perhaps, but I don’t think it’s really a problem.
While some situations might lend themselves better to one or the other, a lot of it also comes down to personal preference for each player. If there was an objectively superior option, this would have been settled long ago – instead, you still see debates about how much (if any) inheritance projectiles should have in different games. Heck, some people even seem to prefer partial inheritance – I don’t know why, but they do.
With Arms of Telos, I’m going to try opening it up to the players. Depending on their play styles and preferences, players will naturally have different opinions on the ideal inheritance values — so I’ll just let them tune their own weapons as they like. These are accessible through a client-side config file.
The way I see it, it’s similar to tuning your gear ratios in a racing game. Some gear ratios may be better suited for different tracks, but it also comes down to personal preference. Allowing players to tune them to their own preferences will hopefully give them a better sense of ownership over their experience.
Instead of getting into heated arguments on the forums, they’ll hopefully be helping each other find their own ideal inheritance settings. I can even use those discussions to help inform the values I choose as defaults.
Right now the game is in private playtesting, but since I am a small indie it’s not quite like a closed beta you may have experienced for larger games. You can find more info about getting involved on the official forums.
There’s various ways you can keep up with the game’s development – the official devblog is on Tumblr, and I’m often posting smaller updates on Twitter (there’s also an official twitter account for the game if you don’t want my personal tweets). You can subscribe on YouTube to keep up with new videos and I’ll be streaming stuff on Twitch as well. I welcome you to join the community on the official forums, as well as the IRC channel and subreddit. I’m on Facebook and Instgram, too. I also post updates to development communities like IndieDB and TIGSource.
Over the last couple weeks, I brought Arms of Telos to a couple events. I had already been brainstorming some ways I might be able to show Arms of Telos at events like PAX – for a lot of indies, they’re a great source for exposure and marketing that I’d like to be able to take advantage of in the future.
Essentially, the challenge is that Arms of Telos is designed for 5v5 and as an indie, it’s very unlikely I’ll be able to have a booth that offers a true experience that reflects the actual game. I go into more detail about these challenges in the forum thread I linked above.
Perhaps unlike other first person shooters, I’m really building Arms of Telos specifically for 5v5 CTF. In its current state, this is less obvious – there’s only a modest selection of weapons/equipment and the meta is still relatively simple. So a lot of people assume the game would scale to different player counts like other games do. As the game continues to expand, I expect the result of my focus on 5v5 CTF to become more obvious and as you scale the player count down or up, the further it will compromise the experience. When you design a game to work with multiple player counts (1v1, 2v2, 5v5, 10v10, etc), as most first person shooters do, you’re almost certainly going to make compromises in the game design to facilitate that flexibility – that compromise is what I want to avoid. I think it’s pretty much understood that if you take a MOBA and reduce it to 1v1, it would be a severely compromised experience and not be an accurate representation of the game – I’m aiming for a similar expectation for Arms of Telos and I think the result will be a much more focused and rewarding experience that isn’t often found in the first person shooter genre. So I’m especially sensitive to showing the game in these compromised environments and setting the right expectations early on.
As you can see from the thread, I built a checkpoint-based race Challenge Mode that the player would be able to do alone and learn the movement system. For the booths, I brought two computers and networked them together with both of them running the game. This way, I could be on the other computer in the game with them and help demonstrate how to do things – this idea might have sounded cooler on paper and I don’t think it was a game changer in terms of being a good way to teach the game. But having two computers also meant if there were two people who wanted to fool around in 1v1, they could – and that’s what people generally did when they came to play as a pair. I had a third monitor that would be looping gameplay from a real match so they could see how the game actually plays in a real setting, but I don’t think it was enough – I still had people asking if it was a racing game and for the most part, the only way they’d walk away with a good idea of how the game actually played was if I explained it myself. I’d much rather let them play the real game in the intended 5v5 CTF setup.
So moving forward, I will probably continue to refine this limited booth experience, but I’ll focus on trying to show the game at events where I can have a real match (events with BYOC LANs, events where they can provide enough machines, etc).
It’s also worth talking about audiences. Let’s Play Expo was a general gaming expo with a Smash tournament on the side. EGLDallas10k was a multi-game tournament (fighting games and Call of Duty). In both cases, they were primarily console gamers. As someone who has pretty much always played games on both PC and console, I was surprised by how many people struggled with even the most basic keyboard and mouse controls. I sort of expected that sort of thing at Let’s Play, which skewed younger – but it was no better at EGLDallas10k despite most of them being competitive gamers. Console gamers aren’t my core demographic, but it’s still interesting to see how they perceive Arms of Telos. I am still interested in trying this 2-PC booth setup at a PC-centric event to see how much of a difference it makes.
There’s all sorts of reasons to do events like these, but a couple bonuses that stod out to me were youtuber coverage and future event opportunities. These were small events and there wasn’t much of a media presence, but in the age of youtubers, even small events have people that can help spread the word (like this and this). These events can also be great networking. If I hadn’t gone to Let’s Play Expo, I wouldn’t have had the chance to show at EGLDallas10k. And at EGLDallas10k, I met somebody involved in an event next month and started a dialog with them about maybe showing there too. You also get to meet other developers and vendors. If you have the opportunity to show at an event, don’t neglect these things.
Challenge mode started as an experiment for expos, but I think the potential is stronger for teaching the game to new players who’ve just bought it and other things. Because there’s such a strong emphasis on movement, a race mode feels natural and it’s a lot of fun to improve your times. And while other games have defrag modes, they’re usually very much removed of the context of a real match. Instead of creating distinct maps (surf maps in CS, defrag in quake, etc), I can build challenges into the actual Arms of Telos maps because those maps are already designed to accomodate this sort of thing (though I should note, there’s currently only one map for now). This first challenge I made (see video above) simulates a flag run (from your third flagstand to the enemy’s second flagstand). So these challenges will generally have more direct benefit to your skills in a real Arms of Telos match.
I also think I can create smaller challenges that teach specific maneuvers – a way to gradually introduce new players to the different layers of the movement system (which is currently the steepest learning curve in the game). I’ll try to have a basic set of tutorial challenges ready for the first public launch.
Later, I want to expand the challenge system into other areas. I want to let players do the challenges online in a similar setup that Trackmania uses (no way to interact with other players, but you see them doing the challenge alongside you). This could be an interesting activity to do during intermission between matches. I’ll be exploring non-racing challenges and I’d also like to connect all challenges to leaderboards and support recorded ghosts – this could be leveraged as a crowdsourced guide system to help players further refine their skills.
I asked twitter for advice on transporting equipment to/from the expos. For less than I would have spent on that GearGrip thing they suggested, I got a dolly and it was a life saver. Definitely worth it if you are doing expos you can drive to – if you’re flying, it’s probably not going to fly with you but the GearGrip would help there.
Another tip – bring something to cover your booth. Most of these events will offer some kind of security, but as an added precaution it’s a good idea to cover it when you close it for the night – that way, it’s easier for others to spot somebody snooping around where they shouldn’t be. I brought back my work PC tower every night though – too risky for me. And for the iMac, I had a security cable that kept it tied to the table.
I also had the third monitor set up on a plastic drawer thing (facing the back of the booth where only I would be). I had food and other stuff in that drawer and it was super convenient to have that storage.
Hope that was interesting to you. Let me know what you think!
Hey everyone! I know updates are still sparse – have had my head down working hard. Wanted to share a few things I’ve done recently.
I’ve added the first deployable equipment to the game. Here’s a webm of me deploying a Speed Gate:
I wanted a universal system for implementing build time for deployables so that I could quickly add more in the future without having to do unique animations for each (can always come back and add those later). That iconosphere will scale to the size of the deployable. The display text shows what’s being built and there’s a progress bar.
After that I went and tweaked the spinning thing.. thought it looked weird in a cool way so I kept it.
Then I tweaked the look of the deployed Speed Gate itself and added effects for when you do damage and destroy it. Arms of Telos can have very long sight lines and I didn’t want it to be too easy to destroy a deployable from across the map, so I have it to where the hitbox only shows up when an enemy is near.
Reworked the healing equipment, Light of Apollo. The beam used to be rigid – just shot straight wherever you pointed. Now it it’s magnetized. White circle represents the aiming threshold – the healing beam locks on, but only if the target is within that radius.
Green circle marks the potential target (who would be healed if you clicked) or the current target that is already being healed. When there’s multiple teammates within the white circle, it’ll pick the one closest to your crosshair.
If the target goes outside the white circle or something blocks your line of sight, the healing beam will disengage and it’ll stop healing. If you don’t let go, it’ll remember your last target and reengage if the target becomes valid again.
There’s no limit to how far the beam will travel, but the healing strength is modulated by both the distance and the aiming accuracy. So it’ll heal faster if you have better aim. Here’s the current falloff curve for distance (using Unity’s AnimationCurve) – as you can see, the healing strength decays fairly quickly so you won’t be healing much when very far away. The thickness of the beam modulates based on healing strength, too.
Also, I’ve recently been making an effort to keep my gifs small so I can upload directly to Twitter. I did some tests with Photoshop and GIFBrewery — you can see the results here: http://discourse.armsoftelos.com/t/gif-compression-comparison/306
Let me know what you think and if you have any questions!
Episode 94 - Justin Pierce - The Indie Haven Podcast -
I was a guest on The Indie Haven Podcast – check it out and let me know what you think!