Devlog #30 | Public Demo Countdown, The Ripper, and Major System Overhauls!
Public Demo
The public demo is almost here! Hostile Mars is excited to participate in the Steam Tower Defense Festival, featuring our latest demo! The festival kicks off on July 29th, but you can dive into the action early with the public demo going live on July 26th. Get ready to defend Home Base!
If you experienced our last public demo, prepare for a whole new adventure! This demo has been completely overhauled from top to bottom, with revamped game mechanics, enhanced enemy behaviors, and a host of new features. Get ready to dive into an even more thrilling and immersive Martian battlefield!
Let's take a look at the things we've been working on for the past month:
The Ripper
We've been crafting a weapon that truly captures the essence of Hostile Mars. With our focus on battling massive waves of enemies and physics-based interactions, we've created "The Ripper."
The game kicks off with The Ripper as your primary utility weapon. Originally designed for repairing and debugging live robots, this versatile tool can disassemble bots into pieces for inspection. It also throws scraps too heavy to move manually into storage or recycling bins. But here's the twist: The Ripper can be easily modified to pull enemies in close, tear them apart, and hurl the pieces at other bots!
Upgrades allow The Ripper to pull in more enemies and shoot more scraps per shot. It's an incredibly satisfying weapon to wield, and we're continually refining it to ensure it feels fantastic and scales seamlessly with the increasing waves of enemies. Get ready to rip through the robotic hordes with style!
Attack Token Changes
We've enhanced the attack token system, which balances combat by limiting simultaneous enemy attacks. Previously, all enemies shared a global token budget, making it hard for all enemy types to get a chance to attack in large groups. Now, each enemy type has its own attack group with a private budget, ensuring more balanced and engaging combat. Enemies can still use the shared budget, but if depleted, they rely on their group's budget. This update allows for fine-tuning the number of attacks from each enemy type, making battles with mixed enemy groups more dynamic and exciting.
Aggro Changes
Up until recently, the enemies would aggro the player whenever they were in range, no matter what. This meant the player could easily stop the entire wave from progressing by standing in range of the path as enemies would try to reach the player instead of going for the core. And this worked even when hundreds of enemies were around.
We've changed the aggro behavior to limit how many enemies will take the aggro at once, using the attack token system described above. This resulted in much better interactions when getting too close to the swarm, most of it will continue going for the core as some enemies stay behind to take care of any pesky player bothering them !
Management Mode
We've revamped Build Mode, now called Management Mode, with a cleaner UI. The interface has moved from a vertical stack to a bottom row, freeing up screen space. Category tabs are smaller with clearer icons, and material costs are shown only when hovering over items. This is our first pass, with more improvements to come based on feedback.
Home Base Designs
We are building out home base to fit with the wave structure of the game and this is the central power generator!
More Art
Mahines, Turrets, and Crates.
Building Health
Health for structures has been implemented more robustly and now shows on the prompt when viewing an object's cursor prompt.
Refining the Machines and Crafting System
We've been hard at work tuning our machines and crafting system to seamlessly integrate with Hostile Mars' intense gameplay. Each type of enemy scrap can be used towards smelting two different metal types, giving you the freedom to choose which resource to extract from each enemy. Additionally, certain traps can yield both resources from each enemy type, emphasizing the importance of home base design and strategic resource collection. The better you design your base, the more resources you'll harvest from each wave, enabling you to build and upgrade with even higher efficiency. Get ready to optimize your base and turn enemy scraps into Martian treasures!
That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care, -HM Team
Devlog #29 | Unveiling the Public Demo and Revamping the Martian Battleground!
Public Demo
Great news, Martian defenders! The long-awaited public demo of Hostile Mars will finally be available on Steam at the end of July! Get ready to dig into the action and face the robotic onslaught!
Development
This month, we've been mining deep into the core systems of the game, polishing and refining them to perfection. While we don't have a lot of shiny new visuals to show off just yet, we've been hard at work on item progression. Although we can't reveal the details right now, expect some game-changing updates next month! Our goal is to make the early game as straightforward as possible without digging into the complexity and creativity that makes the late game so rewarding.
Reworking Our Grid System
After lots of discussion, the decision was made to pivot all placeable objects to objects that align with a grid to provide a more predictable and precise building experience. The world grid is represented by three main coordinates. (1) The cell coordinate. (2) The shared side coordinate which is a combination of a cell coordinate plus an indicator for which face (left, down, back) it represents. And (3) The inner side coordinate which, like the shared side, is a combination of cell coordinate and face (left, down, back, right, up, forward).
These three types of coordinates allow us to define items that take up entire cells, specific sides between cells, or even a specific side inside of a cell. This gives us a lot of control over the placement requirements that must be met for an object placement to be valid and also allows us to get very granular with the rules we build. Can I place a trap on this wall if the floor already has this other trap? Does this wall support having a trap placed on either side or only one of the sides? etc. There are many more exciting aspects of the grid system that we will discuss as development continues.
More Wave Information
We want to give players tools to better understand how their base design performs against waves, and part of that will be through various overlays showing these details in a heatmap style.
The first one will display where enemies were destroyed, so we added support to track events during a wave. We're still designing the UI and exploring how it'll be rendered, but these overlays will be accessible in the Build Mode, which is being improved into a more general base management mode.
Player Enemy Collisions
The character controller we are using wasn't designed to work with Unity's DOTS packages, which includes the physics system used by all enemies and most of the game. This makes properly integrating the player's movement with the enemies challenging. However, we found a temporary solution to simulate the collisions and resulting forces that we can apply to the character.
While this causes some jitter and definitely doesn't feel like proper physics as the controller wasn't meant to be used this way, this is still a massive improvement as the player now pushes enemies differently based on their mass instead of pushing them all like inflatable balloons.
Running against a big enemy or even in a crowd of smaller bots will be more difficult, and in some cases, the bots can overpower you and push your character around.
Art
Defining Environmental Themes
Our art team is hard at work crafting immersive and stunning locations around the Hostile Mars map. Here are a few sketches of these awe-inspiring environments currently being modeled.
Prop Modeling
UI
Enemy Designs
Our enemies are leveling up! Each robot type will have various ranks and visual identities, gaining more shielding, larger silhouettes, and deadlier weapons as they progress. Check out these concept designs for the first rank of the Transport Bot and the Laser Bot. They're shaping up to be formidable foes, so gear up and prepare for battle!
Stay tuned for more updates, and remember: in the war against evil robots on Mars, it's all about digging deep and mining every opportunity for victory!
That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care, -HM Team
Devlog #28 | Reducing Complexity, Boss Design, And Enhancing Gameplay Mechanics
Welcome back, explorers! Gear up for an exciting journey through the latest enhancements and unveilings in the world of Hostile Mars. Let’s dive into this month’s thrilling updates!
Define and Design - Scheduling for Early Access
Over the past month, a large amount of time was devoted to defining all of the key elements of the game and getting everyone on the same page about the gameplay loop and depth of the game. This should allow us to deep-dive into each core mechanic and analyze its purpose and value. After that, the next step is to identify exactly what needs to be done to get the game into early access, and then just do it.
We are really excited about a lot of the changes and feel like the formula is forming really well.
As you know, we are mixing a few genres so taking care to analyze which parts of those genres work well in our formula, which don’t work well, and which can be improved or reduced, are all important in figuring out a gameplay loop that lets the player be creative and expressive while having an engaging experience. Some of these adjustments are explained further down.
Development
Boss Design Prototyping
We've spent a lot of time considering boss design for Hostile Mars. Given the unique blend of combat and base defense genres, it's crucial that the boss isn't just a larger bot with more health. Reflecting one of the main pillars of the game—massive amounts of enemies—we decided to construct the boss out of thousands of individual bots.
This isn't just a visual trick; each component is its own bot that can be destroyed. Once enough bots are destroyed from a segment, it compromises the integrity of the rest of the leg, causing it to collapse. The bots are then dropped and enter the player's maze of defenses.
Improving Bot Movement
We've been experimenting with the behavior of the enemies, adding more dynamic reactions when the player is close by, improving the way they look when moving, and leveraging all the systems we've been working on.
In the clip below, the bots' movement speed has been increased to better demonstrate their drifting and leaning behaviors.
Ramming Attack
We're also in the process of adding an attack to the first enemy type. They used to ignore the player but it didn't feel right. Playing into the physics-based nature of Hostile Mars, these bots will now be ramming you when you get too close, being surrounded by hundreds of machines should always be a deadly situation, even when these are "cute" transport bots.
Companion Bench UI
Last time, we introduced companion bots, helpers that follow the player and simplify some common tasks. At that point, they were still being prototyped and were spawned using debug tools. However, these companion bots can now be crafted, upgraded, and equipped on various backpacks.
Each exopack can provide a different number of slots to equip bots in, and each slot can be restricted to specific types of companions.
Drastically Reduced Complexity
We’ve made quite a few changes regarding the item progression and the early game complexity.
Power System
The power system continues to be refined to allow focus on what’s most important for the title, base design, and combat. A power core is dropped each wave, allowing the player to expand their defenses.
Instead of multiple distributors and considering the range between distributors and buildings, all of the power distribution is done through the grid system. This means a centralized power generator making use of all of the power cores and distributing power through connected floor, wall, and ramp panels. Power capacity is now given as a standard unit, and all placed items consume a set amount of power.
Snap To Grid
Because of how the power is distributed, all defenses are now ‘snap-to-grid’. This relieves some ambiguity regarding how traps will function based on where they are placed, providing a more accurate experience for the player.
Often, traps placed just off target cause frustration when the wave fails, and the trap needs to be slightly adjusted. Now all traps are a full panel size and affect any unit that is located inside of the defense's attack zone.
We feel this makes placing and adjusting defenses super fast, getting you into the action and allowing iteration much quicker.
Item Manufacturing
The early game item progression focused a lot on micromanaging various resource types when recycling and converting enemy scraps into usable materials. New players spent much time managing this process, interacting with machine UIs to craft and check which items were necessary for progress or construction.
We have reduced this by removing a lot of the ‘parts’ like springs and cogs. Now defeated bots directly drop scrap metal which can be forged into scrap ingot. This allows us to provide a combat and base defense-focused experience in the first hours. Don’t worry, there will still be more complex items down the road, but the early game will contain much less to understand and keep everything organized.
Complexity Postponed
A lot of these changes are in an effort to reduce early-game complexity. This does not mean that the game will lack complexity; there will be plenty of time throughout the game to ramp up more complex mechanics and strategies. Everyone on the team feels better about reducing the complexity early and waiting to introduce complexities until the core mechanics of the game are understood by the player.
Art!
Concept Work
Rock Concept Exploration
UI Design
Models
The Overseer
Pipes!
Item Processor
That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care, -HM Team
Devlog #27 | Digging Deeper: Unearthed Weapons, Bots, and Tech in Latest Update!
Another monthly Dev Log! Let's jump right into it:
Weapon System
The weapon system has been improved upon by adding a ton of enhancement options. You can increase various stats for all weapons using gun parts to increase individual stats.
There is also an experience system with each gun, so the more you use a gun the more familiar you get with it allowing for additional abilities and modifications. Leveling up a weapon will have automatic perks such as increased reload speed and accuracy, while unlocking different abilities at milestone levels. Each weapon will have an ability tree that the player can customize to their choosing. Want to focus on dealing damage to the most bots possible? You can do that, or focus on single target damage for the larger bots, up to you. Each weapon will have its own unique abilities to unlock.
Passthrough bullets penetrate bots so multiple can be hit with the same shot while exploding bullets deal massive damage to a target with splash damage to nearby bots. But why stop at a single ability? Why not both passthrough and exploding bullets:
Want 10 barrels on an SMG? Anything less doesn’t even make sense:
The uses are endless, be creative! Wondering if it would be a good idea to shoot explosive bullets on the ground underneath yourself? We may never know:
There are tons more abilities waiting to be tested on ridiculous amounts of enemies.
Turret Upgrades
How do you know when you have too many upgrades? That’s the wrong question, the correct question is: How do we add more upgrades? Here’s how:
Turrets have single stats that can be upgraded by spending AI Cores, which have a low chance of dropping when defeating almost any type of bot. Increase the damage, range, and rate of fire, you pick, so that your turrets can be effective in the situation that it is used.
You can also now calibrate your turrets to either deal more damage or shoot faster.
Attack Budget System
We want massive amounts of enemies, each being capable of attacking the player. This can make balancing them challenging as we'd want an encounter to require fighting even with only ~10 enemies, but it's possible to be surrounded by 100 of them at once which would then be completely impossible to even survive from.
That's where the "Attack budget" comes in, each enemy taps into this budget to execute their attacks, and enemies that are well positioned get to consume it in priority, but once the budget is depleted no more enemies can attack during this frame. Difficult enemies consume more of the budget at once, while ones that can be mostly ignored would drain only a very small amount.
This system allows balancing enemies independently from one another based on a "normal difficulty" budget depending on how much of the player's attention/skills they require to be dealt with. Yet it still adapts to any combination or quantity of enemies.
It also provides a great way for us to manipulate how difficult the game is by tweaking the total budget, even while the game is running.
Companion Bots
One of the ways the player will progress in the game will be via these companion bots. They can be equipped and they follow the player around, automating tasks the player would've had to manually do before or providing convenience such as more inventory space.
Player Abilities
More than a year ago (in Devlog #20) we worked on backpacks the player could equip to gain abilities, basically equivalent to a class system, except the player can swap classes at any time (provided they have unlocked the associated backpack).
We've been updating them to work with all of the new systems as most of everything changed since then.
ART
VFX
Bot trails, cool.
Models
Laser Bot
Walls, Floors, and Stairs!
Combining Bot 2
Transport Bot
Concept Art
Home Base
Door
Wave Leader
That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care, -HM Team
Devlog #26
This month, our journey through the cosmos of Hostile Mars took us deep into the design and rhythm of the game's universe. We've made significant strides in the storyline, revamping the majority of our bots to align with the evolving narrative theme, while also refining key gameplay mechanics to enhance player engagement and progression.
We're thrilled to announce the expansion of our creative crew with the addition of an Art Director, VFX Artist, UI Technical Artist, and Environment Prop Modeler. Brace yourselves for a visual revolution in the updates to come!
Chain Lightning Trap
This trap hits nearby robots with lightning that chains to other nearby bots. This can cause a chain reaction throughout the entire wave!
Turret System Performance
The new enemy system is in a good place; it was time to spread the refactoring love to the turret system as well. This task was completed much faster because the design is very similar to that of the agents. Nearly all the turret code is now parallelized and has been largely optimized, making it simpler to extend and create new kinds of turrets.
Wildlife
During the exploration of the open world, the player will encounter bots, mostly enemies. We created a highly customizable system to define encounters and how they happen. This example has a small group of enemies spawning near the player on a timer, but the system can allow for much more variation in when: triggering an encounter each time a bullet is fired, continuously while an alarm is triggered, etc., and in what: calling reinforcements if the enemies stay alive for too long, trapping the player with status effects or props, or even creating full-on mini-waves!
Map
This month, we started our first iteration of a Map System for Hostile Mars, so please forgive the programmer art. Mars will feature many different points of interest for the player to discover and explore. The map will assist them in navigating their way around and serve as a resource where players can view specific information about POIs they have already discovered without having to travel back to those POIs. For example, they can see the repair cost of a distant signal generator.
Models
Laser Turret
Chain Lightning Trap
Bomb Trap
Combining Robot
Concept Work
Turrets
Robots
Early exploration of the Foreman Defense Unit (DFU) This robust observer controls and defends the workers during their mining operations.
The Surveyor drone is the front-line explorer of Hostile Mars. Their task is to burrow down into the Martian regolith using the SFR (sub field radar) they can detect all nearby ores, and notify the local FDU for collection.
Mining Laser Droid used for close-quarters surface precision cutting and mining.
And a Resource Transport Bot to carry valuable materials around the surface.
That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care, -HM Team
Devlog #25
Greetings from the Hostile Mars development team! Dive into our latest monthly update to see our progress and new features:
Weapon System Enhancements
We've overhauled the weapon system, incorporating a dynamic level progression feature, weapon modifications, and unique abilities. Players can now earn experience for each weapon, enhancing its capabilities and unlocking potent abilities as it advances. Each level-up bolsters the weapon's stats, with additional options to invest resources for augmented damage, extended range, accelerated reload speed, and other vital stats.
One exciting new ability is the "bullet ricochet" feature, which allows bullets to automatically deflect toward the nearest enemy bot upon impact.
Enemy Dynamics: Combining Bots
Introducing the third adversary type - the Combining Bots, joining the ground and hovering bot types. These bots conjoin when in proximity, forming formidable clusters that are tougher to dismantle and capable of evading physics-based traps, especially if allowed to conglomerate.
User Interface Evolution
Our journey towards an innovative user interface is underway. Here's a preview of the evolving design:
Home Base Development
Innovation continues with the design of a proper home base. Delve into the early stages of our concept art:
Survival Mechanics: Battery System
We've transitioned the player's suit to operate on a battery pack while navigating beyond the Home Base sphere. Instead of immediate damage upon leaving the safe zone, the suit now depletes battery power, visible on the HUD. This mechanic allows for extended exploration until the battery exhausts, after which the player will begin to incur damage. Look forward to more details on environmental exploration in our upcoming updates.
Visual Overhaul: Automation Bot
Aligning with our refreshed art direction, we're updating our models. Behold the Automation Bot, reimagined in our latest theme:
Enhanced Build Mode: Inspect and Upgrade
We've refined the inspect element of the build mode, now categorizing similar traps by their developmental stage and enabling mass upgrades of trap clusters, provided all necessary resources are at hand. The underlying architecture has been meticulously restructured, paving the way for a multitude of future interactions with selected traps and turrets, enhancing both strategic depth and user experience. Stay tuned for more inventive additions!
Impact Damage
We knew we wanted the player to deal with the incoming waves of enemies both with conventional tower defense turrets and traps, but also by leveraging physics, both by building traps and using weapons. A big part of that will come from velocity-based damage upon impact. This applies damage to any unit that collides with another surface above a certain velocity.
This system allows us to define how the damage scales with the impact force, and to customize how traps might deal damage (for example the face of a hammer might deal more collision damage than its sides). We're looking forward to putting that system to use once we get to making the content more than systems.
Hover Tank
The hover tank, the most dangerous enemy as of now, has joined the others in the new system. It does not follow the player and is fairly slow, but will aim at you with its turret while continuing to progress towards your base's core.
It is supposed to be quite a lot bigger than other bots but its size is proving to be a challenge as the pathfinding solution we're using isn't set up to properly work with multiple agent sizes, so a large agent might try to go closer to walls than it really can.
We're considering multiple options to improve how the pathfinding works but for now it'll be smaller, giving it a cute side too.
Laser Attack
The concept art for the hover bots is getting closer to being final as a mining bot using a laser to melt and pierce. But the current implementation had it shoot bullets!
This is now remedied, it has been equipped with a new attack module, already starting to make good use of the flexibility of the new system. Note that the in-game visuals aren't updated yet, the concept art is still being refined and that's to be done before making the model. The laser is even worse as it's programmer art only for now.
That's it for this dev log. If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care, -HM Team
Devlog #24: Magnetic Mayhem, Enemy Improvements, New Concept Art And More!
Welcome to another edition of the Hostile Mars dev log! Going forward, you can anticipate a monthly dev log update, scheduled for the first of each month.
DEVELOPMENT
We've been hard at work experimenting with a wide range of enemies, turrets, traps, and weaponry, and this phase of development has been an absolute blast. Our primary goal is to elicit that "Wow, that's incredible!" reaction from our players, inspiring them to explore and utilize game mechanics in innovative ways while contending with hordes of robotic adversaries.
Magnet Gun
One exciting addition to our arsenal is the Magnet Gun, a versatile tool that generates a magnetic field along its aiming axis. This magnetic force can be employed in numerous strategic ways, such as pulling groups of enemies together, launching them into deadly traps, or simply slamming them into the Martian surface for maximum impact. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.
Magnet Trap
We've also integrated this magnetic mechanic into one of our traps, allowing players to efficiently group large numbers of adversaries, setting the stage for epic battles and creative strategies.
Boss Design
We're also diligently exploring ways to make boss wave encounters a truly unique and captivating experience, steering clear of the typical "bullet sponge" enemy archetype. Given our focus on the "massive amounts of enemies" pillar, you can expect the boss battle to integrate this element in an intriguing and innovative way. Stay tuned for some thrilling surprises!
Obstacle Course Testing
The previous bots would override their velocity and thus could ignore bumps or be completely stopped in awkward positions, but it resulted in unnatural movement and would occasionally cause them to go through walls.
Now that they are properly using physics though, it’s possible for them to get stuck against steps. So, we’ve been observing and testing solutions to help them be more dangerous >:) It turns out that having them perform a small jump when they detect being stuck is really effective. As a bonus it gives them some funny personality, don't you think?
Status Effects
Leveraging the modularity of the new system, we’re extending the base behavior of the bots with status effects. Starting with a slowed and stunned effect which is already being used by traps. Additionally, we made a couple to disable the physics and entire behavior to manipulate the enemies with weapons and traps. More will be made as we work on the traps.
By the way, the Orb bot has been updated to the new system as well.
Breakout Mode
We’ve also brought back the behavior of attacking structures when the enemies can’t path to the core, they’ll still try to come as close as they can, but if they come across walls, traps, or any other building they’ll angrily lash out on it.
Build Mode Improvements
Players now have the ability to go into an inspect mode while in the build mode which allows them to drag over an area to select placed items. The UI changes to now show a list of all selected item types and the amount selected. From this mode, the player can choose to remove all selected items or only remove items of a specific type. We have more plans for how the player can interact with the world in this mode in the future but that will be covered at a later time.
Featured in Unity Unite Keynote
Hostile Mars received an exciting spotlight at Unity's annual Unite conference, and it's truly thrilling to witness our game take center stage and generate buzz among gaming enthusiasts!
ART
During November the art team has continued working on new enemy designs and assets that will populate the world.
Check out these enemy concept art pieces:
And some early testing of the combining bot enemy type. This enemy will be able to combine, forming a bigger and more powerful adversary.
That's it for this dev log. Remember, moving forward you can expect a new one on the first of each month!
If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care, -HM Team
Devlog #23
Welcome to another edition of the Hostile Mars dev log! Going forward, you can anticipate a monthly dev log update, scheduled for the first of each month. We've got a wealth of exciting updates to share, including a new art direction, innovative gameplay mechanics, and much more!
DEVELOPMENT
Player Ability System
We are in the process of experimenting with various abilities and reimagining the skill tree associated with player backpacks, which effectively function as a class system. We'll provide more information as we finalize the details regarding progression and ability configurations.
Bot Types System
The hover bot has been brought to the new 100% physics-based system as well. We were able to find an efficient and modular way to add more specific behaviors to each bot type separately. Previously this was really complex as all bots shared the same code, which meant many edge cases where the behavior of one bot could affect another and it was generally slower to work with, this is no longer the case! In the future, this will allow us to have more complex enemies with major differences much more easily.
Movement Flow Improvements
Continuing work on the revamped enemy system, we’ve been trying to improve the flow of massive amounts of enemies through mazes. One work-in-progress attempt is to use local avoidance to help reduce congestion around corners, as you can see from the sped-up clip the bottom version clears all turns significantly faster. However, this is costly on performance and introduces a lot of meandering around instead of a clean queue, so this will continue to be improved upon until big groups are able to take corners properly.
Helping Bots Get Unstuck
On that same trend, we’ve also been experimenting with ways to help bots get unstuck, they previously requested a new path every few seconds, which did work but became ineffective at scale and didn’t catch all cases where the path couldn’t be followed. So we’re now detecting when an agent’s velocity stays under a certain threshold for long enough to trigger the path and a wall avoidance behavior to steer clear of them. While it still sometimes takes a few tries for a bot to go around an obstacle they so far have always succeeded in recovering from getting stuck. This should also help bots get stuck in the environment.
Automation System
We're enhancing the automation system for speed, efficiency, and player clarity. Agents now strictly follow the visualizer's path, and a visible package indicates when the delivery bot carries items.
Integrating Panels into Build Mode
An important task this month was to improve the players' experience creating their base's defenses. The first step in improving this experience was to unify the way players placed objects in the world by taking the old method used to place walls, floors, and slopes, and bringing that into the new build menu.
The second step was to give the player the ability to remove placed items without having to leave the build mode.
New Item Data Architecture
A big backend task we had was to improve the architecture surrounding item data. We wanted a system where items could have unique attributes that represented data required for that item to interact with various systems in the game. This would allow us to represent item data using a composition-based approach instead of trying to cover all unique possibilities using inheritance. Along with this, we improved on our editor tooling allowing us to streamline adjusting item data and the creation of new items.
Objective System Quality of Life Adjustments
There were a few quality-of-life adjustments made to the objective system mentioned in the last devlog. This includes some improvements to the data that some objectives required that help reduce the amount of work we would need to do if aspects of the objective were to change. Visually, we also opted to hide additional objective step information when said step is not active.
ART
In the realm of art, our team has delved into diverse aspects, ranging from conceptualizing adversaries to designing the core base and its encompassing environment.
Currently, we're refining a work-in-progress depiction of a downed satellite, which players will encounter during their exploration journeys:
We've undertaken an update to some of the cliffs and rock formations in our environment, ensuring a more refined look:
Furthermore, certain pickups and crates have been revisited for a fresh redesign. As players explore, they'll come across an array of props — just a glimpse into the intricate details that will populate both the base and the broader world.
Please note that the presented concept art and in-engine previews are works in progress and do not depict the final designs.
Additionally, our team is in the process of blocking out and brainstorming new variations for our adversaries, adding depth and diversity to the challenges players will face.
That's it for this dev log. Moving forward you can expect a new one on the first of each month!
If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care, -HM Team
Devlog #22
Welcome to another edition of the Hostile Mars dev log! Going forward, you can anticipate a monthly dev log update, scheduled for the first of each month. We've got a wealth of exciting updates to share, including a new art direction, innovative gameplay mechanics, and much more!
To enhance readability, we're streamlining our descriptions for each item, avoiding lengthy paragraphs of information for each change. Your feedback is invaluable to us, so please share your thoughts, and if there's anything specific you'd like to see in future dev logs, don't hesitate to let us know!
New Automation System
We're diligently refining our automation system to harmonize with the evolving game dynamics. Our goal is to empower players to delve into intricate base automation while ensuring that the core experience still revolves around strategy and combat.
Through playtesting, we've introduced a revamped delivery route system that offers players clear visual cues to gauge the effectiveness of their routes. Creating a new route is now a breeze—just click, drag, and release! This intuitive system automatically selects the items used by machines and facilitates routes to and from storage boxes.
New Art and Design
Some exciting concept art! (No representative of final designs)
Push Traps
We've been working a lot on physics-based traps like this one, the push trap. This is a massive plate with an expanding mechanism in the wall behind it. When triggered by an enemy, the trap swiftly moves outward, delivering a powerful strike. However, its effectiveness is limited by the force it can exert, so if there are too many enemies to push, it might not be as effective.
New Enemy System
Our core gameplay centers on robots, be they allies or foes, with movement and behavior as pivotal elements. The previous system, developed over years of experimentation, struggled with handling numerous enemies and customizing their actions.
To tackle this challenge, we gleaned insights from playtest demos, embarking on a journey to enhance modularity and performance. Initially, I created distinct systems for each robot, uncovering the potential for a versatile, universal system.
The new architecture prioritizes movement, employing two modular systems for translation and rotation. These systems consist of multiple "mini behaviors" for creating comprehensive movement patterns, allowing real-time parameter adjustments for complexity.
Enhanced Build Mode
We spent time cleaning up the player build mode. While most changes were on the backend, we also implemented the ability for players to click and drag to place multiple traps at once, along with the option to snap scrap-tier traps to the grid.
Improved Pathfinding Efficiency
The new enemy system also necessitated efficient pathfinding at scale. The previous system, effective on a small scale, became cost-prohibitive when handling multiple entities requesting paths simultaneously. Moreover, it was designed for the earlier Unity ECS version, lacking the memory and computation optimizations of our current version.
We completely revamped the pathfinding system, envisioning a scenario where multiple entities share the same path. Now, requesting entities are grouped by path, sharing data rather than maintaining individual copies. Leveraging new ECS features, we improved how various states are represented and safely managed data disposal.
The Objective System
We've also added a new objective system. The modular design allows objectives to be built piece by piece and reused, offering flexibility for creating custom or specific objectives as needed. The system interacts with the world and reacts to the game state, enabling the addition of world elements that guide players or respond to their progress.
That's it for this dev log. Moving forward you can expect a new one on the first of each month!
If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
Take Care, -HM Team
Devlog #21
It's been a while since the last update was posted... a lot has been going on and tons of changes to the core gameplay have been implemented. It is probably a bit much for one post, so I will split up the major stuff into a few updates but will hit on the major stuff in this one.
A SHIFT IN GAMEPLAY DIRECTION
There are many reasons that I wasn't satisfied with how the playtesting was going the last few times the game was available to test. Mainly though it didn't have a strong core gameplay loop that urged the player to continue to progress. I also feel that some of the systems were a bit too complex considering the nature of the game we are making.
POWER CORES
The game now focuses on an item called Power Cores to build meaningful defenses. For each wave the player completes, they will receive an additional power core. All defenses require power cores, from spike traps to gun turrets. Upgrades do not require power cores, so even if you have maxed out the number of turrets and traps by using all power cores, you are still able to progress your base through upgrades.
This will also improve balancing waves and enemy difficulty.
This leads to the most valuable task for the player to do to increase base effectiveness being playing the game itself, versus tedious resource gathering and farming for hours to build massive amounts of traps and turrets, taking away from the strategy of the wave structure.
The available power core count will be displayed directly on the HUD, so you know how many cores are left to use. They will also be indestructible, so you will always have all the cores you've received even if buildings are destroyed.
AUTOMATION
Automation has been altered to make use of 3 primary automation bots:
Scrap Pickup Bots
Item Delivery Bots
Ammo Bots
Their routes do not need to be defined like they used to be. If the player does not want to mess with routes and pathing, it will automatically make use of the bots in the most efficient manner.
Scrap Pickup Bots - These bots pick up any scraps that are dropped by enemy units and deposit them into a recycler.
Item Delivery Bots - These bots will take items from storage and machines to anywhere that an item is needed. For example, if a new machine is placed and an item is picked to craft, it will request the required items from the automation system, and the automation system will split up any available bots and cycle them through all the requested tasks. Ideally, the player will have many more bots than requests, so the result will end up being a line of delivery bots from one target to another.
Ammo Bots - these handle delivering ammo to traps and turrets
The bots will be built in Bot Factory machines and will allow the player to build hundreds if not thousands of automation bots.
BASE HEALTH / SHIELD HITS
Previously, the enemies would gather at the target point and attack Home Base. Now, they collide with the Home Base cores and the wave fails once a set amount reaches Home Base.
This feels and plays much better. Now the game is designed with the goal of destroying all the enemies in the paths leading up to the base. If a few make it to the cores, the wave ends but without any downside to the player. This way the player can test out different defenses without losing the game while experimenting. It also provides a good resource buffer if a player is behind on their defenses, allowing them to collect scraps from enemies up to the wave failing.
The number of hits your base can withstand will be upgradeable and starts at 2.
ENEMY ROUTE VISUALIZATION
A small but necessary addition is the enemy path visualization, which shows the paths enemies will take before the wave starts and will adjust in real-time as you move walls and defenses, so you know exactly where the enemies will go and what traps they will interact with.
ITEM PROGRESSION
I will dive into the big changes with item progression in the next dev log, but I will say that the items dropped by enemies have been significantly simplified and the base components for crafting items have been as well. More on that in DevLog 22.
A NEW MODE
If you are at all active on the Hostile Mars Discord, you probably know Hugo by now. He has been working on something exciting for the last few months and I asked him to write up a quick overview of what he has been developing.
Luckily for you, his writing is much more enjoyable to read than mine, so here is one of the things that we have been excited about recently, from Hugo:
EXPEDITION MODE
The intention of the main game is to have a story intermixed in the player's progression. While they have the choice of how they progress and how they build their base, this format limits what can happen to what the story is planned for.
This means the consequences of the player's actions are somewhat constrained, for example, we can't have the player completely lose their base and be unable to progress as the next wave is too hard, effectively soft-locking them. In other words, there's not that much at stake.
And this is an issue seen in many games, ever heard of a mission in Red Dead Redemption 2 failing because you strayed too far from the intended route? or in GTA V's infamous opening sequence where driving slightly off-road will reset you to the checkpoint? Yeah, that's the same issue.
So to fix that, we added a brand new game mode!
Presenting: Expeditions Mode
At some point after the initial learning phase of the game, the player will unlock an expedition platform, featuring a bunch of mechs and a launch pad. You'll be able to take control of a mech upon sending it on an expedition, to collect resources and equipment.
The expeditions, in contrast with the handmade world of Hostile Mars, are procedurally generated levels. They will take different forms to keep the experience entertaining: caves, canyons, cliffside buildings, underground lab... Some are fairly small, others are labyrinthic, and a few are vast and open. Each type would feature a different generation system and environment.
In those levels you will encounter enemies from a different faction than the ones present in the regular world, allowing us to add more diverse enemies without requiring them to thoroughly fit in with the rest of the world-building. As expeditions happen possibly all over Mars in faraway places you might never return to, there can be some special enemy you've never heard of.
To balance the randomness and potentially unbalanced feeling procedural generation can give, you'll have the choice between multiple locations when picking an expedition to start. Each location represents a type of generation, enemies, and loot that you can find there.
The degree of difficulty will vary around your current level. Sometimes the canyon expedition will be marked as highly dangerous, sometimes it will be marked as a stroll in the park, or well, in the canyon. Obviously, higher difficulty means better rewards, but if you're not feeling up for the challenge, you're free to pick another expedition that suits you better. Think of Deep Rock Galactic's mission selection map for example.
About difficulty, here's a major difference: if the main game is easy to medium, this mode would be medium to hard. And the reason for that is permadeath.
The intention is to have high tensions and stakes as you try to explore these levels, and if Roguelikes proved something is that permadeath makes for a completely different experience than the typical *return-to-last-save-upon-failure*.
When your mech gets destroyed, you will lose the mech along with all the loot and equipment you sent, but you will not lose your base, technologies, or other player stuff, the permadeath is limited to the expedition mode. This said it will cost you some materials and time to build another mech to resume running expeditions.
That makes surviving and successfully escaping the trip very important if you want to profit from it.
Of course, once there, you won't be able to leave at your convenience, but you will have to explore until you find an extraction point, you'll then have the choice: whether to continue exploring around the extraction point, risking losing your entire bounty but potentially finding a rare treasure, or returning home to secure it. I recommend looking at Zero Sievert, a game that recently launched with this "open world roguelite" concept.
We're considering having an expedition type featuring smaller levels where you'd have a third option: to go on another expedition straight away with a higher difficulty but also more loot. If returning home every time you find an extraction point might be a valid strategy, if you want the goodies you'll have to risk more and more. Exciting eh?
Lastly, we added a quest system, or as we call them: contracts, given by friendly NPCs that you'll be able to fulfill during expeditions.
This adds objectives, a reason to go on an expedition, to choose one location over another, to risk some more to try and complete a timed contract, to engage with enemies you'd rather avoid. The system we made is quite powerful and should allow us to design interesting contracts with branching choices, optional objectives, sequences of steps, and more, they can even influence the generation.
Upon returning a contract, they'll give you rewards based on the completed objectives. Maybe penalties for failed ones? Penalties are just an idea at this point, we'll see if it fits. What do you think?
The main world's exploration will feature more unique and complex story-related elements, while the expeditions provide replayability and a kind of challenge that wasn't present before.
We've already made a lot of progress on this mode and have a first iteration up and running that we're currently testing.
We're still discussing how the upgrading of the mechs will work, the idea for now is to salvage destroyed mechs during the expeditions and get parts (modifiers really) you could stick to your mech to change its stats or gain some ability for example. Over each expedition, they would get more damaged until they either not working and having to be replaced or behaved differently perhaps. If you've ever played Beacon you might recognize the concept as we're taking some inspiration from it. This mode is still under development, so while we like the current design, parts might change as we playtest and develop the parts of the game surrounding the mode.
That is all for this update, next update I will try to cover the remaining things that have been implemented and/or changed including:
Boss Fight 1
Combo Kills
Item Progression
Tech Tree Progression
Player Abilities
And More!
If you want to keep up with development, join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/Xd88eF8Teg
