Did two more characters today. The first is the mysterious Rifter. She's not a conventional fighter and uses no weapon and has only a feeble melee attack. Instead, she has the ability to warp gravity, slow down time and so forth. A dedicated support and inhibit enemies character and the closest thing to a wizard in this game. Very weak physically and not well armoured but with very powerful and potentially game changing buffs / debuts and gravitational attacks. Screen Shot 2016-09-02 at 9.52.43 AM by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr The second is another specialist warrior called the Spectre. An assassin that uses personal teleporters, cloaking fields, smoke bombs, etc. to get up and close to enemy leaders. He then uses his blade and specialized pistol (not shown) to take them out and get out of harms way. I wanted to include melee in the game but in a realistic manner. So I think a guy in a stealth suit with a teleporter and cloaking technology works in that regard. Screen Shot 2016-09-02 at 9.51.34 AM by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr The Spectre's armour really sparkles in gameplay and looks really cool. One of the really impressive things is seeing the reflections and bloom in motion on these characters. Unity 5.4 has made amazing strides in the graphics department and it's unbelievable how good graphics can be with great performance ... provided you know all the optimization tricks.
The cloaking and warping gravity skills could be really fun to play around with. You have a good eye for choosing cool looking models. Those last two are my favourite so far.
Thanks .... Glad you're liking the theme and style. I'm trying to make a very plausible sci-fi setting and not the over-the-top and illogical setting you find in warhammer 40k and some other games. Will be showing off some more aliens next.
Here are some photos ... this is a nice little action shot I took while doing play testing. It sums up the theme of the game nicely .... do you, as the human, shoot the alien out in the open, the more dangerous alien in cover, use some ability or move to cover? Screen Shot 2016-09-04 at 7.11.12 PM by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr I love the pose of the Psi Operative as he holds his pistol and looks down the sight. The new alien next to the computer screen has mind control powers similar to the original gray aliens in XCOM. If left unchecked, these guys will take control of your soldiers and use them against you. They'll also have a psychic attack and various other abilities.
Another shot of the mind controlling alien: Screen Shot 2016-09-06 at 11.47.29 AM by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr I need to come up with names for the aliens. How do you guys feel about more informal names that might be assigned by the warriors fighting them or would more scientific names make more sense? How exactly do you think we, as a species, would name aliens we would encounter?
Soldiers, real and fictional, always seem to come up with nicknames for the enemies they fight and if scientists are involved they would of course give it a scientific name. You could go either way or do both. And of course the aliens would have names for themselves.
I think you got it perfectly with this way of thinking. As you say soldiers tend to come up with nicknames for their enemies while scientists/professionals would be more likely to use a more formal term. Aliens would use their own language to refer to each other of coarse. That brings me to a question; Will there be an alien language with perhaps some form of equipment/ability for humans to understand them?
Not in this game. Instead, the focus will be that the aliens are mysterious with no intelligible language. The back story for the game is that humanity has expanded for several hundred years after the discovery of taster than light travel across a mostly empty universe. Most life forms have been unintelligent or at basic technology level, and thus easily subjugated. Humanity was confident, relatively unified and aggressive in its expansion. That changes when small outposts are destroyed, ships go missing and it gradually comes to light that another, technologically advanced race is waging war on them. The aliens do not attack in a unified effort but in isolated and seemingly random raids across the human empire. They are composed of many different races ... each seemingly designed for a single purpose and many appearing to come from completely different genetic ancestries. Those captured cannot be communicated with and so the humans have no idea why they are being attacked and really by whom. This pseudo war stretches on for several generations .... with some significant battles taken place and several solar systems populated by the aliens taken. However, no "home world" has been found nor even any densely populated alien systems. Therefore, it's unclear whether humanity face a small group of nomadic raiders or are encroaching on the fringes of a massive alien empire that has yet to fully mobilize against them. Anyway, that's the rough summary of what we're trying to put together in terms of a background. I'm hoping it's successful and we have several games that gradually bring to light the nature of the alien threat.
Here's today's new creature. This is an alien grunt and will form the bulk of the early enemies players will face. These guys are composed of a mix of human and alien DNA and use pretty heavy weapons but are unarmored. Screen Shot 2016-09-06 at 11.46.40 AM by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr They will employ guns and also gas and frag grenades.
Nice. I really like how you're making mankind the aggressor. I mean, clearly still the home team, but with more going for them then the usual alien V humanity story.
For now genders will be predetermined but that may change if one of my asset creators finishes a space soldier builder he's working on. Probably not very likely though. Will be showing a couple more playable characters soon. I'm thinking of making one a female hacker / infiltrator and another a robotic sniper.
thanks ... appreciate it. If you like Templar battleforce and star traders, I suspect you'll like Demon's Rise. Here's another alien. This is the brute ... a huge, armoured alien with a big gun, exoskeleton and insectoid appearance. this guy will be an absolute nightmare for a team to face if they didn't bring some big guns. Screen Shot 2016-09-06 at 11.53.14 AM by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr
Last of the alien previews. Here is another spider-like alien. This one may have the ability to evoke fear in nearby enemies. As I mentioned earlier, fear / psychology will have a bigger impact on this game than the already considerable effects it has in Demon's Rise. Screen Shot 2016-09-06 at 11.47.01 AM by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr
It does look a lot of fun! Sadly my 16gb phone lacks space at the moment, but it's gone straight on to the wish list for when I finish Galaxy on Fire 2 again... I suspect that DR2 will be added to that list very shortly as well
Did some work on Strike Team. I managed to get the code working for the various levels / stairs. Looks pretty decent. Strike Team Scene 1 by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr I also started work on the menu's. I did the Main menu today and started on the load / save menus as well. Here's the more or less finished Main Menu: Strike Team Main Screen by Rajpreet Dhillon, on Flickr The Main menu has a very cool XCOM style with an alien popping his head up from behind the window and then ducking down again. Sinister music plays and the two soldiers move around the scene.
