PlaySelaco

The Future of our Patreon Page

Hello everyone,

Phew, it’s been a while since we’ve done this. It has been over a month since our last development blog post. As we were working our way towards launch, we found ourselves so busy, so short on time, and so incredibly stressed out, that consistently writing Patreon Blogs wasn’t very realistic anymore. I want to apologize for that, because I really tried to squeeze in it, but things got crazy.

Now that the launch is finally behind us, we can start returning to our usual schedule when it comes to Patreon. Which... I’m actually really looking forward to!

We finally did it. Together with your help, we’ve launched a major chunk of the game in Early Access (and you should have received a Steam Key if you’ve been with us a while! If not, e-mail us). The positive reception surrounding it has been overwhelming, and I want to talk about all of that really soon. I kept meaning to write a blog post about how our launch went, but writer's block is making that really hard right now. To tell you the truth, I’m tired. Really damn tired. I’ve been working almost constantly for the last couple of weeks, including the week after launch, and to this day I’m still trying to recover from that. It’s been nuts, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve never worked this hard in my life, ever. Our demo launch was nothing compared to this. We’re all taking it easy for the time being before, slowly, resuming operations again.

This blog post will be short and more of a heads-up. Starting next week, we return to our usual ‘2 development blogs a month’ schedule. Next week, I’ll tell you the story of how our launch went, because oh boy, things were rocky. Awful, even. Did you know we were 5 minutes away from posting a big Apology.png post on Twitter to announce a delay right before launch? I’ll tell you all about it next week!

(To all of our new backers, I usually don't do shitty cliffhangers in our blog posts. I promise this will never happen again.)

What will happen to our Patreon?

The reason I wanted to make this blog post was to briefly talk about this. We’ve been getting new backers recently, which is great, but I’ve started to feel an immense sense of guilt not saying anything. Which is just rude of me, given your importance towards this game! We’ve consistently provided updates here for almost 3 years, and not doing so anymore just felt wrong.

Given our commitment towards making 2 more (shorter) chapters, we still need some way of funding, so Patreon is still crucial to our sustainability and the finalization of the game. With the majority of the game being available right now, I’ve been trying to figure out where to go with our Patreon page. Selaco is in Early Access, so we owe it to all of our players to inform them about the state of the game on a regular basis through public Steam Blogs. That’s the point of Early Access, after all.

But, given how you guys are actively supporting the game, you deserve a little extra. So we found a great way to still justify development blogs. So, here is what will change:

• Development Blogs will continue, but with more emphasis on behind-the-scenes stuff and the inner workings of the systems we are working on. Public Steam posts will be far less detailed and a lot more straightforward. Basically:

  • Steam: “We made this!”

  • Patreon: “We are going to make this, here is how, here is why, this part was fun to make, this part sucked, here is what we want to improve". We will announce things in detail a few weeks before showing a simplified version on Steam. Most of the Chapter 2 related stuff will be exclusive to Patreon. Not all, but most.

• Rewards are going to be revamped. Now that the game is out there, not all rewards make perfect sense anymore. I don't have any more to share about this yet, but we’ll have more news shortly! We refuse to not reward our backers with new stuff as we enter our new phase.

• There will be more emphasis on doing private beta tests with our backers before rolling it out to the public. This means you get everything earlier than anyone else! Again, more details ASAP!

Conclusion

That’s all for now! I know this isn’t a whole lot and that we usually talk a lot more, but I really need a break. I’m going to take it easy this week, perhaps read a book, maybe reorganize the office for a fresh new look, buy some plants, I don't know. I’ll see what comes my way. 

I’m super excited to start working on Chapter 2. It’s going to be fun, and now we feel a lot more at ease given how the base game is already out there. We understand the game way better than we did before, and now we can lean into that.

I truly appreciate all of you for sticking around and continuously supporting the project. I hope you take a moment to realize that you've made all of this possible.

Here is to a new phase of Selaco. Here is to you! 💙

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #66 - Lots of progress!

Greetings!

Unfortunately, we had to skip a blog post last month, so my apologies for the long silence. There's not a lot of time left to finish our Early Access build of the game, so trying to squeeze in a window of time to write these things has gotten increasingly harder. I promise I'll be back on a regular schedule after the game has launched and we begin working on the rest of the game.

But we're here now, and to make up for it, it's full of images and gifs!

Enjoy!

Ice Grenade rework

They were quite lackluster before. They would freeze and completely immobilize enemies, but you would have to do a follow-up yourself to kill them, which often involves switching weapons. In a way, this works, sure, but it's too involved for something like the Grenade Launcher; where you can use Ice Grenades as an ammo type that requires time to switch towards. We didn't like it, our testers didn't like it, so it was time for a change.

So instead, given the rarity of Ice Grenades, we've turned them into beefed-up Frag Grenades with a much larger radius and some added functionality.

Anyone close to the point of the explosion will shatter into a bunch of ice chunks; anyone unfortunate enough to survive the blast will instead be frozen (or, in case of higher tier enemies, get slowed down). Frozen enemies die in a single melee hit and take twice the amount of damage from any damage source.

Behold, ice!

During the making of this section I've backspaced 4 different ice puns, I couldn't do it.

Artwork

We want to launch with new key art, so we've got something cooking! Have a sketch

Secret Tracker

We've added a hidden mechanic to Selaco that allows players to locate secrets easier. Every level will have a Multimeter tool in it. It looks like a random prop, but it has hidden functionality.

Picking it up will cause it to beep. The frequency of the beeping is based on the distance of the nearest secret. You can, in theory, take a Secret Tracker from the first level, and carry it with you all the way until the end of the game!

Markers

Markers are now placed at the point you are aiming at, rather than in front of the player's feet. A small change, but so worthwhile

SPACE BRO rework

We've gotten to work on, arguably, the most important change we've made in recent years; we made SPACE BRO fun!

Whenever we looked at streams of people playing the demo, they never bothered playing SPACE BRO for longer than 30 seconds because it didn't feel great to play. The Asteroid-style game with tank controls where you have to defend Earth from incoming meteors never felt right, and we knew that going in, but time was short so we launched with what we had at the time.

We've turned SPACE BRO into an auto-scroller and accidentally made it pretty damn fun (and addictive). New enemy types, upgrades, a faster-paced style, and, best of all, the player gets healed for every stage they complete!

Burger Flipper

Speaking of in-universe videogames, Burger Flipper is officially finished and has proven to be a hit among testers. You can find it in one of the later levels!

Zynzu Entertainment is ready with their marketing push, too. So expect plenty of Burger Flipper posters around the world.

We showed a short video on Twitter a few days ago and everybody assumed it was an April Fools joke. Oh well.

Fruitful Computer

New voxels! Finally, Selaco is a getting a premium computer system aimed towards people with far too much money. The thousands of PHILD monitors you come across in Selaco are about to get some actual competition in the computer market.

At roughly 12 times the price, you can get a computer that's at least 8% faster. Oh, you can't play games on it, so don't bother installing Burger Flipper.

They even have packaging!

EDIT:

I could not resist. Right as I wrote this, I decided to add them to the game. Even this GIF feels overpriced.

Water Bottle

Many years into Selaco's development and we finally asked ourselves ''Wait, why does nobody drink water in this universe"

Happy to announce that Selaco now has water bottles ready to be consumed for 1HP. Thank you, Hydrocy!

(A water splash effect when drinking is currently missing)

Personal Containers

Selaconian residents can now store their belongings in nice, sturdy, colorful containers. Surely, no players will attempt to destroy these with their guns!

Danger Indicator Improvements

This one is a bit more subtle, but still something I want to mention as it has been criticized a handful of times on the internet.

Danger Indicator from incoming explosions now properly adjusts to elevation. In the demo, it's one big circle that completely ignores staircases and slopes, resulting in a gigantic floating circle that looked way off.

This new solution properly considers these things.

Casting Call

We made a casting call on Twitter asking for voice actors to voice Friendly NPC's and background noises. I was expecting roughly 50 or 60 submissions from this, but instead, we got so much more.

As soon as the next Playtest build is ready and we invited our third batch of testers, I'm going to start plowing through these auditions. I'll be honest, I am not looking forward to it, but we do have some cool stuff cooking up, including a brand new voice cameo that I cannot announce yet.

644 voice reels though... Phew, that'll be a while.

EDIT: 717 now!

Grenade Swap indicators

Swapping to a different grenade will now be properly displayed on the HUD. We've been using an ugly placeholder for far too long.

Fire Damage

Dawn can burn now, and so can NPCs!

Like many shooters, standing close to fire will cause the player to burn and take damage over time. We are not different here, but we did decide to add a small mechanic to it. Dawn can slide and do dashes, so this can be used to mitigate damage and shorten the burn timer. Just don't accidentally slide yourself into more danger, which has happened to me a couple times and that's how I knew we had a fun mechanic in our hands.

Apologies for the VAC-Bot driving straight into the flame. That was an unprompted horror :(

Level 5 - Exodus Plaza

We are currently doing a polishing pass for the 5th level. It's already completed, but we decided to give it some extra love. It is, after all, a mall! It has to be good.

Have some screenshots of the current state!

Smooth Level Transitions

As I've said many times in the past, we aim for Selaco to be one smooth, uncut journey from start to finish. Whenever there's a strange jump or teleport, that illusion is shattered.

In the current demo build, that is always the case. Loading zones are never smooth, you never stand in the same spot after loading, and any props that got damaged will suddenly be restored because they are not destroyed in the new level.

That has all been changed. We managed to find a way for these things to carry over.

Have a look at how I move this chair to a different spot, enter a loading zone, and have the chair stand on the exact same spot it used to be. Much smoother! Player position is also stored, so you no longer jump to a different spot you weren't before.

Conclusion

Less than 2 months left! Are we ready?

For the next blog post, we are going to discuss how we will continue with our Patreon moving forward, because we do have some fun plans for post-launch, if you choose to continue supporting post-launch development!

Again, thank you for your continuous support

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #65 - Propane Tanks, Bipods, Dawn Toons and more

Hello everyone,

Keeping it straight to the point for this one! I have a very busy week, and an even busier week after this, so I'll focus less on words and more on images.

Enjoy the blog post!

Propane Tank

We've finally gotten to rework how propane tanks work. Or rather, I finally got to finish them properly! 

The usual behavior (which is still in the game) is that the propane tank will sizzle when hit before eventually exploding. While that makes sense, it completely lacks any other type of interaction, essentially making its behavior and role in the game identical to an explosive barrel except with a much smaller hitbox. 

This is not very interesting.

Default behavior

This is the universally agreed upon behavior for propane tanks when it comes to shooters. But this is Selaco, so...

Added Behavior #1

You can now pick up the propane tank to detach it from the container and place it somewhere else with ease. This makes a propane tank a lot more flexible compared to an explosive barrel.

Once you shoot the propane tank, it will fly towards the direction of the shot and explode when it touches an enemy or solid surface. Perfect for setting up ambushes if you know the enemy is coming.

Added Behavior #2

You can also shoot the propane tank when its in its container, then pick it up and use it like a grenade. It will explode when it touches an enemy.

I know what you're thinking so I would to address to elephant in the room. Yes, we still use gas in 2255.

Material-based floor decals

This seems rather silly because we’ve had different effects for different types of walls (metal, wood, concrete etc.) for years now, but GZDoom handles floors/ceilings and walls completely differently from eachother, so we needed to make a tiny tweak to make decals dependent on the material.

It’s 2024 and we finally have this amazing piece of technology! Metal decals on a metal surface. 

Game of the Year.

Extra ‘oomph’ for the Penetrator

We’ve spiced up the Penetrator's effects a little to deliver more OPS (Oomph Per Shot). It’s a shame gifs don't have sounds, but it sounds a little chunkier, too!

DMR Bipod

We added a bipod to the weapon design mostly because we wanted a unique silhouette, but then thought ''What if you can actually use the bipod...?" With how much of a defensive weapon this is, it makes sense to make it more powerful when the player is taking stand somewhere.

So I got to work!

This is still a work in progress, but players can now attach their bipod to low surfaces for more accurate shots. Without attaching a bipod, the gun works just fine, but the spread build-up is rather large, so eventually, you have to stop attacking to regain accuracy.

Not the case with the bipod. Just move to a surface, briefly hold still, and the bipod will attach itself through the power of automation. Once attached, you can still strafe left and right, as long as the weapon remains on a surface.

Here is how the DMR fires without the bipod attached. As you can see, it has plenty of kick and the spread builds up rather fast, quickly losing it's reliability. You can still fight like this, but some shots will miss.

Attach the bipod, and it will look like this:

Your moveset is significantly restricted in this approach, but the trade-off is a considerable increase in power because spread and recoil is almost completely mitigated.  It's a bit of an experimental approach because we don't see such systems often in shooters, but I wanted to try! That's part of why we do Early Access, after all.

New Dawn Toons

We’re working on new tooltip animations. These are some sketches we've made for the upcoming ones. The faces will be a lot less stiff when we render them out, we kept it simple because these are mainly about composition, not detailing

Destructible trees

Lo and behold, destructible trees!

...Quite underwhelming, isn't it? I agree! I want the leaves to stay on top of the tree and break apart once they hit the floor, as well as add some more believable special effects when it's tumbling downwards. 

We're currently in the middle of our playtests (more invites being sent out soon, btw!) and there's a lot of work to be done in regards to the new upcoming level, so I did not quite get to the point where I wanted to be with our trees. 

Let's try again at the end of March and show something more decent. Sorry!

Conclusion

Oh man, I just now realized I ended the blog post with a downer. As a backer, you deserve proper tree destruction, so I'll add an exclamation point to my notes so I can do it properly. 

As usual, a major thank you to everyone who's still here with us. These last few months are more costly than ever, so the extra bit of budget is especially making a large difference now. 

A little under 3 months left! 

Wesley de Waart

Small delay for the next Developer Blog

Hello Patrons,

Unfortunately, I have to delay the Patreon Blog by a week. My initial plan was to have a blog post ready just before the end of February, but a lot of work ended up getting in the way of things. I uhh, must also admit that I had forgotten about how short of a month February is 😬.

We're currently working hard to wrap up preparations for our Playtesting Phase, which took a bit longer than expected. The Developer Blog will be ready by the end of the week, and I'll make it extra juicy to compensate. Apologies!

Some important information regarding playtesting 

The majority of testers will be added in the second batch which takes place in a few weeks. The first batch is smaller to ensure everything is set up properly before we "open the flood gates."  So, if you haven't received an invitation yet, fear not – you may still get one later!

Have a great week,

Wesley de Waart

EDIT:

Oh man, Patreon is really rubbing this one in. I said I was sorry! =(

REMINDER: We are looking for playtesters!

All patrons,

Quick reminder that we are still looking for playtesters! If you are interested in becoming a playtester for Selaco, please submit the form before February 26! 

You can find the form below. Please make sure to read the FAQ that is included in the form.

Playtest Submission Form

Thank you,

Wesley de Waart

PATRONS ONLY: Selaco is looking for Playtesters!

Hello everyone,

We are excited to announce that Selaco is now actively seeking playtesters to play the pre-release version of our Early Access. This contains most of the content available at launch, albeit still in beta form (meaning it might be buggy or unstable)! We will be working together with you to make it ready for launch.

If you want to help us make the best game possible, and playtesting is something you are interested in, please consider submitting the form below:

Playtest Submission Form

I've attached a short FAQ below that may answer some of your questions. If your question isn't answered, do not hesitate to ask us here!

FAQ:

Q: Why do I have to sign an NDA?

A: Significant portions of the game will be handed out to playtesters. In order to protect our game and its assets, we have to take the necessary precautions.

Q: What are the rules in regards to the NDA?
A: Anything that happens during the testing phase should not be shared with anyone who is not in the playtesting group. This includes sharing files of the game, details about its contents, impressions, videos and screenshots, live streaming etc.

Our goal is to make the playtesting phase as laid back as possible, and we are confident that our backers have no ill intent, but we cannot take any risks with something of this scale.

A more clear list of rules will be provided prior to signing the NDA.

Q: What information are you looking for?
A: We are mostly interested in knowing if the game is fun to play and if there are any problems / rough edges we have to look into. You are more than welcome (encouraged, even) to give us detailed feedback and analyse the game wherever you see fit, but that’s not a mandatory requirement!

The most important thing is whether or not you are having fun.

Q: How is this going to work?

A: We review submissions and handpick the ones we think are the most suited for our playtest. We have limited space so we, unfortunately, cannot let everybody in. If we get too many good submissions, we will be using software to randomly select between our recommendations.

If you have been approved, I will be sending you a friend request on Discord (Username is Nexxtic) and discuss further details in our Test Group! If your submission mentioned you don't want to use Discord, I’ll be sending an email instead!

Q: How many players will be accepted in the Playtesting Group?

A: We aren't entirely sure yet. We do know we want to keep it small scale for the time being as we aren't sure how labor intensive the testing phase is going to be for us. If we feel like there is space for more, we'll be reviewing the form again and invite new people over. We'll adapt based on the circumstances.

If you don't hear from us, we may still get back to you later!

Q: Will we test the full Early Access version of the game?

A: In a way, yes! We still have 4 months left of polishing and tweaking left to do, but many of the contents are approaching final and are very representative. Just potentially buggy or ‘rough around the edges’ in certain places.

The test will be done in multiple phases. The first phase contains the entirety of Level 2. The second phase contains the entirety of Level 3 and Level 4, etc. Then at the end, we test the first level (which is getting a major rework soon). The average level should take 45-60 minutes to complete. This allows us to continue working on later levels while the other ones are being tested. Once a new set of levels are done, we will be updating the game.

We will discuss more about this in the Testing Group when the time comes.

The final level(s) may be excluded from testing.

Q: Will it take a lot of my time to test this game?

A: That’s up to you! We don't mean for this to feel like a job, we want the playtest to be fun as if you’re casually playing a video game you just bought. If all you can muster is 30 minutes of playtime a week, but still can find the time to provide feedback, then it’s alright with us.

Q: Any rewards for playtesters?
A: Anyone who helps us playtest the game will receive special credits; both through the Credits page listed right after the development team, and through an in-game asset in one of our levels that mentions your name (either your full name or nickname). We are still working out the details of the latter, but are fully committed to that idea. We will make sure players see you!

Q: I’ve never tested a game before. Is that a problem?

A: That is not a problem. We need a wide range of different players to cover more ground. Casual or hardcore, red or purple blooded, everyone is welcome in this playtest.

Q: I only have a Linux  machine / Steam Deck. Does this reduce my chances of getting accepted?

A: No. We need those to be tested too! Not having a Windows machine at your disposal is not an issue.

Q: I don't want to use Steam

A: Unfortunately, Steam makes it very easy (and safe) for us to distribute the game to testers. Steam is a mandatory requirement.

Q: What about Discord?

A: We can make an exception by e.g. using email, but highly recommend Discord as one central place is a lot easier for us to manage.

Q: My question isn’t answered here >:(

A: Oh no! Reach out to us in the comments, in the Patreon Chat, or in #Patreon-Lounge in our Discord server!

Conclusion

We have to be honest with you here: We have never organized such a thing before! While we have a good grasp on how to make a fun game (hopefully, at least!), many other aspects of this line of work are a complete mystery to us. We’ve never promoted a game before, never ran a sizable community before, and also have never done testing like this before. We are figuring it out as we go, so please bear with us as some things may be subject to change.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

The password required for the form is ‘I shall not kick Park Benches’

(Feel free to exclude ‘not’ in the password if you want to be a rebel)

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #64 - Steam Achievements, Upcoming QA Tests and Scripted Sequences

We’re at the end of the month, which means it’s time to have a chat about the game and the route ahead! I’ve been looking forward to this one in particular, because we managed to pull something off we didn’t think was possible and have an exciting announcement to make on top of that (which I spoiled in the title, probably).  

These last few weeks have been really weird for me. Scary, rather. Today, we have exactly 4 months left on the clock and I wish I could describe just how strange everything feels right now. There’s a healthy dose of excitement whenever I think about people finally experiencing this huge undertaking of ours, but looming in the background is a sense of anxiety I haven’t been able to escape just yet. I think I speak for the whole team when I say that we are quite confident in the game as a whole, purely because we still enjoy playing it every single day, but you never quite know how something will land with a larger audience and that's horrifying. Once it's out of our hands, all we can do is wait and hope that Selaco is making people happy. 

Selaco’s launch is immensely close right now, and it’s time for us to begin the next phase of development. And, oh boy, it’s a scary one! Let’s not waste any time and get straight to that.

QA Tests

Yep, it’s that time! We’re going to start doing QA tests with a number of people outside of the development team, using a build that contains the entire game (or rather, the current development state of the game). While we've done extensive internal testing over the years, a bunch of developers can only find so much; a fresh pair of eyes can discover so much more.

At this point in time, we are still figuring out the specifics of how to best approach this. However, since Selaco is entirely funded by the community through Patreon, it only makes sense to involve backers in the testing process. It has always been clear to us how passionate our backers are about the game. We share that passion too. We all want Selaco to be the best game it can possibly be, and with your help, we can achieve that.

Sometime next week, I’ll be uploading a form to our Patreon Page regarding testing. If you are interested in helping us out, whether you are a recent backer or a veteran, you are more than welcome to submit an application!

As much as we want to, unfortunately, we cannot let everybody in, but we’ll try to get as many on board as possible without spreading ourselves too thin.

Please stand by for more information about this next week! If you have burning questions, comment below.

Steam Achievements

Due to popular demand, we have revisited the subject of Steam Achievements and are happy to announce that Selaco will be able to support them after all!

In the past, we have mentioned how achievements are not an easy thing to implement in an engine that’s GPL-compliant. In simple terms, this means that the engine is open-source (all code publicly available for other people to use) and can only use other open-source APIs. Steam’s Achievement system is closed-source, so it cannot come into contact with the engine directly. However, there are common ways of getting around this while still wholly respecting the license.

Since we already have a plugin that can download Workshop mods by running before launching Selaco (discussed in a previous blog post), we have extended it to also provide achievement services.

As long as the plugin is running at the same time as Selaco, achievements will be available. The plugin will run by default when you launch Selaco via Steam. Technically, any mod or achievement service could be facilitated this way by providing different optional plugins. The plugin is immensely lightweight, and you won’t even know that it’s there.

Despite the existence of Steam Achievements, the game will still be DRM-Free. You can run the game without Steam if you still choose to do so, but Achievements will not work this way, and the plugin will not run.

We have tried to make the system work as seamlessly as possible. When starting up the game, you will be notified that achievements are enabled. There is also a warning if the achievement service stops or is not active when the game is launched with achievement support. We wouldn't want you to miss out on the epic toilet flushing achievements just because you accidentally closed the achievement plugin.

Achievements will be unavailable when running the game with mods or when using cheats.

Here are some of the Steam Achievement icons with no further context:

Take a guess!

Object Pushing

GZDoom’s pushing system is… Primitive, to say the least.

One of the more common complaints we have received ever since launching the demo was in regard to the amount of clutter that can block your path. Even something as simple as an office chair has a tendency to block you, even though it’s an object that’s actually easy to push. It has wheels for a reason, after all!

We decided to address this and ensure that players keep their momentum when bumping into objects that are easily pushable. If something looks light, you can push it with ease. If something looks heavy, it will slow you down, but smoothly and less jarringly.

In the current demo, pushing an object goes like this:

Notice how stuttery the pushing is? And how with every touch it slows the player’s momentum down? Not only is it not very appealing to look at, but it also has a negative effect on gameplay. Imagine trying to evade enemy fire, but you keep strafing into small pieces of decoration that unexpectedly slow you down because they are outside of your field of vision. 

This is a problem and a potential cause for frustration. Judging from some comments we’ve read on the internet (yes, we dig around a lot, some places are really mean!), many people felt that this kind of sucked, and they were right.

The new system was quite a headache to implement due to how the engine handles these things, but we managed to come up with something that’s quite good. 

Pushing an office chair now goes like this:

Pushing is now smooth, and objects stick against the player model. If you end up pushing an object against a solid surface (like a wall), it will simply get out of the way for you. Humans have a tendency to do such things without any thought, so it only made sense for Dawn to shove objects away that block her

Scripted Sequences

I currently have two pages full of ideas for scripted sequences and have started to implement them bit by bit.

Something I always liked about the demo level was how much was happening around you while venturing through the level. Things would explode, elevators would crash, ceilings would crumble, and soldiers would be seen shooting at people. While not always as action-oriented, that’s something we want to keep doing throughout the entire campaign because it helps make the world feel more alive and gives the illusion that things are actually happening around you, with or without your presence. There's a war going on, and we need it to be convincing.

They can be simple things, like the GIF below where Air Drones fly past you and demolish a vehicle occupied by friendly soldiers.

Or more involved things, like Selaco’s Sky Simulation going completely offline in Level 3-2, shrouding the entire city in complete darkness as the primary source of light is momentarily disabled. It’s a great way to remind the player that Selaco is merely simulating Earth-like behavior and that the war is causing simulations to glitch out more and more as time goes on.

(Blackout is extremely WIP and merely a concept. It currently allows us to darken the entire city instantly at will.)

Adding such events is honestly one of my favorite things to be working on. From a development point of view, they are fun puzzle pieces to figure out because such sequences have to happen in real-time without ever compromising any gameplay systems. We don't want to do what Crysis 2 did, for example, where it would deliberately slow the player down and force them to look at something. In that sense, I tend to look at Half-Life more; finding a way to draw attention to something that may catch the player's eye, then leave it to them to decide if they want to engage with it or keep going.

And from a player's point of view, it makes the world seem reactionary and keeps players on their toes. We try to add such events in every area of the game, albeit most of them will be small and simplistic, of course.

Let's talk about grass!

Finally, Selaco has the technology to feature dense patches of grass at a very low performance cost.

Before, every single grass sprite was a separate actor, so we had to be very careful with the amount of grass we placed within scenes as they would quickly drain performance. For larger cityscapes, that quickly becomes a problem. Having only a small handful of grass sprites in a grassy area looks rather dull and not very convincing.

We finally optimized the darn thing by storing big clusters of grass in a single 3D actor consisting of flat planes that are completely ignored by GZDoom’s tick system (making them less CPU hungry).

Behold, optimized clusters of grass that keep performance high!

Now, with this game being Selaco, I owe it to myself to make grass feel more physical. We are all about details, after all. So, when running or sliding over grass, some of the grass will get kicked up from the surface. If it rains, a small splash will also emerge. The same rules apply to enemy footsteps.

It didn’t stop there, though. I dedicate Sundays to adding small bits of detail that aren't important to the game as a whole but give the game a bit of extra character (like the grass demonstrated above). Another such thing is that shooting a tree will now cause some leaves to appear from the top, and a brand new particle effect was added to convince the player that the tree is taking damage (called 'Sawdust').

One crucial ingredient is missing here, though. And that’s how the tree is currently indestructible and doesn't snap in half. I’ve been wrapping my head around it for a while now, and I think I may have an idea on how to pull off convincing destructible trees. 

These will, obviously, not be as detailed as Far Cry 2 or Crysis, where individual branches could be removed, but you bet I’ll make sure they’re satisfying to break! It just feels wrong to have something in Selaco that is very commonly placed in levels yet cannot be destroyed by any means.

I mean, Tree Stumps already exist! There is no reason for the game not to have destructible trees.

Also, Park Bench destruction. They’ve always been destructible, but the effects were quite lackluster so I gave them a do-over. Lots of bits and pieces are breaking off now.

(Windows Mouse Cursor of Shame not included in the Early Access release)

Or, if you really dislike the existence of a Park Bench and prefer to take them down through more personal means, you can kick them, too! I’ll leave it up to the players to come up with a headcanon that explains why Park Benches are the only piece of decoration with a Kick prompt (excluding damaged doors). Perhaps Dawn had a terrible experience with park benches in the past and takes great pleasure in giving them them the boot, or, more plausible, she blames the park benches for the Alien invasion.

Stand by for the next Developer Blog where I will show you a destructible tree! You have my word.

AUTO-9 Shotgun Shells

All upgrades are practically finalized by this point, but it always felt like we needed something a bit more playful that doesn’t require any thought from a design standpoint and solely exists for the sake of ‘why not.’

I’ve added an upgrade that beefs up the amount of gore that occurs when you shoot someone with a shotgun. It’s already a very punchy weapon and players told us they really liked shooting enemies with the Shotgun, so why not allow them to go a little more over the top if they choose to spend resources on it?

Thank 'Robocop: Rogue City' for this idea.

Okay, I made the GIF, then realized how demonstrating purple gore in a very purple room is perhaps not the brightest idea. Sound off in the comments to tell me how stupid this is so I can make a new one in an environment where the blood doesn’t blend with the background.

Conclusion

Once again, very satisfied with the progress we've made. The addition of Steam Achievements has been on our radar ever since the beginning, and it was requested about a thousand times over ever since we’ve announced this game. It feels good to finally have a solution that actually works to our liking, even if the implementation isn't as clean compared to other games.

Next week I’ll post the QA testing form. Very excited for that, hopefully you are too!

I hope you have a fantastic month ahead of you and that we'll see you again in February.

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #63 - Reflecting on 2023, The Route Ahead, New Fun Additions

Hey everyone,

I’ve been dealing with an awful fever these last couple of days, so this blog post has arrived a few days later than I had intended. Still not feeling too great, but I’m recovering! Feeling good enough to write a blog post, at least.

Reflecting on 2023

While 2022 was our biggest year (due to the launch of our demo, followed by a major update, preview builds that got us a lot of publicity, a VineSauce / Jerma stream etc.), 2023 was the biggest year in terms of development, as the amount of content and finalizations we’ve been able to do has been pretty absurd! We’ve basically managed to make the game playable from beginning till end, while making most of it relatively polished already. We could ship the majority of the game right now if we wanted to, with the exception of one area, and people would hopefully be satisfied. Doesn’t mean we’re going to launch right now, of course, god no, but it’s great knowing that the game is in a very good spot right now.

2023 was my first full year of working on Selaco full-time. And with that came a lot of new expectations in terms of game completion.

What have we been doing in 2023?

This is quite a list, and doesn't cover most of it, but it does cover a significant amount! Please bare in mind that I don't have exact numbers with me on some of these, so they are rough (but very calculated) estimate's.

• Integrated Modding Support, including Steam Workshop and an in-game mod menu
• Added Cloud Saving
• Completed 95% of our levels.
• Fully rewrote how Glass panes are handled, taking length and height into consideration, as well as feeling more ‘physical’ by no longer shattering as easily.
• Optimized Particle and Smoke effects to be way, way more performant than before.
• Added multi-threading for certain parts of the Engine (UPDATE: As of today, Multi-threading has been added to OpenGL!)
• Added all of our remaining guns (1 of which still requires some additional polish, some require some animation refinements in places)
• Added over 20 adjustable Alt Fires
• Implemented ~90% of the Weapon Upgrades
• (Estimate) Added 200 new voxels
• (Estimate) Added 700 textures, including walls, floors, fictional branding and more
• Remixed the entire game’s audio for better clarity and dynamic range
• Reworked GZDoom’s Ambient Audio to not clutter all of your computer’s Sound Channels the moment the game is loaded.
• Added all of our remaining guns (1 of which still requires some additional polish, some require some animation refinements in places)
• Added over 20 adjustable Alt Fires
• Implemented ~90% of the Weapon Upgrades
• (Estimate) Added 200 new voxels
• (Estimate) Added 600 textures, including walls, floors, fictional branding and more
• Remixed the entire game’s audio for better clarity and dynamic range
• Reworked GZDoom’s Ambient Audio to not clutter all of your computer’s Sound Channels the moment the game is loaded.
• Adjusted indexing to significantly increase bootup times
• Reworked pathfinding so enemies can navigate levels flawlessly
• Launched an Extended Demo
• Added a City Backdrop and Skybox
• Added 6 new Enemy Types (3 of which still require some polishing
• Added at least 300 new Sound Effects
• Added Ladders that don’t suck for FPS standards
• Added an Invasion Tier menu along with 10 new Invasion tiers (new ones are still being worked on)
• Added Cockroaches, Flies and some other critters
• Added Rain System for exterior levels
• Added an Alternative HUD that shows up in one of the later levels
• Fully rewritten Explosion System to be more performant
• Added a system to make lighting effects (muzzle flashes, explosions, plasma impacts) more performant.
• Added 'Workshop Upgrade Tier' items to allow for new weapon upgrades and Workshop Systems to be unlocked
• Reworked GZDoom's "BloodType" system to take more context into consideration when getting shot (for example, Roaring Cricket, DMR or Shotgun attacks give very different blood splatters than other weapons would)
• Complete Armor rebalance
• Refined the Plasma Rifle
• Reworked DMR (Although we are still not too happy with it
• Reworked Animation Cancellation for most weapons, making it more reactive towards player input despite being in an animation (e.g you can now reliably melee to cancel a reload at any time, rather than 'when the game feels like it')
• Added Battle Overseer system to allow for better control over enemy squads
• Launched an Early Access trailer at Realms Deep 2023
• Reworked Gore System for killed enemies and made it more flexible
• Added Human NPC Model. So far, sprite work only includes 2 corpses but more will come before launch
• Added a small handful of new death animations to older enemies
• Added new hazards like Gas Pipes and Acid Containers.
• Completely rewritten Crosshair system to properly portray recoil/spread values in real time
• Added power ups like Bunny Hopper and Protein Shakes
• Gave Dawn a home for the player to explore
• Added destructible cars
• Added a whole bunch of new stats for the game to keep track of
• Rewrote the Footstep system in Zscript to allow for better fidelity in how we handle footsteps (it cares for more context, like having snowy footstep sounds when you walk over snow, or check to see if the character is walking on top of a car)
• Tons and tons of logic tweaks to core game systems to be less demanding on the CPU
• AI improvements (allowing them to dive, mount shields, better grenade throwing and much more)
• Brand new 'Status Icons' to showcase cooldowns, buffs, nerfs and more.
• (Very rough estimate that took be taken with a grain of salt) Added at least 250 new Sprite Decorations (signs, graffiti, paper posters etc.)
• Added system for hitscan attacks to pass through objects. No more bulletproof plants!
• Fully reworked Water System where impact effects can be properly detected, as well as react accordingly towards most non-particle actors
• Added Weapon Wheel
• Added Marker System
• Added 'Last Known Position' system for Enemy Soldiers
• Improved Automap by adding additional visual aids (Breadcrumbs, automatically mark level transitions, more icons for important objects)
• Kept the blood Purple instead of Red
• Expanded upon the Safe Room by adding a Shooting Range and a Train Traversal system
• Added Fish AI
• Murdered a ton of stuttering.
• Improved tools by (Pathnode Data baking, PowerShell scripts to compile a build at the press of a button, single-click window pane creations and more.
• Reduced VRAM usage by ~40% (It's still unreasonably high though. Working on that as well. This was not much of an issue in the demo because of limited assets, but when you have a full weapon and enemy roster, all those PNG sprites add up!)
• Allowed seamless transitioning between completed levels
• Fully rewrote multiple gameplay systems that still used legacy DOOM code (Armor, ammo pickups. damage rolls and more)

Apologies for the complete lack of structure in this list. I was looking at Github Commits as I made this and writing down some of the noteworthy ones. I could go on for a little longer if I included all the little things.

What could have gone better

I'm generally satisfied with the way things have gone from a production standpoint. However, from my point of view, I wish I did a better job at being organized. I tend to work all over the place, and while I've managed to handle it well so far, the complete lack of structure can lead to chaos, especially as deadlines approach. Having a good plan holds a lot of power, and I need to find the discipline to actively maintain such a thing.

Finding proper structure and getting into the habit of sticking to tight work hours has been one of my primary goals since the ADHD diagnosis a few months ago. Currently, I work throughout most of the day with little breaks until I'm way past midnight. It's not ideal, as it makes it challenging to separate work and personal life, a common struggle for those working from home. Waking up late in the day because I tend to work until 4am is not a lifestyle I want to continue sticking with.

So far, progress has been slow on that front, but it's coming along well as I do notice I'm improving. I hope to reach a satisfactory level in 2024. Therapy has been very helpful when it comes to helping me find this level of structure.

The story of the game is another issue we really need to start moving forward with. We outlined it years ago and built the game's structure around that outline, but implementing the story beats has been slower than I would have liked. Our writer and I plan to pick this up in the next few weeks. Time is not by our side anymore!

What remains to be done?

We’re finalizing right now, but that doesn’t mean everything we want to be in the game is already made. Here are a few things we still have left on our plate:

Steam Achievements

You heard that right! When we worked on Steam Workshop support, we had to create an application in the background that handles the modding element (Primarily just moving a bunch of folders so the game can detect Uninstalled and Installed mods). Doing so in GZDoom itself would violate GPL, so we could not do that.

The fun thing is, this application can be used to handle achievements as well. We still have to wrap our heads around it, but in theory, we found a way in now. What remains is finding a way to have it communicate with the game engine as certain events happen.

I strongly wish that I can write a blog post soon where we announce the existence of Steam Achievements. That would be awesome, as it would be a GZDoom first and tackle a very common critique surrounding the game!

Level 6-3

It’s a level I have a lot of difficulty with. It required a lot of setup, so with the setup out of the way, actually making the level puts a lot of weight on my shoulders. It’s going well, but it’s rough.

It’s coming together bit by bit, but it probably will not be done until we’re quite close to launch.

Level 8-1

Selaco’s Chapter 1 finale is a mini level that functions as a bridge to Chapter 2. Joe is currently working on it.

Balance

Selaco is insanely fun to play, but we feel like there are still some severe balancing issues we have to figure out sooner rather than later. There is always too much ammo, too much health, too many credits to find, and many other different things. While combat itself feels pretty good from a balancing standpoint, the external factors do not. We have some plans to tackle this, and I’ll be starting next week most likely.

Demo Level rework

The Demo level already showed its age 2 years ago, and that is especially the case right now. Closer to launch, we are going to modify this level so it holds up better compared to later levels.

Finalizing enemies

Most of the roster is done, but there are plenty of rough edges that we have to iron out. Snipers are still lazy engineer recolors, Enforcers, and Siegers still use placeholder lines, etc.

General Refinements

This is always an on-going process. But both now, and after launch, we will be refining the game further and further until things feel perfect.

Full voice recordings

Start getting all the main and misc dialog in the game.

Quite a lot of work left with only 4.5 months left on the clock. Scary, but do-able! Lets show some fun stuff we've been doing recently!

Fish Tank

We finally added some proper fish tank destruction, along with... fish AI! When there’s no water, they will try to flop themselves towards water. If water is found, hooray, the fish gets a chance to live again! If it struggles to find any water, the fish unfortunately lives a very slow death.

A few Patrons in our Showcase channel proposed allowing the player to pick up a flopping fish, and return them to a water area manually, or flush them down a toilet, but why would do that!? This is not yet implemented, but is something I'd love to do if I can squeeze in the time! Should probably take less than an hour of work assuming no strange GZDoom-isms occur (GZDoom-ism: Having a fantastic idea that seems very easy to implement on the surface, but strange quirks in the engine prevent you from doing it the easy way)

Here is some fish, chilling in their underwater fish world

(The footage was a bit dark, so I brightened it up after the fact. Sorry!)

Here is fish, except Dawn decided to shoot some holes into it, causing the fish tank to leak 🙁 I had to speed it up a bit in order to keep the GIF under 10 seconds.

Water will drain until it reaches the lowest bullet hole. With enough damage caused to the glass, it will eventually shatter and spill all the water.

We truly hope players will respect the fish and not destroy their home. And we know you will because you love animals and especially fish <3

Air Hockey

Players can now utilize Air Hockey tables! Unfortunately, Dawn is lonely and entirely by herself, so there’s nobody to play against. Thankfully, she can pretend to be playing with plushies, like with the Koala over here!

EDIT: Well, as I was writing this, Cockatrice ended up adding A.I out of nowhere. So I guess you can play Air Hockey against a robot now! Selaco's asking price on Steam has just tripled!

Datapad UI

We’ve given the Wristcodex UI some love. The primary goal was to make it more pleasant to read as we’ve received quite a few complaints about that (especially those playing on a TV or Steam Deck). The new font is bigger and softer around the edges, and scrolling is no longer instant, there is no a smooth scrolling animation to make it easier to pick up where you left off.

We’ve streamlined the entire UI and think it looks quite a lot better now!

Train Menu

Still WIP, but very much getting there!

(NOTE: These are not all the workshops)

Conclusion

I’m very excited for where this year is going to take us. Selaco’s launch will, without a doubt, drastically change how this year will go compared to the other years; as there's an actual game to play then!

As usual, thank you for being a part of the team <3

A little under 5 months left!

Wesley de Waart

Happy New Year from Altered Orbit Studios!

And just like that, we've entered a brand new chapter in our lives. Depending on where you are, you might be too! We hope you have a wonderful night and wish you an incredibly healthy, happy, exciting, and awesome 2024.

Just like the years prior, I’ll be writing an extensive blog post to reflect on how 2023 has gone for us! Including Selaco’s progress, what we still have left to do, and what we wish to improve upon moving forward into 2024. I'll be getting this done this upcoming week, but maybe even tomorrow.

2024 will be Selaco’s year. It’s the year where we finally get to release the biggest chunk of the game to you. Having recently played through the whole thing back to back with no interruptions, I’m very confident there’s a lot to be excited about here, so much we haven’t shown or talked about too! Truly, we can't wait to see what everyone thinks of the game.

Thank you for being on this journey with us!

See you in 2024 <3

Altered Orbit Studios

Dev Blog #62 - Mod Support, Armor Rework, Animating a Robot

Good day, everyone,

It's been a fantastic couple of weeks for Selaco! I'm glad things have consistently improved after a dull period some time ago. And with only 5 months (oh god!) left on the clock, we can’t lose anymore time.

Just like the week before it, we’ve continued clearing out the remains of our backlog which, I must admit, has a lot of stuff in it that I’ve been postponing for months or even years. It's easy to push things aside when you have over a year left of dev time, but not so much when the release date is rapidly approaching. One such thing is the Mech that I’ll talk about later in the blog post.

We also finally got to work on actual mod support for the game. So, let's start with that!

Commencing Dev Blog #62!

Mod Support

We've begun working on Mod Support for Selaco! While we're still in the early stages of the process, the core foundation is fully intact and I dont think it will take much longer to finish.

Of course, being GZDoom, it's already moddable thanks to the open-source nature of the game. However, our goal is to streamline the process and integrate it more seamlessly within the game itself. While players can use external tools to assist them with mod management (such as ZDL for DOOM), I believe it's more ideal when all the necessary tools are integrated into the game from the get-go, without requiring players to download additional tools onto their computer.

Selaco's root directory will include a folder called 'Mods'. Upon downloading a mod, players can drag the files into the Mods folder, and these mods will automatically be enabled when the game launches.

If a player has at least one mod installed, the 'Mod Settings' menu becomes available in-game. Here, players can view a list of their installed mods and configure them according to their preferences.

Here is what it looks like!

Yes, these mods exist and will be available at launch!

The appearance of this menu is still a bit too busy to our liking, so expect some tweaks to be made in the release version.

Modders can include their username, a description, a header, and even a ReadMe so players can read up instructions in-game. These are plain-text files (.txt), so one of the purest form of art (ASCII art) is possible in GZDoom now.

We are actively working on Steam Workshop support too. While we can't directly integrate a Steam Workshop menu within the game itself, due to the GPL-License that GZDoom comes with, we're making it so that any mod you subscribe to will be sent straight to your Mods folder.

From the perspective of a modder, not much changes compared to DOOM. However, we will provide a text file in the Mods folder to explain some best practices for Selaco modding. For instance, we highly recommend modders include an ON/OFF button so their mod can be disabled at any time—either taking effect right away or after a level restart—without a saved game getting corrupted. With the game being open-source, we cannot mandate that, nor do we want to. But the best we can do is encourage modders to use it and avoid headaches for their players.

ACE Security

Last update in regards to the friendly NPC model. He’s rigged up and ready for use! Here he is with a heroic pose.

Mech

Up next, the Mech! We already have him rigged up, but nothing is animated yet so that’s on my to-do list before the year ends! Here are some pictures.

(The first 2 pictures have been shown in the past)

Rigged up! The lines allow us to move individual parts of his body.

To explain it a little better, you essentially pick up the pieces you want to animate, and start moving them. With all bones being connected, you end up moving different pieces of limbs automatically. When we have a pose we can use, we hit Render, and move to the next frame!

Here is quick demonstration:

Now, start posing every frame manually which make an animation when played in order, similar to claymation or stop motion, and render it out so it can be turned into a sprite. A traditional approach to modern animation involves using Frame Interpolation, which allows for smooth transitions between two frames. However, as Selaco uses sprites and draws inspiration from older video games, we intentionally avoid achieving a smooth look, as a 'perfect' animation tends to appear unnatural for sprites and can be too demanding because the computer has to load a large number of PNG’s files.

Our initial attempt involved using Frame Interpolation with applied frame skips during rendering to create a 'laggy' appearance similar to traditional DOOM-sprites. While this approach worked reasonably well, we felt it made the animation seem artificial, you could tell it originated from a smooth animation but got scaled back in post. It was also more likely to miss important details. For example, a frame skip could happen right at the moment a soldier inserted a magazine into his weapon. That's not a frame you want to miss when someone is reloading.

Instead, we now decide in advance how many animation frames we need based on guesswork (for example, we know the average walk cycle requires only 4 or 5 frames, while a death animation may require 10 or 13). We then manually pose each frame without using any tools to blend them together. This means that every single frame of animation is intended to be seen that way, and ensures all the important bits of visual information is always properly conveyed.

I had to dig deep to find this one, but here is the first animation we've ever made that we felt worked well within the game.  It has 4 frames and all of them are crucial.

The Mech will be used late in the game, but won't truly get to shine until we reach Chapter 2.

As enjoyable as it is, I've never animated a mech like this before! It’s one of the reasons I’ve been sitting on this one for so long. I always feel quite a lot of pressure when an artist finishes an asset that took a while to make, that I have to bring to life somehow.  After all the hours it took them to make such a thing, the last thing I want to do is send an animation video that feels borderline insulting toward their creation.

Time to do some research on mech movement and get it to work!

Armor System

There is a very dirty lie in our current Steam and Patreon demo. Something was so far down our to-do list back then that we had completely forgotten about it. Whoops.

This message here? It's a lie! You did not gain additional armor absorption when having more armor, and it did not absorb 50% of your incoming damage either.

I did implement such a system, but apparently DOOM's armor system worked a little differently than we thought, so our system didn't function as intended and behaved like Green Armor in Doom at all times. This is one of the downsides when working on top of a 'template' (despite most of that template no longer existing at this point).

The solution? We completely ditched the DOOM armor system and rewrote our own from scratch, entirely based around our game. We now have 'SelacoArmor,' which behaves a little differently.

When you have armor, there's a tiny label at the bottom that mentions (in real time) how much damage is currently being absorbed by your armor. In this case, damage will be reduced by 25%.

Pick up more armor, and the icon changes into something that looks stronger (having 75+ armor)

Armor now absorbs 50% of incoming damage, as indicated by the label below. Maintaining a high armor level will result in less damage being lost when taking hits, making it an important, though not essential, additional resource to manage. I expect experienced players to try and maintain 75+ armor as much as possible .

We are also planning to implement a system where, after you stop taking damage, a text label above the Armor HUD displays how much damage has been absorbed. For instance, imagine you're in a firefight, standing in the middle of a grenade explosion. That's a significant amount of damage you're taking! However, in many games, it's often unclear how effective your armor was in these types of situations. Did it save your life? How much health would you have lost without armor? Does armor even work against explosive damage? Armor tends to be a bit vague in video games, and we often take it for granted, knowing it protects our health but don't often bother looking into the inner workings.

Illustrated below is a mock-up. When the player stops taking damage, a label briefly appears, informing the player about the amount of health loss absorbed by the armor.

This will inform the player about just how effective their armor is, while also providing the satisfaction of knowing just how much damage was absorbed when taking a point blank shotgun shot to the face!

There we are 2 things we want to explore when we begin working on the second chapter. At this point, players should feel comfortable with the core mechanics of Selaco, so we can start introducing more advanced mechanics.

Enemy Armor System:

The plan is to implement a system where enemies can utilize SelacoArmor, but with different behavior. Enemies with armor will still take damage as usual, but they are less likely to stagger or take headshot damage. However, after taking enough damage, their armor can break, making them vulnerable. Kind of like the Brutes in Halo 3. 

Of course, this is nothing more than an idea right now, but we think there’s potential here. We just have to make sure the system doesn’t get too involved. We don't want players to, for example, constantly switch weapons just to deal with armored enemies. And we also have to make sure that shattering enemy armor is going to be satisfying and rewarding, rather than tedious.

We’ll see how it goes!

Upgradable Armor:

The Workbench is currently limited to just weapons, but we would love to expand upon this and allow for more customization. Not quite like an RPG where you keep upgrading things to become stronger, but rather allow players to make choices in regards to their playstyle. For example, an upgrade that increases bullet absorption at the expense of Dash/Slide effectiveness to complement slower playstyles. Or make armor absorb less damage but also make it last a little longer

Other updates:

• Burger Flipper has been completed! Selaco now has a second in-universe game that you can play straight from your Datapad. Woohoo!
• We’re in the process of drastically reducing VRAM usage. Will elaborate more in the next post when it’s ready. (UPDATE: One day after writing this, it has been implemented!)
• Level 6-1a and Level 6-1b are finished. Currently doing internal tests.
• A whole bunch of audio stacking issues have been fixed. For example, usually when firing a shotgun at an enemy, every single shotgun pellet would play an impact sound, often overloading the audio output. These have been fixed.
• I promised to demonstrate the train, but unfortunately got sidetracked by other things that needed to be done. I promise I’ll show it in the next Developer blog!

Conclusion

I’ll squeeze in one more blog post before the year ends where I take a look at the year as a whole and evaluate how everything went, including accomplishments, mistakes, the state of the game, and more.

As usual, we are grateful for your support! <3

Happy Holidays!

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #61 - A lot of new stuff, Bag Junk, and a Burger Flipper game

Hello everyone!

As of today, we have precisely 6 months of development left before our big launch. No pressure, right? 😬 It's becoming increasingly more scary to think about, but thankfully everything seems to be coming along well.

Two weeks ago, I shared a blog post where I mentioned that we weren't entirely satisfied with the progress over the past two weeks. This was mostly due to circumstances beyond our control that briefly slowed us down. However, for this blog post, that's not the case. We have a lot to show and talk about. Consider getting a nice cup of coffee or tea before beginning your read!

Another Health Update

Originally, I didn't want to write about this, but since I brought it up a few weeks ago, I figured it would only be fair to at least conclude this ADHD story!

Like I mentioned back then, ever since working from home in 2022, my ADHD issues have gotten more severe. It became increasingly difficult to concentrate, and distractions were everywhere. Even regular daily tasks were a nightmare because I’d quit halfway to do something else. I mentioned how I started taking meds to hopefully control it better.

Happy to report that that has indeed been the case. The medication has had a good effect on me, and I feel quite a lot more productive than I used to. Did come with a few side-effects though; I’ve had a few unusual mood swings where I felt unreasonably angry about things, and at times I was so focused on whatever I was doing that I refused to eat (so basically the opposite problem of what I had before!).

Thankfully, these things are very common for the first few weeks of taking the meds and should iron themselves out eventually. I’m 4 weeks in now, and I feel like the side effects are slowly fading away.

Lets hope it stays that way!

DMR - Animation Pass

We've finally given the DMR a proper animation pass! There are still a few rough edges I want to iron out, like the last few frames of the reload, and the scope animation could use some tweaking, but it’s turning out great! Expect a few of these animations to feel more tightened up when you get your hands on the game.

A cool detail you might have noticed is how the DMR’s magazine transitions from a first-person sprite to a voxel object when thrown. We do this for most of our weapons and, in most cases, this is very convincing, but there are a few angles where the throw doesn’t look as natural. Not much of an issue, but still something I’d love to improve later on when I find the time for it.

Demolition Charges

These are timed charges that detonate after a short amount of time. You can’t use them on-demand because they are made purely for scripted sequences where you have to blow something up in order to progress the game. You acquire a small handful of them in the third level of the game, and will frequently use them from that point onward. Why? Because destroying stuff is fun!

Here is an early prototype of the charges in action. They work, but I feel like they lack 'oomph' right now.

Grenade Bandolier

A rare upgrade found mostly in obscure secret places.

When picking up a Grenade Bandolier, you get one of every grenade type in the game. If it’s the first Grenade Bandolier you’ve picked up, your maximum Grenade Capacity will also increase by 1.

This means you get to carry around a maximum of 4 Frag Grenades, 4 Landmines, and 4 Ice grenades (and whatever else we add post-launch), instead of only 3. It’s quite similar to DOOM’s backpack pickup, except for throwables instead of ammo.

With how powerful our throwable items are, you may want to seek them out as they give you a good advantage. Especially later on.

Destructible cover

Hooray, more things to destroy. I haven't added all of them to the game yet, but that’s on my list for the week.

Probably also worth explaining how Brightmapping works, given the mysterious black boxes you see in the picture. I think it explained it before for sprites, but for the newcomers, allow me to explain how it works for our voxels.

The Black & White boxes are what we call ‘Brightmaps’. We overlay these as a full bright texture (always fully lit, unaffected by world lighting) on top of the crates. Using this will ensure that certain elements of the voxels are always lit up, which can make them a lot more convincing if they have portions that are meant to be lit up.

Here is what they look like without a brightmap:

Quite dull, right? The voxel clearly has a light on it that is meant to be lit, and yet it doesn't show.

Here they are again, but with a brightmap texture overlaid on top:

Much better!

Bag Junk

There are plenty of suitcases and duffle bags spread around Selaco. If you’ve played our demo, there is no doubt that you’ve walked past them from time to time. But once you began to shoot them, they just disappeared! Nothing happened. I hope you weren't a victim of such disappointment during your playthrough of the demo.

We started addressing this last weekend. The result? We’ve hand-painted 142 everyday items that people would generally store in their bags, excluding some of the items we are reusing like an ArachnoCola can or a teddy bear.

Think about pieces of clothing, bags of chips, perfume, deodorant, towels, medicine strips, you name it. Destroying a duffle bag is no longer lame and shows a decent bit of variety in what it spits out!

Will we add even more at some point? Who knows. I'm always oddly fascinated by having an unreasonable amount of variety in these type of things so I'd love to do more if the time comes.

Pick-up Notifications

We’ve fully rewritten how our pick-up system works. It is now smoothly animated and a lot less headache inducing. Our previous system was a convoluted mess where 3 different scripting languages were used in order to display it properly. On top of that, it used the dreaded ACS scripting language to display HUD information which is never ideal, since it’s not very scalable and convoluted to maintain. Making one change to Ammo required me to painstakingly migrate multiple scripts to the updated system no matter how small the change was. This sucked, and it was done this way due to my lack of experience with GZDoom at the time. If a system is this integrated into the game, it becomes quite hard to get rid off without accidentally breaking other things. It's been on our backlog for months but we never got to it.

For Selaco, nowadays, we have made our very own UI framework called ‘CockUI’. It’s a major part of the reason why our UI feels so drastically different compared to other projects made in GZDoom since it doesn't use any of GZDoom's code. It allows for smooth/filtered UI elements, clean transitions, proper scaling, queuing systems and so much more. Our pickup notifications, however, were still using a system that I had made on my own roughly 6 years ago and was never properly migrated to CockUI. It has some major flaws that have been a thorn in our butt for quite some time.

Playing the game at a 4:3 resolution (which is quite awesome in this game, btw!) would awkwardly cut off the notification messages on the right side, scaling was a disaster, and picking up a large amount of items at the same time would break the system because it used hard coded ID’s for every line that would easily go out of sync. I don't think anyone managed to get this error in the demo because pickup variety was quite low, but is absolutely an issue in the full game where we often give loads of stuff at once.

On top of that, the way pickups were validated and given to the player was a very backward approach. When making a game, you want a flexible pickup system where you can easily alter values or add entirely new ammo pickups without too much work. This was not possible on the old system, because otherwise there was no way for me to retrieve that information and display it on the HUD using ACS.

Not so much the case now! With Zscript and CockUI being used, it only requires a few lines of code in order to make a new pickup work with our new system. This is how it should been from the start, but alas:

The new pick-up system looks a lot of better and makes it easier for us (and by that extend, modders) to add things to the game without having to untangle a big blob of spaghetti. And, most important of all, it also performs better!

Friendly NPC

The model has been completed! Can’t wait to give them a weapon and start animating them.

Announcing… Burger Flipper!

Cockatrice is currently working on a small Selaco related minigame that the player can launch on their Wrist Computer after unlocking. You will have to find it first though! Have some Patreon Exclusive insider information: You can find it in Level 3-2! Look for a Game Development studio in the city.

As much as I would love to show it off, we think it’s best that we let you figure this one out yourself. So for the time being, I’ll just drop this top-down burger asset that has no right to look this tasty.

Transit System

About a month ago I showed off a UI mock-up of our Transit System that I made using Photoshop. We now have a working version that’s in-game and actually allows traveling! Still not completely satisfactory in terms of how it looks, but we’re still iterating on that.

ReformedJoe also got to work on the train system itself, and boy, it was a hard puzzle to crack design-wise, but we eventually settled with a solution.

As many of you know, Selaco aims for a seamless experience. The camera is locked to the player's eyeballs at all times, and not once are we going to use a hard cut. This means that our train system must seamlessly bring the player from one level to the other without shattering the illusion. We cannot rely on a black screen that teleports you to the new level because that means we’re taking away control of the player and having a ‘time jump’. These are forbidden in Selaco.

If you have any experience with Doom modding, you may know that having a moving train that the player can walk on is practically impossible. Sectors are meant to travel up and down, and PolyObjects are too limiting, so how are we going to drag a train across a track?

There are a lot of solutions to this problem, like giving the illusion of movement by simply moving textures in the opposite direction that the train is supposed to move. This is typically how older games, like Blood, handle train sections. The train wasn’t moving; the texture offsets were! As much as that solution was tempting, it felt like an easy way out.

So what did we end up doing? We made a moving train (sort of!), and even showed the station getting closer.

The contents of this GIF are very much a work in progress and not very representative, but it’s already quite convincing.

How did we pull it off? I think that deserves its own blog post, so we’ll talk about that in a few weeks!

Conclusion

Thank god this week was a lot more interesting than the last one! My current focus is to finish level 06A and get it ready for testing, and improve the Train System so I can give a proper demonstration for our next blog post!

As usual, feel free to ask any questions in the comments below.

Thank you for sticking around, hope to see you again in the month of December!

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog Update + New Music Track

Hey everyone!

I would like to apologize for not having a Developer Blog online this week. We always try to get these done twice a month consistently, but this month I’m afraid we’ll have to settle with only one Developer Blog. There are two reasons for this.

• Availability has been a disaster for the last 10 days, both due to technical and personal issues getting in the way. Thankfully, nothing too serious, but it did affect our work schedule. We have not been able to finish the amount of work we wanted to complete in time for our blog post.
• I am working on a lot of stuff that isn’t particularly interesting or worth sharing. I’ve been ironing out bugs and adding some new layers of polish to some of the game’s mechanics, as well as putting the finishing touches on some of the maps.

There is no need to panic, though! Development as a whole is still going really well, and there is no reason for us to think that we won't hit our May 2024 target. These last two weeks have just been a bit of a downer, but nothing we can't recover from.

This puts our Patreon in a bit of a rough spot. These bi-weekly blog posts are very important to me. It’s our way of ensuring that backers know things are in motion and that the project is in good hands. It’s one of the reasons we try to do these twice a month rather than only once. Unfortunately, game development just doesn’t always go according to plan, and even when it does, the things we're doing often aren't really worth talking about. And in this case, we're dealing with both.

I promise that the Development Blog post at the end of the month will be a big one! Give us some time to make up for the lack of a blog post this week. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments though, I'd love to shine a light on specific subjects you may be interested in.

So, for the time being, I’ll attach an absolute banger of a music track for you to listen to.

Enjoy!

Dev Blog #60 - New Environments, Voxels and Engine Improvements

With only one day left in October, this blog post came just in time!

Last week I mentioned how Selaco’s first chapter is almost fully playable from start to finish, but there are still a few holes here and there that we have to iron out. These last few weeks have been spent getting rid of those, on top of further finalizing our systems to get things ready in time for our Early Access date.

Let's talk about what is going on.

Life update

I don’t usually do this, but figured this is worth sharing.

I’ve been officially diagnosed with a pretty bad case of ADHD. I always assumed that I had it because concentration has always been a problem, and sitting still for a long duration of time never worked well for me because there is always an urge to move. I never felt the need to get it officially tested because I never assumed it would really change anything.

It’s always been a nuisance, but I always managed to get by just fine. At least I did, up until last year when I dropped out my final year at University to become a full-time developer for Selaco. Being at home a lot has worsened my condition. Getting any work done throughout the day became increasingly more difficult to the point that I only ever got a satisfactory amount of work done at night time, when people are asleep and the streets are quiet. Until then, I’m just distracted and doing simple chores while I wait for my concentration to arrive.

A few weeks ago I figured that enough is enough and started talking about it with my therapist, who then recommended that I get it officially diagnosed and treated. Today, I started treatment against ADHD by taking meds. I’ve always refused to do sp because I’m very stubborn. Surely, I’ll find concentration through natural means, right? I recently turned 31, and it’s clear to me that that day will never come. After multiple sessions with my therapist, I agreed to take the meds and accept that it’s a perfectly normal thing for people like me to do.

It’s still too early to tell if it will work for me since I just took my first pill 2 hours ago, but the fact that I am actively working on a Patreon Blog post at 1:00 pm might be a good sign. Time will tell if this is the placebo effect at work; perhaps I’ll follow up on it on the next blog post.

Enough about me, lets talk videogames!

New batch of voxels!

All of these are either interactable or destructible.

Letter Blocks. You can find these in the toy store and probably some other areas. I managed to make a very simple fort out of them but ShadowPlay failed me and didn’t take the screenshot. Maybe bother me long enough about it on our Discord server and I'll re-attempt my Block Fort.

Gym stuff. Very fun to throw against things because of the metallic sound it makes. Please ignore the debug eye icon at the end there.

We have some silly ideas here, like giving 1hp when you lift these up and down repeatedly until your muscles get too sore to continue doing so. Will we implement this? No idea. Try it when we launch!

Water Melons and plastic crates, which have 6 color variations. Comes with classic John Woo-isms where  the contents of the crate start flying all over the place when destroyed. Including classic watermelon destruction.

This is a For Sale sign voxel. Not much else to add.

Flour Bags with varying degrees of dirt. Fun to shoot because of the particles it unleashes upon the world.

Arcade Machines. No, these won’t be playable, these are conveniently out of order 🙁 Don't worry, I’m sure there is a SPACE BRO arcade right around the corner that actually works. Those folks over at Onami made sure that they work even during an Alien invasion.

And yes, you can destroy them all!

We’ve also added a Protein Shake that the player can drink. Upon drinking, your next 5 Melee Attacks or Object Throws will deal additional damage and knockback. It’s nothing major, it’s not going to become an important item to seek out, but it’s a fun little addition to add! You will find these scattered around the game.

Ah, Fresh Meat! These are sprites and not voxels, but will be converted eventually. We have a serious lack of kitchen props right now that we want to address.

Fun fact: At this time of writing, our 3D folder contains 726 items, the vast majority of which are voxels. It’s absolutely wild to me how we have access to this many props to make the world come to live. Borion is an absolute monster at these things!

Environments

Got some new environments in the pipeline too. A rooftop section, and the starting rooms of the Plant Cloning Facility.

Rooftops (Part of Level 2)

Don't adjust your monitor! These are meant to be dark. The exterior levels get brighter as you progress since the night transitions into morning.

The rooftops pose a challenge from an art perspective. All of our efforts regarding the skyline are made with the implication that they will be seen from below, looking up. But with the Rooftop, the exact opposite happens. You are now above (or on the same level) as the skyline, resulting in a vastly different look. There is also the issue of looking down when standing on the edge. What do we show? It must look like there's something down there even though the level ends at a certain point. It's clear that we have to fake it but make it convincing.

So far, I've settled with fog banks that are shown at different height levels, moving independently from one another. We also spawn big dynamic lights at random portions of the backdrop to give the illusion of two factions fighting a war with each other in your absence. Since the backdrop is relatively cheap from a performance standpoint, we can get away with casting big dynamic lights.

I don't feel comfortable enough to show the work in progress version of these effects, but I'll make a note out of it to showcase it in a later blog post. It currently doesn't look even close to how I want it to look.

Plant Cloning Facility (Part of Level 6)

Level 6 is a big one and consists of 3 different floors (every floor is their own Area (our term for 'level segment')). There's an elevator that the player can use to switch between floors at any time, using an interactive elevator panel.

Floor 1 and B1 are mostly finished, Floor B2 only has a starting room and still needs a good amount of work. My goal is to get this finished before the year ends, so we can enter 2024 with all levels fully intact.

Ace Security

We’re working on a model for a friendly NPC. They won't be a common occurrence in Chapter 1 and are mainly used for corpses, but are going to be used extensively from Chapter 2 onward where they aid you in certain battles.

Here is the current status of their model. We use this model to render the spritework.

Current 3D model status.

He currently looks like a nude individual wearing some random bits of body armor to cover up his skin. Bare with us as we give him some proper clothing! I expect him to be finished when the next blog post arrives.

Concept art for the ACE Security Guard

We are still not entirely sure how we are going to tackle friendly NPCs in Chapter 2. With Dawn’s position as a Captain, it would make sense if the player can give out orders ('Follow', 'Stay put', 'Move to this location) during certain sections of the game, like set pieces where you have to hold a zone for a set duration of time. All we know is that friendly NPC’s are a must if we want to sell the large conflict taking place in Selaco, and want to do a proper service to the story outline that Ken has written for us.

Engine Stuff

Brace yourself. Cockatrice is going to deliver some technical stuff about some engine changes we’ve made. Ready? Here it comes!

(Cockatrice)

In an effort to decrease startup times I added a texture database cache called TEXTURDEF. When we build the PK3 (the file that contains all the game data) we can now compile a texture database which skips a step during startup; The game has to index every single sprite and texture upon startup, reading the header from each one on disk. Since we have something like twenty-thousand image files to date this could be quite slow on some hardware. It was especially slow if you are launching the game from an SD card on the Steam Deck. This was something that had to be addressed ASAP.

The texture database simply indexes each texture in one file and contains the offsets, color and transparency information, and SPI (Sprite Positioning Info) for every texture so the game doesn't have to look it up during runtime, or scan each file at bootup.

The other thing that significantly slows down boot times in the engine is that it loads every single model file at startup. We intend to change this so model files are loaded from disk when needed instead of at startup. Since we have a LOT of models, and the models are quite complex being OBJ versions of voxels, this should decrease load times noticeably when combined with TEXTURDEF.

In addition I have replaced the GZDoom's default font-sheet loader. GZDoom would typically load a font sheet by making a custom, individual image for every character by making a Multipatch Texture. A Multipatch Texture is basically just a set of instructions for combining image files into a custom texture.  These multipatch textures would have to load the entire sheet every time a new character needs to be displayed, and since UI graphics do not currently load in the background like sprites this would result in a big frame hiccup when the first notification with a large font would appear on screen.

Now we render every character in a sheet font by simply using UV offsetting and a single texture image, which drastically reduces the amount of load time required to just render text for the first time. Now we load the fonts at game startup which adds no noticeable load time, and this completely eliminates hiccups caused by text rendering.

Some misc things we are working on

• The entire menu is now interpolated, meaning it is no longer limited to GZDoom tickrate (35 FPS). This results in a UI that feels infinitely smoother and utilizes whatever framerate you are currently playing the game at. If you want to see an example: Load up the demo, open the Datapad and start dragging some windows around. Notice how it’s laggy? That has been fixed.
• We have reworked our Weapon Bar icons. Still the same simplistic design, but redrawn from scratch to be in a higher resolution since we prefer to keep HUD elements crisp and readable.
• Started working on preparations to fully rewrite our Item Pick-up messages since these are still based on ACS and don't properly scale to resolutions (This makes the game awful to play on 4:3 since text cuts off!). It also looks visually a bit dated, so hopefully we can spice things up a notch.
• The majority of the levels have been made playable with Selaco Must Fall.
• An Item Scarcity mode has been added, significantly reducing the amount of pick-ups in the game. This can be enabled after selecting a difficulty.
• Two new music tracks have been made! I’ll make sure to share one in #Patreon-Showcase this week!

Conclusion

It’s been a very traditional couple of weeks for us. Nothing quite groundbreaking has happened outside of the life update, but significant progress has been made towards finalizing Selaco's initial release. May hits in 185 days and, assuming no complications arrive, we are well on track to hit this target

As usual, I want to thank all of you for still being here and supporting us. Hopefully we see you in November as well! 

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #59 - Current State of the Game, Uncompressed Realms Deep trailer

Happy Monday everybody!

We have survived the dreadful week of September. The extended demo has launched and the release date has been announced, so now we can focus entirely on the release of the game with no other distractions. Or at least, no planned distractions. Fingers crossed that we can make the game in peace moving forward!

In this blog post I want to focus on the current state of the game, rather than showcase what we are working on. We’ll be doing that at the end of the month!

Release Date

Let's start with the biggest thing that happened between this and our last blog post. A release date has FINALLY been announced!

We launch Chapter 1 in May 2024. We open up right away with a whopping 25 levels (or Area's, as we call them, spread over 7 massive levels) and 11 weapons. Basically, Selaco is already a full game in EA, but expands further from there. For some, this may seem relatively far away, and unfortunately, some players expected the game to launch a little earlier. But  anything sooner just wasn’t possible, not without severely compromising our vision.

The reception in regards to our trailer has been great, and I was truly happy to read each and every comment regarding the trailer. Such a relief, too, since many players always assumed Selaco’s environments were nothing but blue corridors and a bunch of offices, and now we’ve finally proven that the game is so much more than that. And with this being the first trailer I have ever made, it surely put a smile on my face to hear praise in regards to the editting. That was very unexpected.

Realms Deep was nerve-wracking. What didn’t help was how the event was a massive 4 hours long while we all assumed it would have been just 2 hours. We didn’t know when Selaco would air either, so when every hour passed, the nerves got worse! And guess when Selaco was shown during the event? NEAR THE END!

Uncompressed Release Date Trailer

YouTube’s video compression did not do the trailer any favors. All of the moving bits and pieces combined with fast movement resulted in a very pixelated mess. Thankfully, you’re a backer, so here is the download link to a (mostly) uncompressed version.

Enjoy!

Download Link (422 MB)

(The quality is still poor when viewed through the Google Drive Video Player. We recommend downloading the video and watching it using something like VLC Media Player).

Promo Artwork

This is another case of 'Did We Share This Already?', so apologies if this is a repeat.

We made this to announce our Realms Deep trailer. The full resolution with no text can be found here!

Timelapse:

Current State of the Game

With the Early Access announcement out of way, I thought it would make sense to break down different parts of the game and elaborate on where we are right now.

Levels

The vast majority of levels are close to completion, with only the second half of Level 6 being largely absent. A lot of the groundwork for Level 6 is already done (primarily asset creation), but it has yet to be designed.

This means that the game is practically playable from start to finish already!

All other levels are of high quality as we speak. They are polished up, tested and a lot of fun to play through. But there’s still a bit of extra work we want to put into them before we consider them 'Selaco Quality'

Closer to launch, we will still be going over each and every level to make some finishing touches. Like adding a few more level events, some extra worldbuilding or other stuff.

Gamepads

Support for Gamepads and Steam Deck is close to being final. We still have a few more tweaks to make here however, like improving our Weapon Wheel and making it possible to properly swap Throwable Items. Other than that? Finished!

Enemies

All enemies are in and most of them have finished sprite work, minus the Sniper enemy who still has nothing (the poor guy is the simplest enemy to make, yet the slowest to get actual improvements). There are also some lackluster / unfinished animations here and there that still have to be ironed out.

In terms of their design in the game itself, they are mostly final but there are a few enemies I am not quite satisfied with right now. Small issues, like Air Drones not moving the way I want them to, and Juggernaut feeling a little outdated compared to newer enemies.

AI

We have a lot of ideas in regards to enemy AI and it won't be possible to put all of them in Chapter 1. With that said, the current state of our enemy AI is great! They have gotten really good at pathfinding, they can flank, they react to player actions, feel properly threatening and can communicate using the Squad Overseer system. Read this post for some extra information on that!

We did want to implement a Cover System for AI where they can lean around corners and move towards cover, but this is probably going to be a thing for Chapter 2. If development goes really well, we may try to squeeze it in Chapter 1, but it seems unlikely right now because it's quite a hefty change and will take a considerable amount of time to test.

Weapons

Weapons are 95% finished. They are properly balanced, feel satisfying to fire, have all of their upgrades and the customizable alt fires are mostly done.

There are still a few rough animations and sound effects here and there that could go with some work.

Workshop

The core mechanic of the workshop is fully functional. You can upgrade your weapons, you can modify alt fires, you can restock on ammo, see live stat updates and more. This all works effortlessly.

Transit System

(Mock-up image - is not ingame)

We allow players to seamlessly travel back and forth between levels using an underground subway. This is only used to find collectibles you may have missed in prior levels, or unlock some very mysterious doors that would not open before. The back-end system for this is in place, but the UI elements and the actual train have yet to be made. We will probably start working on this next month or so.

Mutators

Nothing! We have yet to begin. All we have is a design plan, a bunch of ideas, and a few mutators that work but cannot be used without command hackery. 

For the uninitiated, Mutators are smaller gameplay tweaks that players can toggle on and off using the Workshop. These are often quite small, like having Red Blood, Headshots Only, Confetti Headshots and more. But can also have a large effect on gameplay, like having new enemies spawn at random positions of the level, or making enemies explode when killed.

Mutators purely exist because they’re fun. They don't have to be used and will not provide any new rewards other than an extra dosage of fun.

Mod Support

Works fine. Of course it does, it’s GZDoom! We have yet to streamline the mod support though! The ‘’Mod Settings’’ menu still doesn’t work, the image above consists of a bunch of made-up stuff to get an idea across. We want to add an ingame Mod Loader to simplify the process. Ideally, players just drop a pk3/zip file in the “Mods” folders and they are good to go.

Engine

Tough one. Is an engine ever finished!? Most of the essentials are in place, but there are a few more problems that we have to iron out, and about a billion ideas we would love to introduce to the engine (mostly performance related).

For one, we cannot utilize Overlays for weapon sprites without introducing a flickering issue. Which is quite a problem for a weapon like the Grenade Launcher, that utilizes many different overlays for the screen. Here is a GIF of what I mean:

(Overlay Flickering issue introduced by our Multithreading solution)

This happens because of the multithreading system. Since sprites are loaded on a different thread in real-time, they have a tendency to not load fast enough and appear a frame later than intended. Perhaps we will precache these, I’m not entirely sure what Cockatrice wants to do here!

For that reason, in the extended demo, your very first shot with a weapon will not produce a Muzzle Flash since it uses an overlay. Nobody picked up on this, thankfully, but I do. Every single time! :(

We also want to clean things up a little. GZDoom is a bloated engine, and it often feels like 90% of the features it has, are not ones we are interested in. Why would we need MIDI support, for example? The game doesn’t support GLES and Software Rendering, yet the engine does, so why keep it? Simplifying the engine will make maintenance easier and significantly reduce the overhead.

Optimizations

We believe performance is in a very solid place right now. Players of the Extended Demo reported solid performance across the board, with only a few dips during combat that we still plan to iron out. 

I am, however, very bummed out about the whole lightmap situation regarding GZDoom. We talked about this many blog posts ago, how enthusiastic we were about GZDoom getting a Quake-style lightmap solution. This would mean that we could replace all of our dynamic lights and replace them with static lights to gain a good chunk of performance with no visual compromise (in fact, things could even look better!). 

Unfortunately, we tested this a few weeks ago, and it was nowhere near production-ready. Parts of the level would not light up at all, parts were lit incorrectly, voxels and sprites did not properly update depending on lighting condition, etc. 

Here is what the demo level looks like with light maps:

As you can see, many areas are pitch black or lit poorly. The grey areas are skipped entirely. That's unfortunate, but understandable from the GZDoom side of things. It's a hard thing to implement and will probably be a while longer before it can be used reliably.

Perhaps we can play around with this post-launch, but truth be told, I feel very sad about this. Something as important as performance should be solid right from the get go, and now weaker hardware will likely end up with fewer frames than we hoped for. Performance will likely be fine for most, dont get me wrong, but it could have been better.

Chapter II and Chapter III

(Old image from 2 years ago, but it's the only Chapter 2 screenshot we have right now.)

Believe it or not, some work on the next chapter is already in motion. Everything has been planned out roughly 3 years ago, so we already know where to take the player in these chapters. We have one enemy type designed (image below) and will slowly start working on the textures (floor, walls, ceilings) so we can start mapping when Chapter 1 is finished.

We also have A LOT of ideas. So much so, that we doubt even Chapter 2 and 3 have enough space for all of them.

The length of these chapters is still unknown. We aim for them to be a little shorter than Chapter 1 (because Chapter 1 is just that big), but these levels will probably be bigger and more complex since it's later in the game.

Despite some bits and pieces of Chapters 2 and 3 being in motion, the core focus remains on the initial launch for now

What happens to Patreon after launch?

Someone asked this in our Discord Server a while ago, and quite frankly, I blanked out. I really do not know what is going to happen with our Patreon when we launch in Early Access. 

Selaco costs quite a bit of money to make given the emphasis on effects, artwork, voices, and more. Patreon allowed us to get a budget and get these things done. But, if Chapter 1 launches, and the game is successful (fingers crossed!), do we still need backing? I think we’ll have to wait and see.

If we do decide to keep using Patreon, we will probably continue making these blog posts like we usually do, except go a little more in-depth on how we approach things and show more work in progress rather than just results. That way, we can use Steam Blogs (public) to showcase important bits that are finished and use Patreon Blogs (exclusive to backers) to show and discuss progress while having an open dialogue on what we are working on. Maybe we'll even make the Trello Board public so backers can actively see what is being worked on.

Time will tell! I would love to keep doing this; it’s a lot of fun to talk about the game in a smaller circle and respond to questions.

Conclusion

It’s quite a relief to finally be able to focus on usual game development again. A lot of progress was made, but many distractions in September prevented us from achieving the progress we wanted. 

If you have any questions regarding the game as a whole, its development, or the Early Access launch, respond below! I’ll reply as soon as I can. 

Thanks, everyone! Have a great week. 

Wesley de Waart

The Extended Demo is live!

Good day everyone,

It is finally here! A brand new level of Selaco, running on the latest build of the game, is now available for backers.

If you have pledged a total of $10 from June 2022 till today, an email with a Steam Key should be waiting in your inbox. If you believe you're eligible but haven't received an email from us, please don't hesitate to reach out at contact@alteredorbitstudios.com. We will provide you with a key manually!

If you are an Admiral and have helped us out doing tests for this build, you can use the same client you have always used!

Feature list:

• One new level (~30 minutes of playtime)
• One new weapon (The UC-11 Compact SMG)
• Two new enemy types (Gunner, Crawler Mine)
• Access to the Upgrade Station
• A brand new build with new features, polish and other improvements
• Full Controller and Steam Deck support

Enjoy the game,

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #58 - Marker System, Breakables, Preparations

Hello Patrons!

A blog post on a Sunday! We’re halfway into September, and if you remember our last blog, we mentioned that September is filled to the brim with deadlines for us. Just have to push on through for a little longer until we can go back to working solely on the full product.

Thankfully, I have time to write a proper blog post again!

Marker System

A frequently requested feature has finally become a reality! With Selaco having rather complex level design and often requiring you to memorize numerous locations, it only felt right to add a system to keep track of such things.

GZDoom had a built-in system for this, but it was quite lackluster. It only added a very hard-to-see arrow on the Automap, there is not enough control over them, and you cannot see them without opening the map. So where's no good visual on the thing at all. We wanted to fix this.

Visible markers on the map, defined by both color and shape to hopefully make it more friendly to colorblind players

What is it?

The Marker System allows players to place markers in the game world. These markers are in 3D, emit a faint light, and are always visible on the in-game map. Even if you enter a level then return to it later, they will still be exactly where you left them. They serve various purposes, as illustrated in the following scenarios:

• You come across a cracked wall but lack the necessary explosive to break it. You can place a marker on it to return later when you have the means to destroy it.
• You find a Generator, but it's missing a Power Cell. You can mark the Generator's location to easily locate it again once you acquire a Power Cell.
• You stumble upon a potential secret area but struggle to find its entrance. You can mark it for later exploration.

Markers don't directly impact gameplay but provide valuable assistance to players, enhancing navigation and planning.

How does it work?

There are two methods for placing markers:

On a Keyboard & Mouse setup, simply press the 'Place Marker' button.

With the gamepad, we had to improvise because every button is already being used. We came up with a pretty good idea that works wonderfully, and also ended up benefiting from the Keyboard & Mouse control scheme as a result. 

We've essentially reworked our Weapon Wheel to enable the selection of multiple wheels. For instance, if you hold down the Weapon Wheel button, you can press the Left Bumper / L1 button to cycle between different wheels, such as a Utility Wheel (for selecting throwables) and a Marker Wheel (for choosing marker colors). It's not fully implemented yet, but I'd love to showcase it when the time comes.

Players can add up to 5 markers per level. When the sixth marker is placed, the first one is automatically removed. To remove a specific marker, players can press the Use button while looking at one.

Challenges

One unexpectedly challenging aspect of game design is ensuring players are aware of certain features. While there is a 'Place Marker' button in the Keybind menu, not everyone reads this menu. How can we ensure players are aware of this mechanic without needing an entire tutorial popup for a feature this small?

The solution lies in our Weapon Wheel! This is a feature that many players will undoubtedly utilize. Thus, whenever the wheel is open, the button prompt to switch to the Marker Wheel will always be visible in the top left corner. Players who want to utilize this, or want to see what it’s about, will probably give that button a go.

Signs

Because this one always bummed me out. There are hundreds of different sign assets in Selaco, and none of them could be destroyed. They were completely non-interactive and would not respond to anything. This goes against our design philosophy of trying to make everything react accordingly.

This has changed. All signs can now be removed from the walls and have a very juicy 'PANG' sound when shot! You'll hear it in the Extended Demo when it's out! You can also press 'Use' to remove them from the walls. Why? No idea. Sometimes it's best not to ask too many questions about our choices.

Bricks and other breakables!

You can now bully your enemies.

We've finalized our weapon-throwing mechanic, allowing the player to turn almost anything into a weapon. We discussed this previously, and it's now complete! It ended up requiring more work than initially anticipated because not every object was designed with this in mind, both in terms of code and art assets. For instance, when you throw a brick at an enemy, it doesn't feel right to simply make the brick disappear on impact. Instead, the brick now snaps in half and has a unique effect.

The same principle applies to how we coded our chairs. Originally, when they were shot, they would be replaced by a more damaged version of the same chair, one that is riddled with bullet holes. However, when you start throwing it, this approach no longer makes sense because a thrown chair against an enemy would magically have a lot of bullet holes in it. We had to address many cases like this.

BONUS: Here's an example of a stack of bricks being hit by a grenade.

BONUS 2: This also demonstrates the Weapon Shake feature we added a while back! It really adds an extra layer of impact to explosions.

Mapping Improvements

Some minor things here, but probably fun to mention. We’ve added 3 new Actor Flags in the editor that mappers can use (which includes you, once the game ships!).

The mention of Cooperative is just there for future-proofing. This does not mean the game will ship with a Co-op mode.

Sentry

An enemy type that has the ‘Sentry’ flag will avoid moving as much as possible. This is useful in case we want to position an enemy in a tower or window and don't want them to pathfind towards the player or retreat to a different position when shot. If you get close or dislocate them, the Sentry Flag is removed, and they will start having normal behavior again.

Static

This makes an actor completely static. This is useful for a number of decorations the player cannot reach or should not interact with. For example, if you have a bunch of actors behind a window the player will never have access to, these actors can be made ‘Static’. Static basically means that it loses all interactivity. It cannot be destroyed, it cannot be touched, it cannot be thrown. Nothing. It exists purely for scenery. This saves a bit of performance!

Rifle Start Only

We noticed a few problems with our Rifle Start mechanic. As a reminder, a Rifle Start means that you begin every level with just your machine gun. All other weapons and items are removed from your inventory. This is a common way to play Doom, and an approach I personally really like, so we added it to Selaco as well.

However, we noticed a bit of awkwardness in places. (Minor spoilers) Level 3 ends with the player obtaining a Grenade Launcher. It’s a fun way to end a level, so to start Level 4 without it was a bit weird. The Rifle Start Only flag allows us to add pickups that are only visible when players are in Rifle Start mode. In this case, it allows us to place a brand new Grenade Launcher early on in the 4th level so they can still use it. It isn’t there for players who have it disabled because it was already mandatorily given to you the level before it. There are other cases where this is beneficial, but those are spoilers.

From the Archives

I was digging through some old stuff and found some interesting things. One such thing is the very first attempt at designing a Wrist Computer system. Take a look:

Now, let's compare that to the current build…

Quite a fun difference, isn’t it? Lets do another!

Here is the very old keypad. Ignore how the background is Hexen, Cockatrice used that as a base to do some basic UI tests in the engine.

We were still testing the waters here, so we tried to keep things simple. After some testing in the actual game, it felt like the system was a right fit, so we asked one of our artists to start drawing some sketches of a proper keypad system.

Final result:

This raises the question, would you all be interested in reading a blog post that focuses on comparing the old Selaco (or even Ominous, the name we used in our modding days) content with what we have today? This could encompass weapons, enemy designs, and environments. I believe it could be a fun retrospective.

Please let me know in the comments or in the Patreon Lounge channel on our Discord!

Schedule

We’re still in a busy period of the game’s development, but here is what is currently happening:

September 17 -> Admirals get an update for the Extended Demo Testing branch

September 25 -> Patreon Extended Demo goes live for all backers (Remember, keep an eye on your mail)

September 29 -> Plush Campaign goes live

September 30 -> Release Date Trailer on Realms Deep

After this, all focus shifts towards the full game!

What are we currently working on?

Lots of refining right now. I’m currently in the process of seamlessly stitching together all the Chapter 1 levels that we have so far so that we can conduct proper tests for the first chapter of the game (which, I cannot stress enough, is lengthy).

We’re also updating some very old UI elements that still use outdated systems, like pickup messages and location prompts.

The mall continues to be where most of our artists are spending their time right now, as a lot of branding assets are being created. Especially Borion, our voxel artist, who is still hard at work getting all the arcade machines ready for the Arcade.

What to expect from us at Realms Deep?

We will be launching a no-nonsense gameplay trailer that showcases a wide range of content we've never publicly revealed before, not even here with our backers!

After the trailer airs, I'll start a massive Twitter thread to discuss the game and explain what to expect when it launches. I will also be posting it on our Patreon blog.

There's quite a lot to unpack after the trailer is released, and some players may have questions about the mechanics shown in the video. Feel free to reach out to us and ask any burning questions when the time comes! Maybe we can do a Patreon Q&A.

Conclusion

These next 2 weeks are going to be insane and I cannot wait for this month to be over. Doesn’t mean I’m not excited of course, I really am, but it’s very daunting. A lot of the stuff is already done so it’s now just a matter of putting it out there. Remember that as a backer, I’ll be posting our Realms Deep trailer a little earlier than YouTube / Realms Deep!

I’m going to make the final few preparations for the Extended Demo, everyone else will continue working on the full game.

Very excited to hear everyone’s thoughts on what we have to show this month!

Wesley de Waart

DEV BLOG #57 - Weapon Wheel, Extended Demo Launch, Mall Level

Good day, everyone! 

Just like 2 weeks ago, we're in the middle of a very chaotic period of the game's development, so my time to write a good lengthy blog post is rather limited. I have to keep it brief once more.

I have to be honest here, I'm completely overwhelmed with work as of late. There is a lot in motion, a lot of development headaches to wrap our heads around, and so, so many deadlines we have to hit. The currently unannounced release date will thankfully be generous enough to not require any crunch to reach, I've made sure of that, but we do have to keep our heads in the game if we want to reach it, since there's still a good amount of work left and we no longer have infinite time to get it done. 

Once Realms Deep is over and everything is out of the way, I'll be taking a brief break to get my bearings back together. I heard Armored Core 6 is pretty good, so I can't wait to play that at the end of next month! 

Tomorrow we have another deadline to meet. It's when we officially submit our trailer to Realms Deep. The trailer is awesome, I'm very happy with how it turned out. You will love it, I'm sure!

Weapon Wheel

Selaco finally has a Weapon Wheel! The current method of cycling through weapons on a gamepad was a pain in the butt, so this is a major improvement on that front. While primarily aimed towards Gamepad / Steam Deck users, Keyboard and Mouse users will find plenty of use for it too. I know I do, since I always preferred a Weapon Wheel over mouse wheel switching, which I always felt was a bit clunky in a lot of games.

(Weapon Wheel is work in progress, does not show the entire weapon roster)

When holding the Weapon Wheel button, a wheel appears at the crosshair. Here, all available weapons are displayed, and by moving the joystick or mouse around, different weapons can be selected.

The Weapon Wheel also provides additional information, including the alt fire mode the currently selected weapon is utilizing, the amount of loaded ammo and available reserves, as well as icons indicating which weapons are very close to requiring a reload. This allows you to easily decide which weapon to use in the midst of combat, reducing the likelihood of accidentally switching to a weapon that's nearly empty.

Unlike ladders, which required a fair amount of debate on how to approach downward climbing, the implementation of the Weapon Wheel went smoothly. We unanimously agreed on its functionality, appearance, and the information that should be conveyed to the player.

Mall Level

Holy shit, levels like these are tough. We have fully blocked out our mall level with some detail passes here and there. Usually, you would assume this is the hard part, but oh boy, then you haven’t met our mall yet. This week we have finally begun working on the most time consuming part; store assets and branding.

This is without a doubt the most art intensive level we have ever worked on. All stores need appropriate detailing, all the branding must be believable, most textures require a wholly unique set of textures and most stores require fresh voxels that fit within the theme. BUILD engine games always did a stellar job making places seem real, and with Selaco we want to take it one step further by putting a lot of emphasis on fictional branding.

We are currently working on an Arcade, which is especially crazy because we have to model and texture a whole bunch of Arcade Cabinets. Will we make them playable? Time will tell (most likely not).

We debated making the Arcade Cabinets direct references towards other indie titles, which would make our job much easier since it means we can borrow their art (with permission), but we eventually decided against it. So far, our world has very strict rules in regards to referencing things that exist in real life. The only exception here are Easter Eggs, but even with those we try to be clever and not reference things directly. Having a Severed Steel or ULTRAKILL Arcade Cabinet on the main path would just be out of place and feel too disjointed compared to the rest of the game world. We’re going to come up with a bunch of random games ourselves!

Once the arcade is done, we tackle the next hurdle; The clothing store. This is a challenge for more than just assets. We have to figure out what fashion in Selaco looks like because so far all story characters are not overly fashionable, and find a way to properly convey that into voxels since mannequins will most likely be all over the place.

Did I mention performance optimization is also a major challenge here? What have we gotten ourselves into!

The images here are very work-in-progress so may look a bit emptier compared to other areas we’ve shown

For the mall, we’ve been taking a lot of inspiration from the mall I often used to visit as a child, called ‘Winkelcentrum Diemerplein’. If you google it, you may see some of the influences.

I’m very excited for this level to see how it shapes up. It’s going to be great!

New Enemy VO

I’ve been improving our VO system further! Players really like how the enemy communicated with one another, so we’ve added more of it.

• Enemies can now call out the weapon the player is using. So next time you go on a shotgun or Grenade Launcher rampage, expect a comment on it.
• Enemies can now call out when you begin reloading or dry-firing your weapon.
• Enemies will now mention when you've killed their Squad Leader. This will eliminate additional soldier buffs later on in the game.
• Enemies can now call out landmines.
• (Pre-production) We're recording a whole batch of new voiceovers for the enemy types. This includes more variants of the types we already have, as well as a brand new voice for the Enforcers. The latter is quite a lot of work, as the amount of things our enemies say is much higher than most games out there, and we basically have to do that all over again for the new guy. Hell, we still have to cast an actor to do it!

Extended Demo Release Date

All backers who pledged a total of $10 between June 2022 and today will receive a code on September 25. Keep an eye out on your mail! Unsure if an NDA will be required. Likely not, but don't pin me on that. This launch is also one day before my birthday, so there's another reason to celebrate.

Admirals who have been testing the Extended Demo with us: I’m planning to launch an update in the first week of September that adds the new Weapon Wheel, VO changes and more.

Conclusion

Despite the workload and some minor bumps in the road, everything is proceeding smoothly. At this time of writing, there are 30 days left before Realms Deep. After that, we fully expect things to calm down again since the trailer, release date, Extended Demo and plush campaign preparations have all been finished.

Thank you once again for your support throughout the month of August. Hopefully we still see you around in September as well. If not, thanks for being here! <3

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #56 - Preparing for our Release Date announcement

ATTENTION:
As of August 27, all images of this blog post are lost. I was correcting a typo using the Patreon App and it wiped all images completely. I'll return them ASAP. Sorry :(


Happy Monday, everyone!

We are in a very busy period right now. We are exactly 47 days away from finally announcing our release date with a trailer that reveals a lot of the stuff we’ve been working on over the years. On top of that, we are gearing up to launch the Extended Demo to all Patrons in a few weeks while also making preparations for our Plush campaign, getting the GOG store setup in time for the announcement and continue work on the full game because we don't have a second to lose.

I felt like I ran out of breath just writing that sentence. It's manageable, but it does require a lot of commitment from my end, and such things are frightening.

Release Date Trailer



3D Realms wanted to feature Selaco on their Realms Deep stream, and it’s hard not to say yes to that. It’s the perfect opportunity to showcase Selaco to our target audience alongside fellow developers who make games for a similar audience.

I’ve spent the last week working hard on a trailer, and it has been surprisingly difficult. Trailer editing is not a thing I’m particularly good at, yet I am very committed to showing something that’s both well edited and well paced.

This trailer will be our biggest gameplay blowout yet. Showcasing a wide range of different environments, demonstrating the vast majority of our weapons and proving to people that we have a larger enemy roster than just the basic grunts you’ve seen in the demo (which seems to be a thing the internet is rightfully very concerned about). We are excited for this one because we’ve been working on all of this content for the past 2 years. The trailer will have zero footage of the Demo or Extended Demo. Everything is new and unseen. Of course, if you are an epic backer, you may have seen snippets here and there throughout the years through blog posts.

Backers will see the trailer a few days in advance. However, the release date will be hidden in order to prevent the information from being leaked. I know none of you would do such a horrible thing, but I really can not afford the risk since it would severely botch our marketing.

The trailer will be aired publicly on September 30.


Extended Demo when?

Soon! I’m not sure if we will get it done in August because of the reasons mentioned earlier, but I think the first week of September is a very realistic date! So stay tuned. We’re getting there, we're close!


Throwing Objects



This has been requested many, many times ever since we launched our demo. People often wondered why they could pick things up but not use it to their advantage. And they are right. It’s just kind of there.

Like many things, it was simply unfinished, but just a couple of days ago, we finally got to improve that.

Dawn can now pick up objects and throw them with force! Simply hold the Throw button for a short duration of time to fill up a meter, then let go to toss it!

All objects have mass applied to them, so depending on how heavy the object is, the further you can throw it and the more impact it has on an enemy. Tossing a mug, for example, will very briefly stagger an enemy. But throwing a crate with enough force will knock them over completely.

We don't expect this feature to become a meta strategy by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s still a fun addition that adds a bit of extra freedom to the combat sandbox we are setting out to do.

The player will gain access to a Gravity Manipulator later on, which allows them to throw things faster and with far more force. But until then, Dawn’s physical strength will have to do!


Door Kicking?

Look, we’ve shared a lot over the years. Sometimes I look at things and wonder ‘’Wait, did we show this already?”. This is one such thing.

I asked in our Patreon-exclusive Discord channel, and it seems like we never showed this despite me being almost certain that we did! So, here is something we added a month or two ago: Kicking a weak door open! Even if this is a repost, at least this is from the most recent dev build. So that still makes it okay, right?




Safe Room Extensions

We’re going to give the Safe Rooms some extra love soon, but adding ‘Safe Room Extensions’. Basically, we are going to add an elevator to every Safe Room in the game, which takes you to a brand new level called the Safe Room Extension. This is the place where the player can partake in a number of activities. For now, that’s just the Shooting Range and a Transit System (to visit older maps), but in the future we are going to expand this further. Basically, the Safe Room Extension will serve as a hub to relax in, before heading back into fights.

We are also starting to get a good look down for the Safe Room. Given how these rooms are meant to be safe and untouched by the invasion, it gets a very clean look, unlike the majority of the other areas you visit. No destroyed property, no broken lights. Just a very pristine little area!

Here is a work in progress for the time being.




Invasion Tier Menu

The Invasion Tier menu now has a proper visual pass and can now be accessed at the Datapad. Contents will still have to be added, but I can assure you there will be a lot of them.

We're also experimenting with the idea of allowing the player to permanently eliminate a number of Invasion Tiers through a Planning Table that is located in later safe rooms. This compliments Dawn's role as a Captain since she can assign a Strike Force to cripple enemy equipment, while also adding a fun little tactical element to the game.

Whether the Planning Table




Voxels

Coffee Cups. Because you obviously can not have a Coffee House without coffee!



Printer. It was shown in the past, but now it’s fully destructible with individual pieces.



Donuts! Donut types are fully randomized, with a small chance of being a SUPER DONUT. Which heals for an additional whopping 3 points of HP and adds a whole bunch of additional calories to the Calorie Counter.



More were made, but as usual, those are kept behind closed doors.


Conclusion

Exciting times ahead. A Release Date announcement and an Extended Demo are both things we’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and it’s just around the corner. We are confident you will love the Extended Demo since we think it’s a much better representation of the game than the Hospital level was, but I’ll let all of you be the judge of that one!

It’s worth noting that Patreon has made things a little hard for us this month. We believe that a recent fuck-up has affected our budget. We went down from $2900 to $2600. Which is a bit painful since we were very tight to begin with and a cut of that goes to Patreon and merch. Hopefully, our Release Date trailer will introduce a fresh pair of new backers so things can be steady again

For those of you who are still among us, I’m still as grateful as ever. Thank you for sticking with us and believing in our game.

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #55 - Shooting Range, Ladders and more

Happy Friday everyone!

Last week we launched a test build of the Extended Demo to our Admiral backers and I can proudly say that the test went really well. Couple of issues were found, but most of those have already been fixed at this point and time, and more are on the way.

This means that the Extended Demo for all backers might be available a little earlier than we originally anticipated (hooray!). My target is the last week of August. So stay tuned!

For now, let's discuss some new additions and improvements.

Ladders

Yay, we have added proper ladders to the Doom Engine!

If you’ve played a number of Doom Mods before, I’m sure you’ve seen a number of solutions towards the lack of ladders in Doom. Mappers either make very thin sectors to give the illusion that you are climbing something, or assign an action script that causes the player to propel themselves upward when touching a wall / line. All very suitable (and, honestly, charming) solutions.

However, with Selaco being a standalone game, we kind of felt like we owe it upon ourselves to do something better. So instead, we wrote a proper ladder system where the player can latch onto a ladder, and press Up or Down to change directions.

But there’s more!

Ever played an FPS where you could not climb down ladders? Of course you have, that’s the majority of them! Half Life and Doom 3 are good examples as they are both guilty of this, where climbing down ladders would require finger yoga to pull off, but even then it often felt like a coin toss. We didn’t want that, so we came up with 2 solutions which are both used.

Solution #1:

The Use Prompt. This is the obvious one. Selaco’s push for interactivity meant that we had to add interaction prompts to the game. Incorporating the ‘Use system’ for ladders is very easy to pull off as a result. You get near a ladder when standing on top, press use, and Dawn latches right onto it. Easy! Add a little texture on top so players are always aware of a ladder.

Solution #2:

Walking backwards. Originally we were skeptical about this solution, but figured we should still give it a go. Standing above a ladder, then moving backwards when your back faces the ladder, will automatically attach yourself to the ladder. It feels natural in a way, since most of us would do the same thing when climbing a ladder in the real world.

Selaco is a fast-paced game that still aims for things to be grounded, so while climbing, you will not be able to fire any 2-handed weapons. The only weapon available to you is your Roaring Cricket (Magnum). Climbing down is faster because Dawn is an action hero and slides her way down to the floor. Some fun sound design was used for this!

Modders will have an easy time adding ladders too, since it’s essentially just an Actor object you place in front of the ladder, facing it. Once the level is loaded, the actor will be able to read the length of the ladder accordingly which the player actor can ‘read’ before engaging in a climbing mode. A wonderful little hack that works beautifully.

Designing it took some doing though, there are a lot of little hurdles you have to overcome when designing such a thing. Do we allow strafing? What happens to the weapon? What if the player Slide Jumps against the ladder? How do we handle downward movement? What if the player jumps? There’s a lot, but it worked out really well and based on Extended Demo testing, it felt organic.

Shooting Range

Shooting ranges are nothing new in first person shooters, and we are no exception. However, since Selaco has upgradable weapons, we felt like this was essential as players would love to test these type of things.

The Shooting Range can be accessed from any Safe Room in Selaco by simply taking an elevator. Once you arrive, a nearby console can be interacted with to set up a bunch of rules for your Shooting Range session.

Mockup. This image is not in-game

Once your session is set up, the shooting begins. Detailed stats will be displayed on the top-left corner of the screen. Including bullet damage, DPS and the amount of headshots. Game Modes include Endless, Time Attack and DPS Measurement Mode (1 dummy that cannot be killed)

Unlike the other screenshot, this is actually in-game

This is useful information, because there is a Weapon Upgrade station right next to you. If you want to see the difference between your newly acquired toys, the shooting range is the perfect solution to that. It’s also useful to us, the developers, because it means we can easily perform balance checks in terms of raw damage potential and accuracy.

While in the Shooting Range, players will have infinite ammo reserves. So you can shoot to your heart's content without worrying about losing ammo.

And you know what? It’s actually surprisingly fun to just mindlessly shoot things from time to time.

VAC-BOT Mines

Here is a man being obliterated by a VAC-BOT armed with a landmine. Very usual first person shooter stuff. Moving on.

The light not following along with the VAC-BOT is being fixed later

Other tweaks and improvements

Playback Device option

We’ve added the option to adjust the playback device the game should use. In case you have headphones plugged in and want the game audio to play through the speakers, or because sound is somehow coming out of your microphone instead of your headphones.

Invasion Tier Menu

As most have noticed in the demo, enemies become increasingly more lethal as you progress (thankfully, so is the player), granting access to new abilities and combat maneuvers. We never had a proper way of displaying those, but now we finally got it done.

The menu is intact, but the contents still have to be filled.

Ambient Audio Culling

Phew, this was a surprising one.

Selaco relies on a ton of world audio. If you wander around a level, all kinds of machinery and roomtones will be playing around the player. When we did some debugging, we noticed that all 256 audio channels in the game were always being utilized, even when the room the player was in had no audio to speak of.

As it turns out, GZDoom is always actively playing every single ambient sound in the game world, regardless or whether they are in reach or not. How silly of us to assume that would be the case!

We made an engine tweak to address this. If you’ve ever noticed audio getting cut-off in the Pre-Demo, or things feeling a bit more noisy than needed, it’s likely because the audio channels were completely clogged at all times.

Fixed now!

Particle Freezing

This is primarily used for debugging, but results in some very spectacular imagery. We can now freeze time, and Smoke and Particles effects will fully respect that rule. Of course, players can do it too through a cheat code! Fun to do after an explosion.

Conclusion

Next step: Launch the Extended Demo for all backers. Stay tuned for more information on that. Thank you all for supporting us in the month of July. We hope to see you in August as well. <3

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #54 (Mini) - Extended Demo

Good day everyone,

This blog post will be a short one. Like, really, really short. I am hard at work to get the Patreon Exclusive Extended Demo ready to go and that is pretty much where all of my time is spent these past couple of days! While other aspects of the game are still actively being developed by the team, there is not a whole lot to show because I have not been able to incorporate the new additions to the game properly yet.

This blog post will be about the Extended Demo.

Test Lab: Extended Demo

Emails with an NDA have been sent to Admirals! If you have already signed one in the past (e.g Pre-Demo Testing), you are already participating! We will send an email with the password when the build is live.

Before the Extended Demo goes live to all Tier 2 backers and above, we’re doing some tests with a small group of backers beforehand to ensure everything works. If you are an Admiral (you have pledged a total of $80 (cumulative), and are still actively pledging), you are eligible to join us for the Extended Demo Testing phase and should have received an email from us. We are beginning our Admiral Tests (AKA Test Lab) this Friday.

This is a beta version of the Extended Demo that is going to need a few test runs from people outside the team. If you have been with us for a while, it’s the same approach we did before the Nextfest Demo went live on Steam, where we did extensive testing with backers in a private environment. This has proven to be a very effective way of bug squishing and polishing, as some of you were very observant back then!

If you have not received an email from us, please comment below or email us at contact@alteredorbitstudios.com

How long is this beta (Test Lab) going to take?

Nobody knows! If all goes well we might be able to launch it much earlier for all backers, that all depends on if any major issues are found during the Beta and if we can finish the final few bells & whistles sooner rather than later. Our current target is to get the demo ready by the end of August. But it could very well be earlier (though not later!)

You should have received an email last week that contains an NDA.. If you want to participate, please sign it! We are sending out keys and super-secret passwords this week!

Is the Extended Demo timed? Will I lose access eventually?
Eww, no! Unless something really bad happens that forces us to get rid of it ASAP, we have no plans to make it timed. You will always have access to this build provided you have the password for it. Just like every other build we’ve published!

What does the Extended Demo include?

The Extended Demo contains Level 2-2 and Level 2-3. The original demo level is not included in this build, it only contains the new content. We unfortunately had to cut the original demo level for this one, the game has undergone significant changes, to the extent that the Hospital Level is no longer functioning as intended.. It’s going to need a drastic clean up and if we want to manage our development time effectively, it’s much easier to wait until things are more finalized before we do that.

Any other updates?

There’s plenty to talk about, but as usual with these blog posts, I much prefer to show them instead. With a lot of finalized assets waiting for me to add them to the game, I cannot show anything until the Test Lab for Admirals is live. I promise we will do a chunky blog post at the end of the month!

Conclusion

I wasn't joking when I said it would be a very short one! We’re already at the end of this blog post! Please keep an eye out on either your Email or your Patreon Direct Messages as it won't be long until we start sending keys.

If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.

Have a great day <3

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #53 - Enemy Overseer System, Extended Demo, Plush Showcase and more!

Happy Monday everyone,

For the first time in Selaco history, we do a blog post on Monday (and in an afternoon!?). I wanted to get this blog post out a few days earlier but the extreme heat made it really hard to sit down and do some writing. Not the cause today though. With nice warm weather and an ice cold water bottle at hand, I could not wish for better blogging weather.

The amount of work that has been done for the last couple of days has been insane. Pretty significant development leaps have been made  and we’re currently trying to wrap our heads around this Extended Demo launch. Thankfully it’s nowhere near as challenging as the original demo launch since the entire foundation of the game still needed a lot of work.

Not the case for this demo, since the foundation is already done! Still, this demo introduces plenty of new things which is a common theme throughout the game. Not a lot of time is left, but we can do this.

Onto the Dev Blog!

Plush

Starting with something wholesome; the Dawn Plush! I received a in-progress Plush  today and it’s beautiful (also surprisingly soft). The pictures provided here are from a slightly WIP version, so ignore the minor oddities. Visible stitches and such will be ironed out in the full product.

Things are being finalized, more info soon!

Steam Deck & Linux Tests

A few weeks ago we made an announcement on Twitter asking for a couple of testers. Our recent addition of Multithreading worked mostly great, but has proven to bring some problems to a select number of users. The game was either very unstable during gameplay, resulting in frequent crashing, or the game would not load at all. Primarily affecting Steam Deck users, but also plenty of Linux users depending on the distribution that was being used.

We managed to debug the problem and roll out a solution which was then sent to our testers. I can happily say that the test has been a success! The game was running infinitely more stable and players who were not able to play the demo before, are now able to.

This bug was stressing me out, since the public demo still has this bug and a significant amount of players are unable to play it properly.

I expect to launch the Stability Patch later today, or tomorrow.

Texture Loading improvements

While debugging, Cockatrice realized there are a number of ways to improve our Texture Loading system further, affecting all users in a positive way. Before, a large number of assets had to be cached as the level was loaded. Primarily the heavy hitters like Weapon Sprites and their effects. This could easily add 2 or 3 extra seconds of loading time. This is now no longer the case. After the level is loaded, a priority system will ensure a number of things are prioritized and cached in real-time after the loading has completed. On top of the Path node Linking improvements we mentioned a few weeks ago, the Texture Loading improvements will further eliminate the loading times that we introduced by expanding upon the engine. Hooray!

Look at how fast it is. It is now roughly about as long as the average loading section in the original Half-Life. For now, I don't expect this to ever get any faster, but who knows what the future brings.

Overseer System

Given the recent push in artificial intelligence in the world, it’s easy to get confused by terminology. This section of the blog is strictly talking about AI in terms of NPC behavior, not Machine Learning. Let's refer to them as ‘Interactive Agents’ moving forward.

This is a fun one, and something we always wanted to do but just like many things in life, never found the time window to do it. With our recent push into enemy intelligence, it felt about time that we added a system to make it easier to control our enemies.

The Overseer System is an Agent Control System that looms in the background. You won’t see it, you won’t know that it’s there, but the combatants you will fight against will be grateful that it exists.

This system will actively keep track of all enemy combatants in the level. Once you begin engaging with a group of enemies, the overseer will assign this group to a Squad and the overseer is now in full control over their next couple of actions. Think of the Overseer as a commander, making sure every Squad is as efficient as possible.

With a squad fully formed, we now keep track of their status. What are they doing? How is their health? How many squad members have been lost? What weapon is the player using? Did the squad manage to land a couple of shots? Do we even know where the enemy is right now? With all of this information available to us, we can easily adjust and manipulate what the enemy is going to do. If we notice there is a lack of pressure being applied, we could increase the likelihood of a squad trying to push the player instead. Or the other way around, a shotgunning player can now be called out (“Shotgun!”), forcing enemies to try and maintain distance a little better than before.

On top of that, agents now have a proper Patrol System. If a fight occurs, but the player is not seen for a duration of time, the entire squad will now enter Patrol Mode. Here, they wander around the level, chasing down different path nodes, seeking for the player and often requesting a status update from other squad mates. If the player is not seen during the Patrol Mode, they will return to their original position. It’s a bit like Metal Gear Solid in that sense, albeit far less stealth oriented of course. This makes the combat feel much more dynamic.

What else? A lot! Squads are only allowed to communicate with each other, so if a different squad manages to find its way into the battle, you will have 2 very different behaviors to deal with. One squad may be assigned to be aggressive, while the other squad is focused around suppressive fire.

It’s a beautiful system! It’s still work in progress, but it compliments the gameplay in Selaco nicely. The Overseer allows us to easily keep control of things and manipulate the game in ways we could not before. It’s very cheap from a performance standpoint, yet allows for infinite flexibility. Expect more showcases and updates on this system in the near future.

Sniper Enemy

We’ve added a sniper enemy type. Well, mostly. He has behavior but has no proper model or animations yet, so we instead just use a reskinned Shotgunner for the time being. Kind of ironic, but hey it works for now.

The sniper is a guy who always stays far away from the player, and its goal is not to kill you in a traditional sense, but rather to limit the player’s movement options. Rushing through an open field with a Sniper around is dangerous and they will kill you in a single shot (or 2 if you have armor). See a red laser? Either slide towards cover really quickly (sliding briefly makes you invulnerable to the sniper), or try to take him out as fast as you can because the restricted movement options in combat can be quite challenging. In these situations, the DMR is going to be your best friend! They often only require a single shot with that thing to be brought down, 2 if you’re very unlucky.

The sniper is pretty neat, if I say so myself. If it shoots at you, but you manage to evade the shot in time, a system in the background will look for a nearby prop to shoot instead. It makes it a bit more cinematic! Imagine hiding behind a desk and the sniper is constantly destroying the props around you. Not only does it look cool, it limits your cover. Hiding behind a stack of briefcases, or even around the corner with a stack of briefcases near you, will cause the sniper to bring it all down and limit you further.

Oh, and worse of all, the game designer (me) is kind of a dick. These bastards will intentionally target explosive barrels close to the player. Dont do that typical NPC thing by taking cover behind an explosive barrel.

(Footage is Work In Progress)

Extended Demo Status

Practically finished, at least for the time being. We are beginning internal test runs today, and if all goes well, Admirals will soon follow for some thorough testing before sending it out to all other active and former backers.

By my estimate (which should be taken with a grain of salt), the Admirals will get to play it in 2 weeks. All other backers will get it as soon as the tests have been satisfactory. Which could very well be in the same week if all goes well.

Conclusion

Busy. Very busy. Right as I hit the ‘Publish’ button on this blog post I'll head back to work to do the finishing touches on the demo.

This is very exciting, but also a little sad. This will most likely be the last demo we’re doing for Selaco. This does mean the release of the game is looming every closer though, so that’s really damn exciting.

Thank you for your support this month! We hope to see you stick around for the next one <3

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #52 - New Demo Level And A Broken Computer

Dear backers,

It is with great regret that I inform you that my computer has passed away this afternoon at 2:13PM UTC, June 6 2023. Or at least, the Power Supply did. A new one has been ordered but it won't arrive until tomorrow, You know what that means? I won't be able to develop the game today. How boring.

Thankfully, I can still get some work done. Like writing a blog post for all of you.

Oh oh, before I forget, we managed to hit 140.000 wishlists! Absolute insanity. Thank you all so much <3 Still a chunk of work left to do, but seeing people interested in this game of ours makes me really happy. We wouldn’t be here if it weren't for you!

Extended Demo

Speaking of being a cool backer. As promised, this year we are going to be sending out an extended demo to all of you who backed the project after June 2022. If you are reading this, you are most likely eligible!

The Extended Demo takes place in both Level 2-2 and Level 2-3 and features 3 brand new environments (as opposed to only one like in the original demo). Backrooms, The Broken Seal Bar and a brief section in the Water Treatment Plant. The levels will be slightly altered for demo reasons however, so you may find some locked doors that would otherwise be open. The Water Treatment Plant section is a lot longer in the full game but, no matter how much I like all of you, we do have to keep our demo’s short! If it's any consolation, it pains me too, I really liked that section! :(

In addition to the new environments, you will also gain access to a new weapon: The UC-11 Compact SMG. A powerful bullet hose that’s not only fun to shoot, it’s also fun to melee enemies with due to the attached Taser. Punch the enemy and they'll get shocked, stunning them for a good duration of time! Want to shock multiple enemies at once? Try punching the enemy towards a wall, which causes a shockwave electrocuting everyone near your target. Except you, because you are way too badass to be shocked. But not badass enough to ignore the Taser cooldown.

The Workshop will also be present and can be found in Level 2-3. Allowing you to upgrade some of the weapons.

(WIP - Some assets and systems still missing)

The Extended Demo will also run on a brand new build that introduces a large number of improvements. Enemies are more dynamic, they dive out of the way from grenades and have vastly improved pathfinding among other improved systems. Performance has been increased significantly, the audio (and mixing) has been redone entirely. Producing more punchy sounds, improved ambiances and improved explosion sounds (they really kick ass now!).

We are aiming to get this build out there on August for all backers who are eligible. Admirals will be getting it one month sooner so we can test things before rolling it out to other backers. We did this approach with the Pre-demo back in 2021 and has proven to be very effective.

For the time being, have some screenshots of the level! Some of you may have seen these already, but I'm sure some of our newer friends have not:

3 New Enemy types (Continued)

Two weeks ago I mentioned I was working on 3 new enemies at once and was planning to get them all ready by June. This worked out for the most part, two new enemy types are pretty much entirely animated and functional, but still need some polish. The third enemy type ended up having a few complications we had to iron out before we could properly work on them, so it was temporarily put on hold. Thankfully, it’s all working now so once my computer is operational again, I’ll finish the third enemy type!

Gibbing and Blood effects for the new enemy types are mostly finished too. Given the spoilery nature of these enemies, I still cannot show them. Sorry!

Secret Level

We’re doing this, we’re working on a secret level! It’s a very unusual level, but hey, that’s what secrets levels are for right? No screenshots for this thing, it’s a secret after all. But, it will have 2 unique enemies (they are easy to make, won't take a lot of dev time!) and a brand new set of very low resolution textures. I think you will really like this one.

Pathfinding

We have, once again, vastly improved our pathfinding solution in Selaco.

First and foremost, the node building process has been completely overhauled. In the current demo build, nodes are built as the level is being loaded. This basically means that while you are waiting for the level to finish loading, the game is looking for every Pathnode (used to tell the enemy where they can walk) in the level to see which other path nodes it can traverse to. This is quite a demanding process and adds a significant amount of loading time. The more path nodes in the level, the more time it needs to check all of them. Level 1-2 for example took 4 times longer to load than intended purely because of the node building process. We were aware of this problem when we launched the demo, but like many other things, we were unable to correct it in time! But now we fixed it!

The new system allows for these nodes to be pre-built by the level designers. We basically added a script to Ultimate Doom Builder (the tool we use to build levels) and added the option for designers to connect their nodes. This will store all the data in regards to pathnodes into the level file itself, meaning we no longer have to do this when the game is running. The result? Blazingly fast loading speeds since we only have to read something that's essentially a text file. If you play the game on a fast storage device like an SSD, the average loading time should only take a second. Even less if you use an M.2.

On top of that, flanking code, pathfinding and error correction has been reworked from the ground up, and we’ve added a step-based pathfinding solution that allows us to have hundreds of enemies to use pathfinding at once without the game suffering from performance issues.. If an enemy gets stuck, they will reroute immediately, enemies no longer bump into each other, they can finally traverse slopes properly and many other improvements. There’s a lot that went into this and for a game like Selaco which is all about dynamic combat, we have to nail the implementation of enemy pathfinding. The new system makes the game feel infinitely more dynamic as soldiers always know how to reach their desired destination and have no difficulty going around the arena to flank you.

This will be present in the updated Demo build and we would love to hear your thoughts on this!

Printer

This is a printer. It can print!

Conclusion

I suppose we can start counting down the days until the Extended Demo hits. Let's say that it arrives in roughly 10 weeks.

Get hyped!

Thank you are for supporting our game <3

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #51 - Rain!

Hey everyone,

This will be a shorter development blog than usual. Most of our time these last few weeks is spent working on some very spoilery stuff, which we cannot share here. At least for now. This means that there is unfortunately not a lot to talk about, but that wont stop me from at least trying to make a good blog post!

This blog post is entirely written by me and nobody has proofread it. I am absolutely certain everything is going to be OK and we wont get another 'Steam Dick' disaster!

EDIT: The first typo has already been found. That took... 14 minutes! It has been corrected.

Plush

I’ve seen the first draft of the plush (basically a prototype with visible seams) and it’s lovely! I’m not allowed to share this version of the plush yet since it’s still a first draft, but I will share the entire process, from concept to actual plush, in a future blog post. Best I can do for now is a very blurry image, enjoy!

Launch is expected to happen in August and will be a limited edition. If the plushies end up being profitable, we will use the money to further increase development funds! Honestly, we just think it’s really damn cool that a company is willing to do this for us and it’s a great excuse to give our budget a tiny boost.

The plush will cost $30. If you want one, ensure you have something to spare around the month of August! Remember, they won't be sold forever.

Steam Deck Tests

A few days ago we posted a tweet asking for Steam Deck testers. Everybody is able to sign up for this test, but I'm considering sending a version to Patrons a little earlier than others because all of you are extra awesome.

‘’Didn’t the Demo already work on a Steam Deck?”

It did, but not anymore! :( Valve launched a Firmware update for the Steam Deck and our Vulkan Texture Loader is not a fan of it. Launching Selaco on Vulkan using a Steam Deck (or some Linux distros) will result in an error.

The bad news? We are going to have to find out why this happens and fix it.

The good news? This firmware update will very likely improve performance on a CPU-heavy title like Selaco. So yay!

We will be updating the demo with a fix in the near future, but not after some extensive testing to ensure things are working properly.

If you want to help us test, please let me know in our Discord server or shoot us an email! The test wont take a lot of your time, we only need to know if the demo boots properly and doesn't have any stuttering problems.

Rain Effects

I’ve been eager to work on this for over a year now, and we’re finally getting it done!

From the moment we knew that we were going to have exteriors, we wanted to work on rain effects that look both convincing and performance friendly. We have to, since exterior levels have to remain performant despite their increase in scope. A common approach for GZDoom games/mods is that every rain splatter is basically an actor. This may look convincing, but it tanks performance down drastically because there are hundreds of individual raindrops being fired at any given time that your computer will have to process. The level already has an increase in fidelity due to the large draw distances, so this solution was a definite no-go.

Our solution is very different, and practically the opposite; as few actors as possible, capable of covering a ton of ground. GZDoom is very CPU-intensive, so we decided to look for an option that’s more GPU intensive, since the GPU load is relatively mild and has plenty of performance budget left in this game.

We decided to go with a shader solution. We added a bunch or 2D planes in Blender which will function as a reference point for the shader, then added it to GZDoom as a fully invisible mesh (a 3D object). Through some fancy coding magic, Cockatrice coded a shader from scratch that moves up from the sky, all the way down to the reference point seen in the image above.

The result? Accurate rain effects at no performance costs. We can add hundreds of these and the performance loss will be neglectable, the rain actors dont even have to Tick, further keeping the performance cost in check. The rain is also accurate; A player seeking shelter under a roof will block the rain properly, while still spawning rain in your surrounding area where no shelter is present. It’s beautiful and it works surprisingly great.

The rain is hard to demonstrate in a blog post, but I’ll try my best to do it justice. Be mindful that this is still very WIP! More effects like tiny water splashes around the player are still being worked on.

[GIF brightened up by 30% in post. Pay close attention, you may see a raindrop effect on the camera lens!]

We also did a lot of work on the sound design of the rain. The sound of rain will always play around you, but only in places where there is a sky. If you face the entrance of a building and you move forward, for example, the sound of rain will only be heard behind you. Standing near a car will play different rain sound effects where you can hear the roof getting hit by the drops. Standing near a tree? The rustling of the leaves becomes a bit more intense as opposed to a level that has no rain. Standing under a thin roof? A different sound is used to simulate the sound of rain drops landing right above you, and wind always comes from one specific direction. If you have a surround sound system, you’ll love the extra work we put into this! I often load a rainy level and just wander around to listen to how the whole thing is coming together. It’s beautiful and I cannot overstate my enthusiasm for it!

On top of that, there’s a lot of smaller details in play as well. A different layer of sound is added to your footsteps to make it sound more ‘rainy’, going from outdoor to indoor will briefly leave wet footprints behind, a raindrop shader is applied to every surface that has the sky above it, rain drops can hit the camera (which is more common when looking up and less common when looking down) etc etc. There’s a lot going on here and hope the details are appreciated!

Office Complex screenshots

This level is still WIP! This is a very combat heavy level. You will face opposition in pretty much every room and not a single office will still be left standing by the time you’re done with it. It’s fun and it’s a blast to test! The first Office Complex level is finished and is currently being polished by me. ReformedJoe is working on the second Office Complex level which is also shaping up great despite being mostly a bunch of blockouts right now.

What's in the pipeline?

I am currently working on 3 enemies at once. The models are done, Yij fully rigged them so they are ready to be animated, now it's up to me to take care of the rest! They are from a different faction and are very different compared to the Aliens we currently have. They will need their own blood effects, their own gibbing system, their own AI, set of animations, reactions etc etc. Quite a bit of work, and I gave myself until the end of May to get it done *gulp*.

Cockatrice is currently working on some UI systems that play during a later section of the game (which I, again, cannot get into right now!).

ReformedJoe is mapping away at the Office Complex level (screenshots below!). Very action heavy level where you basically go from office to office to gun down a bunch of enemies. Good fun! The rest of the team is providing the assets. Borion, for example, is working on an interactive printer and I can't wait to implement it.

In the meantime, I will continue to polish up the game as a whole. I have a few ideas in regards to AI that I would love to implement to make them a little more reactionary, and recently made a nice gore sound pass so things sound extra juicy.

Conclusion

Apologies that this blog post is much shorter than any other blog post we’ve done. Last week and the current week have been very difficult since adding these new 3 enemies have been giving us headaches where we face a tiny bump in the road on a near daily basis. It’s working out really well, thankfully, but it’s a challenging endeavor.

Regardless of the short blog post, progression remains steady! Rain effects being a particular highlight.

Thank you all for being here and we hope to see you again in two weeks!

Wesley

[Spinning Dawn added as an epic bonus]

Dev Blog #50 - Artwork, Exteriors, Water Effects and More!

Happy Saturday everyone!

We did it, we’ve arrived at number #50! I’ve been re-reading older blog posts these last couple of days and it’s so much fun to see how much things have changed, or how things/problems are frequently mentioned the past, which eventually are fixed in a later blog post. Quite a trip, that was fun! It’s been 3 weeks (THREE WEEKS !!) since our last Blog Post, so let's not waste any time and get right into it.

April Review

Let's start by briefly talking about how April went, and discuss a potential problem.

For the past few weeks, we’ve decided to put most of our efforts into the game itself and kind of leave the marketing aspect of the game behind us for a while. This, unfortunately, is having an effect on our Patreon. We noticed that making a constant internet presence to promote the game as much as possible, was slowing us down drastically. It was effective from a marketing standpoint, but managing actual development time was difficult when there’s also a game that needs to be made. We decided to cut back on marketing and focus on the thing that matters; the game.

We are currently facing the consequence where we are not getting as many backers as we used to, and the monthly budget is slowly dropping. We've reached a record low when it comes to the amount of new Patreon subscribers. It’s not the end of the world, thankfully, but it does make budget management a bit more challenging.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, though! This has been a pretty good month when it comes to wishlists, and all it happened by sheer luck. Someone posted a video of our Toilet Bug and posted it on TikTok, which ended up becoming a viral video with 650.000 views, LevelCapGaming made a video about anticipated Boomer Shooters which Selaco was included in (232.000 views), and we reached the front page of /r/PCGaming on Reddit due to our silly, and very serious, release date. The result was a very nice uptick in the average wishlists per day, illustrated below! While it’s unfortunate how these often do not transfer into Patrons, they at least give us some reassurance when we launch Selaco in the future.

Water Effects

Played the demo? Did you ever decide to shoot a bunch of bullets into a small puddle just to learn that the bullet completely ignores it? Me too, and it sucks! We’ve stepped up our game up here, making it so that all kinds of objects properly react to water surfaces.

Let's start by taking a look at the current demo version. The version you can play right now, has bullets react to water like this:

Truly a disgrace to any shooter game and we can’t have that. Time to get to work!

First things first, let's have bullets properly cause a splash. Oddly enough, we had to make an engine tweak to GZDoom to be able to pull this off, as hitscans are a bit limiting in that regard (BONUS: This engine tweak also allowed us to fix the issue where plants would block your shots!). We needed the water to intersect with the hitscan while still allowing the bullet to pass through and hit the surface underneath it. Then, we also had to find the nearest 3D Sector (which we use to create water areas) and spawn the splash on there, but the GZDoom function did not work as expected, so we tweaked it and made our own

Lo and behold, bullets being fired on a swimmable water surface! (Effects WIP)

Now, obviously, this being Selaco, we did not stop at just bullets! We made *everything* react to water.

Bullet casings:

Objects, based on velocity:

(Enemy)Movement

I’ve been wanting to add this for a long time now, and I’m happy to finally have it in the game! Combined with a few other details not mentioned here, the water feels a lot more water-y than ever! We’re still planning on improving the actual effects as I’m not entirely sold on them yet, and fix an awkward rendering problem, but at least the groundwork is there!

Floor-dependent Impact Effects

Another improvement that bothered me for a long time. We always had the ability to spawn different effects based on the texture of a wall (e.g. spawn sparks for Metal walls, wood for wooden walls etc). But we could not do the same for our floors because it was written in ACS! Long time Patrons are probably already aware of the pain ACS has caused us. ACS is a level scripting tool that we actively used back in the day. Zscript (the language we currently use) was still in its early years and I was not familiar enough with it to feel comfortable using it. So instead, I abused ACS in such a way that it was used for gameplay mechanics. Noticed how your footsteps made different sounds in the demo? That worked because the footstep system was made using ACS, and all the material data for floor textures was stored there. But here is the problem: Our impact effects are done using Zscript (the 'better' language), there was no way to use that data without using very dirty hacks and refused to go that route. It would be too hard to maintain.

So we did the time consuming thing instead; We rewrote our entire footstep system from the ground up in Zscript. Not only is the codebase for it much cleaner now, it also improves game performance (since we no longer have to seek through a gigantic array with every step! More on that later) and allows for more flexibility. Now, every surface you shoot will react accordingly!

Performance Optimization

Improved Texture Seeking

In the current demo, whenever a bullet hits a wall, or an actor walks over the floor, the game is required to seek through a gigantic list of textures until it finds the texture it needs. For example, if a soldier stands on a wood texture called ''WODLO53", it seeks through a list, going through Metal, Sand, Dirt, Gravel, Rock textures all the way until it finally reaches the Wood textures. If it sees WODLO53, a hit is found, and the game can recognize that it's a Wood texture. I always knew this was inefficient, but figured it would be fine for the time being. Fast forward 5 years into the future, and we suddenly have thousands upon thousands of textures to seek through. For a game where a single-thread is used for game logic, this adds up and increases the potential of the dreaded stutter. Imagine you’re in combat, and a shotgunner fires his weapon at you. You dodge, but all 12 Shotgun Pellets hit the wall right behind you. At the same time, you and other characters are moving around. That’s a lot of textures the game has to seek through in a single frame and there is only so much a CPU (especially slower ones!) can execute in a single tick*, so we had to optimize it.

We improved this drastically! Currently, when a level is loading, a function reads all the texture data in the level, and assigns a tag to every single Sector (floor/ceiling) and Linedef (Walls). Now, if a bullet hits a wall or floor, all it has to do is check which tag is assigned to the floor to spawn the appropriate effects. Much better! 

*A tick refers to a point in time where the game is executing game logic. In GZDoom’s case, this happens 35 times in a second. Every single calculation is handled in a game tick. If a tick gets overloaded and your CPU cannot keep up, a stutter happens since the engine code also needs to be processed in a tick!

Improved logics

I can’t be too specific about this one, but I’ve spent a good couple of days going through all the code that we have, and making a big chunk of improvements wherever possible. Small examples? High quantities of smoke can on longer spawn inside of each other. Before the tweak, smoke would often stack inside of each other, making it unable to see through them. However, their alpha was still being rendered despite it not being visible. This adds a unnecessary load to the performance and how now been ironed out. Pathfinding is now done in smaller steps to reduce the load whenever a soldier needs a path to traverse and the logic is now spaced out to prevent a single tick from getting too much work. I’m also in the middle of getting rid of our ACS code, which is slower compared to Zscript.

Level Design

Still hard at work on the third level (we don't develop levels in chronological order!) of the game, The Selaco Streets! Joe has finished designing Level 3-2, so that’s the one we currently giving a major art pass as Joe continues working on 3-3. One area of the level takes place in a very old-timey library. Have some screenshots

IMPORTANT: All screenshots are still getting an art pass! Especially the exterior sections

There is still a ton of work left in these levels, but they are shaping up to be fantastic and a perfect change of pace after the interior sections that came before it.

Artwork

I’m sure you’ve seen the thumbnail, but here it is again! We are replacing our current Steam Banner (the picture you see when you find Selaco on the Steam Store) with something a bit more representative, featuring Dawn sliding towards the enemy, shooting guns and evading incoming fire. This piece is 95% finished, we’re just giving it a small layer of polish before putting the stamp on it! Here is a quick time lapse for now:

I’ll share the full res completed version in #Patreon-Showcase when it’s ready to go! Without a logo, of course.

Mod Options

Another thing we are going to be working on, is a Mod Settings menu where players can manage the settings of the mods they’ve downloaded. The above menu is a in-game mock-up and has not been properly implemented yet.

Conclusion

Despite Patreon performing a little rougher than usual, the game itself is progressing steadily. So far, we are well on track to hit our Release Date target (which we won't share yet!) in the future.

Currently, our focus is:

• Implement highly performant, highly detailed Rain Effects. Exterior levels take place in the rain and we want to pull it off well. We would a way to achieve this by coding a shader combined with a few actors. We’ll elaborate when the time comes!
• Animate 3 new enemy types unique to a later level in the game
• Art pass for Level 3-2
• Level design and asset creation for Level 3-3
• Continue the endless journey for smooth performance!

Thank you all for sticking around and supporting the game! <3

Wesley de Waart

You asked for it!

Follow-up blog post.

A few days ago I mentioned that I was considering to add the abillity to use Paint Brushes to actually paint on surfaces. After seeing the comments on Patreon and the Discord channel, it was hard to say 'no' to such a feature so I got to work.

After roughly half a workday, I am happy to announce that you are now able to create art within Selaco. It's jank, it's difficult and the brush has a tendency to misbehave, but I'm confident at least someone will be able to make something pretty out of it.

...Right?

FEATURE LIST:

o 5 different colors

o Context-sensitive 'Paint' button.

o Ability to stop painting at any time to instead shoot aliens and play something that works properly.

Thanks for reading!

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

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

Dev Blog #48 - Health Update, Kicks and Dynamic Crosshairs

Happy Friday everyone,

Congratulations on surviving yet another work week! I hope you’ve been doing well and have some great plans for the weekend. 

A lot has happened the last couple of weeks, most of them good, but the dominant story of this week will not be one of them. You’ve probably seen the title already so I’m not going to waste too much time with an introduction and will go straight to the point.

Health Update

I’ve not been feeling very well as of late and I was very hesitant to bring this up in a blog post but eventually decided to pull through with it. The primary reason is that, as backers, you deserve to know what is happening in the development side of things. You are the reason we get to do this in the first place and it would not sit right with me to not talk about things that affect the project. Secondly, I always find it rather difficult to open up about my life and it’s something I’ve been trying to feel more comfortable with for quite a while now. I think this is a good step towards that. 

It's quite a story and I’m unsure how long it’s going to be so bare with me. I will attach a TL;DR at the end of this section in case you want to cut to the chase, which is completely understandable! Just to avoid any potential scares; No, I’m not dying, far from it. But there have been some bumps in the road that have made it hard to work on the game.

3 years ago, roughly around the time covid arrived in The Netherlands, I was dealing with quite an intense stomach ache. These are quite common for me, but this time something was a little more unusual. The pain is hard to describe. It’s basically a cramp that, during an attack, made me feel very ill, cold and shivery. These attacks would last for a minute, sometimes a little longer. The attacks kept getting worse and more frequent, so I called a doctor because I knew something wasn’t right. This was not your everyday stomach ache.

Unfortunately, due to the early stages of lockdown, the rules were very strict and I was unable to visit. Given my medical history, my doctor assumed it was just another usual stomach flu that would eventually go away. I told him that wasn’t the case, but unfortunately refused to discuss it with me any further and wanted me to wait it out. If problems persist, I'd have to call again.

As the weeks went by, the symptoms got worse. So I decided to give yet another phone call. Luckily, I was finally able to get an appointment in the same week.

When I got to visit, my doctor assumed it was a bacterial infection and prescribed me antibiotics that should take care of it. I took the medication as described for the weeks ahead, but was unable to get the situation to improve. If anything, they kept getting worse.

After yet another visit and another incorrect treatment, the symptoms were getting severe enough that I was unable to do basic tasks. Breathing was difficult and the pain was getting increasingly more brutal. Usually switching positions (e.g laying down on my side with my knees bent to my head, or sitting down leaning forward) would reduce the pain but even that was no longer an option. It’s easily the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life. It was a very long night and just thinking about it as I am writing this fills me with dread. I could go in-depth about how the night went but this blog post would have to become an entire novel. Despite how much I kept pushing for it, getting proper help was a nightmare. Even the hospital could not help me due to shortages at the hospital in my area. But thankfully, eventually, I was able to get another appointment with my doctor and it was considered an emergency case. So I was able to come over right away as soon as the morning hit.

Upon my arrival, it was evident I was not healthy. I was pale, lost tons of weight and haven’t slept for over 36 hours at this point. An ambulance was called in from another city further up, and was about to be picked up.

I arrived at the hospital and felt like I was finally in good hands. I took a CT-scan where they found something quite unusual. One part of my colon was twisted, somehow. This caused a hell of an infection and made it harder for my bowels to operate normally. An attempt had to be made to correct that and they have been able to get it done by pushing against it with a tiny camera, forcing the twisted part back to its original position. This was the biggest relief of my life. Of course, I was heavily sedated so I was not feeling any pain and while most details are hazy, I do remember not being able to contain my laughter because I was able to breathe without feeling resistance or pain, and that made me very happy.

After the procedure was done, we were halfway there. Most of the pain was gone but the infection was still present and it was approaching a lethal state, I was also diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease which I was not aware of before the procedure. We had to stop the infection as fast as we could since the Crohn's disease on top of it was not doing it any favors, so quite aggressive medicine was handed to me twice a day that should eliminate the infection. Thankfully, we noticed a reduction every day and was finally able to get discharged after a week.

Everything was going great at this point. During all of my bi-weekly check ups the results were positive and the infection was fading away more and more. The medication did wonders.

Now, this was all 3 years ago, so surely there’s a reason I am bringing this up now, right? You are correct! A few weeks ago, similar symptoms started appearing again. Not nearly as severe of course, given how it’s in an early stage, but given the traumatic experiences from 3 years ago, this frightened me, but thankfully it is now well documented in my file so I was confident getting help would be easier than the last time. And it has been! One call with my doctor and I was able to get an appointment with a specialist right away. After 2 weeks of tests, we figured out why the pain had returned.

This Monday, I learned that I have an auto-immune disease. This is well treatable these days, but what makes it more difficult in my case is how weak my colon is due to the incident from 3 years ago. The disease will forever try to cause infections there to the point that my current treatment is no longer effective enough to keep up. The new upcoming treatment has a high chance of success, but does come with the added risk of damaging the immune system. There are ways to mitigate this, one of which is by getting a number of vaccinations that prevent common illnesses. I’m obviously not a doctor so I am not entirely sure about the technicalities, but given how they saved my life last time when I had an unusual case, I’m trusting their judgment.

The expectation is that everything will end up fine for the most part. Assuming healthy habits, this will have no negative effect on my life expectancy so we can still get together and play Bingo a few decades from now to celebrate the launch of SELACO: INFINITY WAR PART II. But I do have to be careful and take good care of myself moving forward. Getting really ill is extra risky for me.

I have not been able to get the same amount of work done as usual for Selaco for the last few weeks. Still significant steps here and there, but not to a level that I feel satisfied with. The pain, hospital visits and uncertainty about why the pain is back have made me feel endlessly tired, uninspired and my creative juice felt depleted. Now that I have more answers regarding my well-being, I’m feeling the creative energy return. And you know what makes it even better? Spring is coming!

I’m still extremely exhausted as I am writing this because I took 3 vaccinations in a single day. It took quite a bit of willpower to get up and start writing, which is usually not much of an issue with these blog posts. But, outside of that, I’m feeling good. I am optimistic about the treatment and hope everything will end up as planned.

I am not expecting everyone to read this whole story, but if you did, I thank you for taking the time <3

TL;DR - 3 years ago I got an extremely severe bowel infection which only got worse overtime since Covid lockdowns made it hard to make an appointment, and when I did visit a doctor the diagnosis was wrong on multiple occasions. After multiple months of pain, I was able to be taken to the hospital where I could finally get proper treatment. Recently, similar symptoms started arriving which meant I had to visit the hospital again which had quite an impact on how much I could work on this game. The result came back this Monday and it’s an auto-immune disease. It’s well treatable and I’ll start treatment next week.

Phew, now that we have the heavy stuff out of the way, I do want to bring up a few development related topics. Not everything is bad, just look at the things we did end up doing below!

Workshop Status

Remember when I showed a mock-up in the last Blog Post? Well, we managed to get it to run in-engine now. Here is a screenshot!

A good amount of upgrades are currently working and numerous alt fires have been added. Just like last time, development progress on this is going way faster than anticipated. However, one key element is changed. In the last blog post, I mentioned that your Upgrade Tier (a tier that grants access to a new set of unlocks) would improve with every Safe Room you visit. But this has been changed for something that allows us to place more Safe Rooms in the game without padding the number too much. Rather, some Safe Rooms (usually 1 per Level) will have a Firmware Update item that you can use to upgrade your workshop. This grants you access to more stuff.

Animated Crosshairs

Selaco’s crosshairs have always been static. It’s effective, but also boring and does not provide a good visual indicator of how your weapon is currently behaving. The amount of spread is never visualized properly for example, you have no idea how much your weapon accuracy is decaying as you fire.

This new system takes these variables into consideration and tries to give you an accurate idea of what you can expect from your weapon. The longer you fire, the less accurate you become and the larger the crosshair gets. Get an upgrade that reduces spread? You will dynamically see the crosshair adjust itself accordingly.

This is still in its early stage but it’s going very well. Apologies if the GIF below makes it a little hard to see. We’re still planning on adjusting the color to be more readable. Oh, did we mention we added fancy animations when zooming?

Kicking animation

Dawn can finally use her legs to open some doors! Before, the door would just fall over and we tried to imply through sound effects that it was getting kicked, but this felt a little lackluster. Animating the kick took a few hours of the day so did not take too much time, yet the result is quite satisfying!

Will we add a dedicated kick button? Probably not, but never say never!

Pathfinding

We’ve given it yet another major overhaul! It was already in a pretty decent place with the recent Demo update, but this time we managed to add more variety in the paths the enemies take and improved their code to figure out flanking routes. Soldiers are finally aware of occupied paths and will often prefer to take different routes to reach their destination. This causes soldiers to frequently spread out, while still having a good chance for 2 soldiers to buddy up and follow each other along a path. Additionally, some enemies, like our predefined ‘Attackers Classes’, will always favor flanking over taking the player head on. This is on top of randomized combat values that decides how aggressive, defensive, fast, or mobile they are. This all results in an improved combat dynamic that Selaco has always been aiming for.

This works quite well and the results so far have been surprisingly effective! This will be demonstrated properly in an Extended Demo that goes live for Patrons later this year.

Test Lab

Anyone who is still pledging and pledged a total of $80 will soon receive access to a brand new Test Lab. I will start work on it next week!

Testing goals:

• AI improvements along with Improved pathfinding
• Plasma Rifle along with Gravity Manipulation

Everybody will be receiving an email when it’s ready for testing!

Conclusion

Bit of a personal development blog, I hope that’s alright with you all. We’ve managed to get a lot more done than just this but I’ll save that for a more chunky development blog 2 weeks from now (so still in March!). I’m currently very tired due to the vaccinations and being able to type this out took quite a bit of energy. As soon as I hit the big publish button, I’ll head down and start preparing a nice meal.

May you have a fantastic weekend, and thank you for sticking with us <3

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #47 - The Workshop

Whoops! I had this Blog Post planned for February 30 but did not realize until yesterday that that day does not even exist. So uhh, ahum, let's get started.

For Cockatrice and I, the majority of the past two weeks have been spent on the Workshop mechanic. I’m certain most of our backers have read about it before, but I’d like to take the time in this blog post to properly discuss the details and its mechanics. The rest of the team kept doing what they excel at. Level design, art and music remain in good hands as usual!

Let the Development Blog begin.

Selaco Plush

I’ve had the meeting 2 weeks ago and we’re going to pull through with it! I still have to wrap up some paperwork and discuss the design, but we’re confident it can be done before Q2 2023 ends.

Watch this space as I will absolutely provide an update on the design when available!

Test Lab - Gravity Manipulation

Slight delay on this one, but I think we can get this setup within the next couple of weeks. This Test Lab will be centered around the Plasma Rifle and its ability to mess around with gravity.

This Test Lab will be available for Admiral Tier backers.

Weapon Workshop

We finally began to properly work on this. If you’ve seen our Realms Deep video from almost 2 years ago (man, time goes fast), or the preview video from Gmanlives or Icarus, you may have noticed a Weapon Upgrade screen. This was a rather janky version that we quickly put together for demonstration purposes, but it did not exactly work the way we wanted to. While the core principles worked (adding upgrades and changing alt fires) the code was a big pile of sloppy spaghetti that was prone to failing if you even looked at it funny. Adding a single upgrade would take a whole bunch of time just to set up and it was a disaster to make adjustments to.

We’ve reworked the entire thing from the ground up, dropping Zforms (a UI framework we used in the past) in favor of CockUI (our own in-house UI framework) to something that is easier to expand upon and maintain. This, of course, also means improved modability since modders can easily add their own upgrades to any custom weapons they choose to add to the game, or alter the upgrades of the weapons that already exist.

(Mockup sketch of the Workshop)

This is a mockup sketch we made before working on the system. Unlike the image below, this is not in-engine.

When discussing UI elements, we always draw them out first and discuss how to best present the features and information to the player. This is often a time consuming process since we try to have a UI that’s intuitive for both KB/M and Gamepad, while also having depth without being too overwhelming. Good UI is far more complex than most may realize, so it’s a good thing that we take out time discussing these things to ensure it doesn’t feel clunky. So far, I think we’ve done a decent job with the UI in the game.

Here is the current in-game version, where the mockup was used as a point of reference

(WIP - Workshop for Selaco, running in GZDoom)

Mind you, this is still early in production. We want to have more suitable icons, have proper indicators that tell the player whether or not an upgrade is installed among a whole list of other things.

Now, before we jump into the Weapon Workshop, I want to address the potential elephant in the room: No, Selaco won't be a full fledged RPG and the Workshop will not be mandatory (but it is recommended!). We want the game to be mostly straightforward shooter, but also don't want to shy away from adding some additional depth to the game. Players can choose to ignore this system entirely if they so desire. It will make the game a little bit harder later on, given how enemies gain access to new tools, but it won’t be impossible. However, we do think this system adds a whole load of fun to the game, so I think most of you will choose to engage with it and experiment with what’s available!

What is the Workshop?

Selaco is full of Security Stations that Dawn, or any other ACE Security Guard, has access to. We refer to these as ‘Safe Rooms’ in the game. These rooms have no danger in them and allow the player to relax and prepare for the route ahead. Its main draw is the Weapon Workshop that players can interact with. The Weapon Workshop can be used to review weapon stats and learn more about how a weapon works, as well as install upgrades and modify its behavior. Let's discuss those two things real fast.

Upgrades

Scattered around Selaco, players will find Weapon Parts. These can be found everywhere; in corners of the level, on top of ledges, underneath desks and more. They are primarily found off the beaten path to encourage players to explore but are generally easy to find if you take the time to seek them out.

Weapon Parts are the currency used to add passive upgrades to your weapon. Every weapon has their own set of upgrades that can range between simple upgrades, like more damage or accuracy, or more complex upgrades, like allowing the Plasma Rifle to power up Explosive Hazards (like barrels) or amplify the taser of the SMG to shock the enemy so hard that they explode.

At the beginning of the game, regardless of how many Weapon Parts you have, not everything becomes available right away. More powerful and crazy upgrades require a certain number of unlocked Safe Rooms (which is a currency on its own) before being available to you. So as you progress, you gain access to more things.

Purchased upgrades are applied automatically but can be turned off if you do not like the alteration.

For players who like to play with Rifle Start; while the weapons will be removed after beating a level, the upgrades will persist. So having a fully upgraded Shotgun would mean that the next shotgun you pick up will also be fully upgraded.

Behavior Modifiers

This has been explained in a past blog post, but for the newcomers, here are the basics:

Every weapon has a number of different alt fires that can be unlocked for use. While we have not finalized a proper term for them, we can call them ‘Behavior Modifiers’ for now.

The workshop can be used to customize the Behavior Modifier, which adjusts what the Alternate Fire button (Right Mouse Button / Left Trigger by default) does for that weapon. Most weapons will start relatively simple, where pressing the Alternative Fire button will zoom the weapon. Useful, but relatively boring for some of the later weapons. It usually doesn’t take too long after finding a weapon that it gets replaced with something more interesting, like the ability to Dual Wield the SMG.

Players can find these Behavior Modifiers in secrets, or sometimes even along the beaten path if the Modifier is considered essential to the weapon. This is the case with the Plasma Rifle’s “Gravity Manipulation”, for example.

After picking up a Behavior Modifier, the player will receive a prompt asking if they want to equip it right now, or store it in their inventory for later use. When deciding to store it into your inventory, the Behavior Modifier can be swapped out in the Workshop.

Extra Info

We’ve primarily focused on these features for the past couple of weeks, but still have a number of other things that we need to implement before we can put the stamp on it. Like the ability to buy ammo using Selver Credits, adjusting Mutators and being able to travel back to previous safe rooms with the press of a button. The latter of which is only used for players who want to find secrets they may have missed in older levels. The game does not require you to ever travel back to an older level in order to progress.

Another idea that’s currently in the backlog is a shooting range. Basically a doorway in every workshop that takes you to a room where you are given infinite ammo to play around with the weapons. Useful for testing new upgrades / behavior modifiers ,seeing how they work and get a DPS (Damage Per Second) readout when firing dummies. Unsure if this will make its way into the first chapter of the game, but it will absolutely be in the second.

Progress on the workshop is faster than anticipated. It helps that the majority of these upgrades were already conceptualized a year ago, so the ideas were already ready to go which often make up a good chunk of the process. Upgrades that modify a stat are very easy to add with the new system, while the more original ideas take a few hours to properly implement and test. Thankfully, I feel like our systems are rather robust nowadays which makes expanding upon existing actors (objects) relatively safe.

For you, the player, it will take a while before the workshop is introduced to you. I think, on average, it will take roughly 2 hours of gameplay for the player to stumble upon their very first Safe Room near the end of the second level. From that point on, Weapon Parts are introduced to the player and Safe Rooms become more common as you venture your way forward. It’s a great way to make the whole game feel fresh again. We expect these type of things to be maintained throughout the entire game but these mechanics will stay behind closed doors for the time being.

Levels

Continuing steadily as usual! Here is a very, very WIP look into an exterior area. There’s still a lot of work to be done here, but we’re happy to finally properly work on it!

Voxels

A new set of voxels have arrived! We have added 17 Chemical props, a white board and a holographic keyboard projector among a few other things.

Chemicals. Ever since we added multi-threading, we’ve been unable to add color overlays in the engine due to an error which we will look into later, so expect the chemical liquids to look less like water when the game launches! A few extra variations are on the way to further add variety to the amount of different cans and bottles.

Whiteboards

Keyboard Projector. You know, those things that barely work? Selaco has them too!

Towels. Finally, Toilet Paper is not the only voxel object that can be used to clean things.

Conclusion

Very happy with the progress of the last 2 weeks. I was expecting the implementation of the Workshop to take much longer, but we’re well ahead of schedule in that regard. The real challenge right now is implementing the many different alt fires, but I’m very much looking forward to that. Giving new functionality to existing weapons is always a treat to be working on.

Thank you all for once again sticking with us and continuing your pledge <3

See you all in the next blog post!

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #46 - Grenade Launcher BTS, ISAAC the Robot, New Game Over Screen and More!

And just like that, we have our blog post up right in time for the weekend! A little later than usual, but still on schedule for our dev blog quota of February. We've got plenty to show, including a deep dive-ish on the workflow of the Grenade Launcher, so lets jump straight in.

GOG

We've heard back from GOG, finally! 

For those unaware, we’ve been trying to get Selaco onto the GOG store for over 18 months but we never managed to hear back from GOG. We tried over and over but we got nothing. Not even a confirmation about a successful submission. To this day, we have no idea why this keeps happening.

There has been quite a sizable demand for a GOG version of Selaco so a couple of weeks ago I decided to be stubborn and contacted one of the GOG staff directly because my patience was starting to run out. To my surprise, this worked, we got a reply back after just a number of days. They were more than interested and were asking for a playable built to review for curation. We sent them the demo aaaaand……

WE'VE BEEN APPROVED! We still have to fill out some paperwork and get the store page set up, but the thing has been put in motion and for those who prefer a completely DRM-free version, Selaco will be available for you on GOG in the near future. Do remember, however, that even the Steam build of Selaco will have no DRM to speak of.

As a Patron (Assuming a total of $20 is pledged) you already own the game on Steam, so I’ll have a chat with Jason (Community Manager) to figure out how we will hand out GOG keys to those who prefer it over Steam.

Plush

This Wednesday I’ll have a meeting with a plushie company where we discuss the possibility of a Dawn plush. I’ll probably write a quick impromptu Patreon Blog shortly after the meeting to give a short summary. Stand by!

ISAAC

We all know the VAC-BOTS, right? The circle shaped robotic vacuum cleaners that roam the hallways looking for trash to clean. Fully committed to their job despite the vicious invasion and the lack of humans to appreciate their hard work.

We would like to introduce a brand new friendly robot to the line-up. Meet ISAAC (Intelligent Systems for Automated Assembly and Correction). A small repair bot that does its best keeping Selaco’s systems functional and ensuring wall panels stay in their place. This will be a fully voxelized character that actively chases down exposed wire panels and attempts to repair any damage it may find. 

You will find hard working ISAAC’s often as you venture through the campaign. Remember to show them your appreciation by tapping their head or giving them a salute, because there is nobody else to do it for them right now.

Grenade Launcher progress

Allow me to briefly recap for our new readers. The Grenade Launcher model has recently been completed and the implementation of the weapon has begun. This includes rendering, animating and coding the weapon.

The Grenade Launcher is, so far, the most complex weapon in the arsenal. It requires far more animation work than other weapons, has 3 different ammo types that need to be accounted for and has a dynamic display on the weapon. The issue here is that Selaco uses sprites instead of 3D model, which complicates things significantly. If we attach a display on the weapon that shows the currently loaded ammo type, we have to figure out a way to overlay it correctly.

Here is what the weapon looks like without overlays. Notice the empty spot at the back of the weapon? That is where the display is going to be. This part of the sprite is rendered separately, so we can swap it out when needed. 

We achieve this by rendering the weapon multiple times. First, we do a plain render with just the gun. This will render an entire animation and give us a series of PNG’s as an output. These PNG’s will be touched up using a photoshop script and get added into the game as Weapon Sprites.

Let's take the Attacking animation (work in progress) as an example here. Here it what it looks like in Blender:

We cannot render it like this, because that would mean the ‘’FRAG’’ display is imbued onto the weapon sprite. So instead, we do multiple render passes.

Render 1 consists of just the weapon with the display turned off.

Render 2, 3 and 4 use the same animation data, except the gun is turned off in favor of a display

Render 5 disables all the lights, but keeps the muzzle flash so we can use this data to make the gun look brighter in game. This is called a Brightmap.

All of these render passes give us a wide range of PNG’s to work with. So we start combining them all to get this result:

Which then gives us a proper display!

Be wary that we working out a minor issue where the edges of the monitor are *slightly* bigger than they are supposed to be. It looks uncanny, that’s why!

Just for good measure, here is the grenade launcher firing a grenade. The screen is off because we have not rendered all of the displays yet. We want to ensure all the animations are final first!

Remember the Brightmap render I mentioned earlier? That allows us to light up the gun properly! Watch how the muzzle flash properly illuminates the gun despite the sprite itself still being mostly shaded. It’s a minor detail, but a very important one.

That covers the rendering aspect which is challenging on its own. Another challenge is the ability to switch ammo types. Pressing Alt Fire will have Dawn remove the drum containing the Grenade Shells to replace it with a drum containing the next ammo type. You can keep pressing Alt Fire to cycle through them. The amount of shells in each drum will be remembered, so if you have 3 Ice Shells in your drum, swap it out with Acid Shells then go back to Ice Shells, the 3 Ice Shells that were loaded continue to be loaded. All of this will require their own animation, so I have my hands full on that as well.

…and let's not even begin about having to balance all of this! Iit’s a fun challenge that I’ve been looking forward to for a while now and am happy to see how well it’s coming together so far. I am fully expecting the Grenade Launcher to be completely presentable in the next blog post!

And last but not least, the voxels!

New Death Screen (Prototype)

Early prototype.

We wanted to get this done before the Demo Update, but have unfortunately been unable to get it done in time.

In the current Demo version, death works almost exactly like in Doom. You fall to the floor, stare at whatever killed you and press E to restart. This works well, but for Selaco we wanted to modernize it a little more. Upon death, you get a screen allowing you to restart the checkpoint, load a saved game or return to the menu. There will also be a drone noise playing in the background to dramatize the character death a little.

Voxels

We have a whole load of new voxels! Here are a couple of them:

Interactive Scissor Lift (can we raised and lowered)

Chemicals

Toolbox

Concept sketch

We currently have 7 concept art pieces in the works. Here is a WIP of the streets

Conclusion

The game continues to progress at a very steady pace as usual. ReformedJoe is currently working on the third level of the game, taking place in the Selaco streets which opens up in a classic parking garage shoot-out section.

The last couple of weeks we have been unable to actively promote our Patron so the numbers are slightly lower than it used to be. This is unfortunate, but we’ll start a new Patreon push really soon to hopefully get that number back up. You are still reading this, which means you are still here to support us. Thank you! <3

Have a fantastic weekend and we will see you in 2 weeks (and this time, we will launch the dev blog on schedule!)

Wesley de Waart

Dev Blog #45 - Grenade Launcher update, Saw Drones, A jukebox and more

Picture of a Safe Room

Time for our new bi-weekly blog post. Or, well, almost tri-weekly for this one. We're slightly overdue for this one.

Last week I made a blog post without editing approval from my team because I did not want to disturb them on the job. It went terribly so let’s do it again. Roast me in the comments for every typo that I made!

We’ve got a good bunch of things to show. A lot of time was spent mapping which will remain behind closed doors for the time being so this blog post might end up being a tiny bit shorter than it usually is. We'll see! Let me dig into the pile of things we've made for the past 2 weeks and see how long this blog post gets.

Grenade Launcher remodeling

The weapon looked good, but in first person view it could look a little dull. We went ahead and made some minor revisions to make the grenade launcher more visually appealing in-game.

New Model

Old Model

And here is the 3D model of the updated Grenade Launcher. Remember that the display is added in post!

Outside of the display, the difference may seem a bit small at first, but trust me that this will make all the difference in first person view!

This Grenade Launcher is going to be very tricky to implement. You see that blue display on the weapon? An actual display will be overlaid onto the sprite and will change based on the Grenade Type that the player is using (Frag, Ice, Acid). The challenge here is that this will require us to do 4 different rendering passes for all of our animations. Once for the grenade launcher without a display, and 3 additional passes with just a display and no weapon.

Quite labor intensive, but that’s the unfortunate reality when using an old engine that uses sprites. Thankfully, I expect the entire rendering process to take no more than a day, two if I’m unlucky. Very curious about the result on this one!

Gravity Manipulation

A few blog posts ago we’ve shown our Gravity Manipulator in action, an alternative fire mode for the Plasma Rifle where the player can pick up props and toss them around.

One of the things we always wanted to do was to add the ability to pick up smaller enemy types and toss them around. Picking up a Crawler Mine, for example, allows you to throw them against the enemy, causing them to explode on their own teammate.

Enemy Behavior has been disabled for demonstration purposes

Starlight

Starlight is 98% finished and we’re ready to move on to the next level. This level consists of 5 sections (6 if you're picky) and will take roughly over an hour to beat. Beating Starlight gives you Selaco’s most powerful weapon, which you will need in order to progress.

Saw Drones

Added and implemented into the game! And yes, you can absolutely destroy them and use their circle saw with your Gravity Manipulator. It would be embarrassing if you couldn’t.

On-screen Keyboard

Image of the on-screen Keyboard is super duper work in progress!

One of the hurdles we have to overcome when aiming for Steam Deck verification, is to implement a proper full screen keyboard within the engine. GZDoom has one built-in, but it’s completely unreadable on Steam Deck and feels rather cumbersome to use, so we’re aiming to modernize a bit.

Jukebox

We’ve added a fully functional Jukebox voxel. Insert a few pennies and listen to a couple of banging tracks! Lawrence made a whole bunch of tracks during his career, but a bunch of tracks that he really liked never saw the light of day. Solution? Jukebox! He had a couple of tracks that work well within the bar setting of the area. Can’t wait for you to hear them! I'll make sure to share a track in #Patreon-showcase over at our Discord channel later this week.

The Jukebox was fun to make. We had to work on a speaker pairing system so that enabling the Jukebox, would play actual music through the speakers spread around the area. If you've gotten sick of the music (why would you!?), you can choose to destroy every single speaker to completely get rid of it. You can continue the rest of the campaign knowing you have questionable taste in music.

Alt Fire System

Weapon Kit pickup voxel. Ignore the very long label, we have to figure out a solution for that later!

One of the bigger gameplay mechanics in Selaco is the ability to find new Alternative Fires (called Alt Fires from here on out) for your guns. Throughout your journey, you will stumble upon plenty of side-area’s (or even a series of encounters) that lead towards a new Alternative Fire mode for a weapon. For example, if you choose to explore that little parking garage in the distance, you may find a new alt fire for your SMG, allowing you to dual-wield it. You can choose to skip these sections entirely, but you will miss out on new tools to use. So make sure you scavenge well. Missed one? No worries, you can always go back to previous levels at a later time to hunt them down.

After picking one up, you will receive a confirmation prompt asking whether you want to equip it right away, or put it in your storage. If you choose to put it in Storage, you can use Safe Rooms to change the Alt Fire for your weapons.

Dawn Plushy

Cannot share too much here! We’ve been approached by a company who specializes in designing, creating and selling plushies of numerous franchises. We haven’t really done merchandising before, it’s not something we have been willing to explore just yet, but the deal seems like a lot of fun so I’ll be having a meeting with them soon to see how it all works. Extra funding for development is always nice to have and what better way than giving a plushy in return?

I’ll keep you posted!

Zooming

We have cheated in our demo. Remember that kickass Alt Fire for the Roaring Cricket that allows you to fire 3 shots in rapid succession? It was not meant to be available to the player right away. You will not be getting it until late into the second level (So roughly 2 hours into the game).

Instead, most weapons start out by having some epic zooming features that are exactly like your primary fire, but more accurate! Whenever you find a new weapon, a new (more interesting?) Alt Fire for that weapon is not usually far off. Assuming, of course, the player pays close attention to their surroundings.

Dawn zooms in with the Roaring Cricket, using both hands. This reduces a tremendous amount of recoil at the expensive of movement speed.

SMG Zooming. Reduces spread. This makes it almost as accurate as a hip firing UC-36 

New Weapon

We’re working on one more weapon. A secret one! We don’t really show easter eggs before launch so all I can do is give a hint. You find this secret weapon in the third level of the full game, but you will have to look very hard for it. This secret weapon completely annihilates every robot enemy in the game, but it will do literally 0 damage to anyone who is not a robot. They will just think you are a child for using it.

Season Patrons who have read plenty of blog posts in the past may be able to piece together what this weapon is going to be. For now, my lips are sealed. If we ever reach our monthly goal of 35.000.000 million a month I'll gladly spill the beans, but alas.

Fixed a sprite issue

A couple of days ago we, jokingly, apologized for having an error in one of reloading sprites. (https://twitter.com/SelacoGame/status/1616852080261730304).

As probably all gun enthusiasts can tell right away, the bullet is being inserted the wrong way around. This issue has been corrected and we’re giving our Patrons a sneak peak at the corrected sprite. Lo and behold, a fixed sprite!

How did this happen? Simple, an animation problem! During the reload, Dawn catches the magazine that's inside the cricket and replaces it with a new one that is hidden underneath the camera. But we need to use the exact same magazine that came out of the weapon right before we put it into the gun, which is a common thing for weapon reloads in video games; the end of the reload should bring you back to the exact same state it was before, including the new magazine. So we pull a switcheroo right before the end and swap them. But we forgot to rotate it accordingly, so it ended up being inserted the wrong way around.

Conclusion

Well I'll be damned, it ended up being of a decent length after all! Like all the blogs before it, things are continuing on a rapid pace and everything is fully set into mention. With Starlight out of the way, tackling the streets will be our next goal.  One of our concept artists is currently working on ironing out the last couple of sketches for the streets so we have a proper point of reference to work with.

Admirals, we are very likely going to launch a new Test Lab soon, where we start testing the Gravity Manipulation device of the Plasma Rifle. Keep an eye on your inbox, I'm expecting this to be done within the next 30 days.

As usual, we are grateful for your support. Thanks you for sticking around and allowing us to do this.

Wesley de Waart