Lancer Tactics

First mech & talent content push
over 1 year ago – Wed, Oct 23, 2024 at 02:35:51 PM

Howdy! This last month was all about doing a big pass on player content. Up til now I've mostly been cherry-picking mechs and abilities that will force me to implement important parts of the engine; this is the first time I've sat down and been like "OK, let's do ALL of X".

The stage of making Content feels very different from the engine-setup stage. Instead of taking a wide view about what sort of weight the system will have to support, my scope is constrained down to making just the thing in front of me work.

For this effort, Carpenter smartly made a big ol spreadsheet with all the mech content we wanted to include for the "bones" version of the game:

I was not expecting it to be as motivating as it was to check these suckers off; every day I'd wake up bright eyed thinking about which ones I wanted to do next. All in all, the game now has bare-bones implemented (so no unique graphics/sounds; just the mechanical impacts) for:

• 10 out of 29 PC mechs+licenses (including the Everest)
• 14 out of 29 talents
• 18 out of 30 core bonuses

The fact that we were able to make such quick headway (85 talent ranks/licensed gear/traits in about a month) is very promising. There's a lot more that goes into a game than ability mechanics, but the fact that it looks like their implemenation will not be a blocker is a big relief. Fingers crossed that NPC content will be at a similar pace; I think their effects are simpler on average, but I'll need to make sure the AI knows how to use it.

Changelog

Engine updates

• Superheavy mount bracing
• Gaining or losing status effects can now trigger events e.g. losing flying can cause fall damage. Migrated old Barb losing apoc charges and Vlad immobilization/shred effect to this new system.
• Being immobilized while flying causes you to fall and take damage.
• Implemented overkill tag
• Multiple things can modify a weapon i.e. a weapon mod and a core bonus.
• Compress landscape block/tile data. 100kb map files now down to like 12kb.
• Be able to pick multiple targets in a chain (Drone Commander III)

• Added "irreducible" weapon tag (tomorrow's thought, paracausual mod eventually)
• Restrict CBs from being applied to integrated weapons
• Added "Exiled" status which removes a unit from the field. Mourning Cloak CP now exiles itself on triple-matching rolls.
• Implemented Intangible status, which works much like Exiled. This finishes FADE cloak.
• Implemented Hidden status. Can now hide and search. Pictured below are just the automated tests for gaining and losing hiding; there's a lot of cases to check.

• Drones can now provoke engagement.
• Thrown weapons become unavailable until you go pick them back up.
• EVA flight puts you just under the water surface OR 3 tiles above the floor, whichever is lower.
• Implemented "straight line movement" and "must move maximum" rules for Nelson's ramjet, non-hover flight, and puppet systems.
• Enemy stats are hidden until scanned. Health/heat are revealed on structuring/stressing them. Edef/eva are revealed on missing an attack. Armor is revealed on landing a non-tech attack.
• When targeting a tile with two units, it now asks you to choose between them instead of affecting both.

Licenses

• Barbarossa frame and all license levels
• Tokugawa frame and all license levels
• Vlad charged stake, combat drill
• Minotaur frame and all license levels (placeholder mech art)

• Deaths Head CP and tracking bug
• Goblin CP
• Armor lock plating adds a brace trigger against being knockbacked/grappled.
• GMS core bonuses: Integrated weapon, Mount retrofitting
• HA core bonuses: Superior by design, Integrated ammo feeds, Heatfall
• SSC core bonuses: Full subjectivity sync, neurolink targeting, ghostweave
• HORUS core bonuses: Tomorrow's thought

Talents

• Ace I, II
• Brutal II, III
• Combined arms I, II, III
• Drone commander I, II, III
• Executioner I, II, III
• Gunslinger II, III
• Stormbringer I, II, III
• Hacker I, II, III
• Vanguard II, III
• Tactician I, II, III
• Brawler I, II, III
• Walking Armory III
• Hunter III
• NucCav converts bonus damage correctly

Basic gear/actions

• Custom Paint Job
• Implemented Brace. In order to prevent prompt spam, it only triggers when it would save you from structuring or when you would take at least half of your maximum health.
• Implemented scan.
• Expanded compartment and manipulators. These don't do anything on their own but can be checked for via sitrep triggers.

Downtime/character sheet

• Redesigned weapon/system picker modal
• disable editing character sheet during module downtime
• implemented spending repairs in module downtimes
• spoke with a narrative design consultant about the module editor to learn how to make it more usable and friendly

Schedule & reward updates

> No new build this month; I want to clear out some bugs in the backlog to be better set up to handle the influx of bugs y'all will find before releasing this much un-battle-tested content. 

> My day job has reduced my hours to zero for the foreseeable future, so I'll be working full-time on Lancer Tactics for the rest of the year (this was a big contributor to getting so much done this update); I'll be paying rent til the end of the year by eating through some of the KS money from the final stretch goal.

> Next year there's a good chance that I'm going to have some paid work for Crescent Loom come in. I'd like to try batching it, so it'll probably look like spending ~3 months off to work on just that, and then come back here full-time for the rest of the year. It should come out to about equivalent to have been working 1/3 time at a day job for the full year, so the only difference is when I'll be doing what.

> We're still currently aiming for the "bones" release by the end of February (three months behind the original schedule due to the 3D cataclysm), and then the "rest of the owl" and fulfilling the higher pledge levels by Q1 2026.

Three total years of development will be pretty on-par for a game, but it's still wild to me how long making these damn things take to make. Me to you: if you ever want to tell a story and you're considering doing it through a video game, please be sure that you can't tell that story through literally any other medium first.

🌺 Olive

Mech recoloring & dialogue layout crisis of faith
over 1 year ago – Fri, Sep 13, 2024 at 05:34:26 PM

Dialogue layout crisis of faith

Every so often, I'll run into something in development that eats away at me until it pushes me to a crisis of faith and I have a breakdown, burn down a bunch of work, and build something better from the ashes. These are moments of transformation and we're almost always able to come out the other side with something dramatically better than what we started with.

This all sounds very dramatic until you take a step back and see the issue in question is just, like, the layout of a menu. But if medieval priests were able to have schisms over angels on pins I can have strong feelings about graphic design, dammit!!

This month's episode revolved around how we're doing character dialogue. For reference the plan was to do a standard 4-slot visual-novel talking heads layout. I call it a 4-slot because there's usually four positions that characters can stand; two on the left, two on the right:

I had it ingame, and it was working. But... something felt off. Do you see the difference between every one of the above examples and this?

It's all about perspective, baby.

Answer: all the character art in those examples are drawn at a slight angle so they can be flipped back and forth to be made like they're looking at each other.

Trying to do this with the perspective we chose early — straight on — makes for a chorus line of weirdos who are looking directly into your soul as they ostensibly chat with each other. Credulity is strained; the illusion of these puppets interacting in the same space is paper-thin.

(I was skeptical of choosing this perspective for this reason, but we ultimately went with it to make the customizable assets in the portrait maker easier to fit together)

We tried a bunch of different layouts, but they all at least one of these problems:

• they'd stare into your soul while ostensibly directing comments elsewhere.
• they felt like text messages; this would be fine if that's what we were going for, but we wanted something that could represent face-to-face conversations. (Tactical Breach Wizards was able to pull this style off because they had little 3D dioramas to go along with it)
• or, most damning of all, they felt like zoom calls.

So, my heart aflutter and spirit in want, I spent a day doing a research dive into various dialogue layouts (bless the Game UI Database!!) to see if any other games had managed to pull this character art perspective off. I ended up with this massive non-chronological taxonomic tree:

(fullsize here)

The type of layout that particularly caught my eye was this style where each character had their own little box. These layouts borrow a concept from comic books called "closure" where the space and time between characters are left blank. Freed from the constraints of trying to simulate a single space, these layouts allow the reader to fill in the blanks with something that feels more true-to-life than anything we'd be able to render ourselves.

I was especially impressed with the dynamism of Tales of Symphonia and The World Ends With You; rather than sticking to single slots they would animate the entire panels moving around to indicate motion an relative position of characters.

So we threw out the old code and copied them. Here's what we've come up with:

We'll be able to have portraits interact, like smacking each other (I felt like a kid hitting two action figures together, lol)

We can also apply effects like princess-leia-holograms and full-screen "lighting" effects like warning banners:

Carpenter and I came up with a number of arrangements that the portraits can smoothly transition between:

I've also implemented support for choices during a dialogue, potentially leading to branching paths.

Overall, I feel so so much better about this system than our initial designs. It might feel a little more cartoony, but I think we're making a cartoony game so that's not a problem.

Whew. We bit a lot off to chew with this project. I feel like I just made a second visual novel game engine inside of the first.

Other changes

• Added a buncha polish to the Trigger tool; faster rendering, categorized effects, ability to minimize blocks, and exposed event flags.
• Better save/load dialog for combats and missions; can just give it an ID instead of messing around with manually making folders. This took like a full day of UI drudge work so even though it's not sexy it gets a bullet point.
• Made an example module, and a "play module" screen from the main menu.
• Got module editor stable-ish enough to do a release with it.
• Mech recoloring! And preview colors on hover instead of only on clicking.

New build + schedule

Version 0.1.4 is available here for backers.

As I threatened last update that we might do, we're pushing the target release of the "bones" version back three months to February/March next year. It'll likely be the version we finally make available on itch.io as a beta (as opposed to these alphas y'all are getting). Between here and there, our main objectives are:

• Remake the tutorial from the initial demo
• Get 2 frames + licenses per manufacturer at least mostly implemented. (we're currently about halfway there)
• Do a major bug & polish pass, finishing up WIP screens like the license picker in the character screen.

Until next time!

Olive

Downtimes, module editor, water temple
almost 2 years ago – Fri, Aug 09, 2024 at 04:51:56 PM

Happy summer! There's smoke in Portland but it's not too bad. Bless firefighters. Work on Lancer Tactics continues apace.

Downtime & Module editor

This month has been mostly focused on the largest heretofore-untouched section of the game: downtimes and the module editor for designing the sequences between combats. We're not planning on doing anything particularly innovative or new in its design — if you've played Banner Saga, Fire Emblem (gameboy versions), or Rogue Squadron you'll recognize what's going on here.

Repair, level up, have visual-novel-style conversations with companions, do some light choose-your-own-adventuring, and pick & launch the next combat. All pretty standard downtime fare — games have pretty thoroughly explored these patterns as vehicles for narrative at this point.

The unique thing that Lancer Tactics is offering on this front is an editor to make your own entire campaigns. Classic games like Warcraft or Age of Empires had incredible scenario editors, but making anything more than a one-mission map was solely the domain of modders. Over the last few weeks, we've gotten a full basically-visual-novel-editor working ingame where you can orchestrate NPC story arcs, clocks ticking, branching paths, and triggered events for all the stuff that happens between combats.

All of the campaigns we ship with the game are going to be made with these same editors, which'll force us to really make sure that they're solid tools. I think it'd be very funny to someday see someone like completely ignore all the mech stuff and just make a visual novel in this engine.

There's no new preview game build this month because adding this big section of the game means too many things are under construction. I'm happy with how fast we've been able to get this going, but making ingame editors is a lot of unglamorous UI piping and data refactoring work. Fingers crossed that it'll come together enough that we'll be able to get the first version of this editor in your hands in time for the next update

Other Changelogs

• Carpenter has started re-making the tutorial level from the demo in this new engine, which is pushing us to add a bunch of stuff to the combat editor. I added triggers for playing arbitrary effects on the map, moving the camera, storing arbitrary data to the battle/module states, enabling/disabling/triggering other triggers, AND/OR conditions, and putting execution limits on triggers.

• Triggers can highlight UI or actions (so it can be like "use the boost to get through!" and the boost button becomes all shiny)

• New "camera start" zone type
• Added a "hotspot" zone type that has a little floating title, and plastered the names of other zones on the map (visual style stolen from some Foundry VTT modules)

• Added water, whose level can be set via the editor or triggers.

• Added unmounted pilots who can mount up into Shut Down mechs. We continue to plan to not have pilot combat be a part of the core game, but it'll be useful for scenario or scripted sequences.

• Added activation pips and template icons to the mini healthbar on units.

• A bunch more portrait editor assets from Martina, including facial hair. Here's a check Carpenter did where he tried to recreate some official Lancer art ingame. ✨

Schedule update

Taking a look at our original date for the "bones" of the game ("finishing the battle engine, basic character creation, 2 mechs per manufacturer, and an a 'instant action' mode"), we estimated being able to get it done by the end of November. The emotional milestone for me on this front is getting the game to a complete enough state that I feel OK about swapping it in on the itch.io page.

I've been saying that the 3D cataclysm has pushed us back back about 3 months, and I think that's still holding true. Carpenter and I haven't officially made the call yet, but I think it's likely we'll need that time to port more mech content; here's a graph they made that shows about where we're sitting on the PC and NPC mechs for the "bones" target in terms of mechanics and action icon/sprite. 

(This data is pulled from a big table they made that includes ALL talents/gear/traits where we've been marking things off as we've implemented them. Very handy for tracking where we are.)

That's all for now. Tata!

Olive

Music, grappling, new build!
almost 2 years ago – Wed, Jul 10, 2024 at 04:22:37 PM

Another month, another build. For today we have a new alpha build, a behind-the-scenes look at the music creation, and a buncha new content (grappling! Drake and Goblin gear!).

New build!

Version 0.1.3 is available here. Highlights to this update include grappling, the full Goblin and Drake licenses, dangerous terrain, and pulling boss subtitles from the pilot names & callsigns y'all submitted as backer rewards.

Heads up that this update is not compatible with previous pilot portraits since we've been adding, fixing, and reorganizing the available assets in that editor, so your pilots' portraits will show up as a default random one until you remake them.

As always, thank you for playing and you can help us by reporting bugs here. Thank you to everyone who reported bugs — we got 65 reports and were able to fix about 4/5s of them for this release. Bless 🙏

Music!

One of the intense joys of getting so much support through Kickstarter is being able to hire & pay professional artists to do bespoke stuff for the game. Music is the single strongest leverage point in being able to set the emotions of a game.

Lancer's tagline is "mud and lasers" — interpreting that, we wanted something that rides the line between electronic and acoustic instruments. We got these big scifi robots running around, but we don't lose contact with the ~human feelings~ of the people in and around them. We are featuring acoustic instruments in an electronic-feeling soundtrack.

The score's writing and production is by Robin Rutenberg (they/them), and they totally knocked it out of the part. Robin is a composer, sound and media artist with an emphasis on transfeminist worldbuilding through storytelling & performance, experiential sound, experimental composition, digital arts, and poetry. They work across mediums, from interactive game art, to film, to sound installations.

This May, Robin and Naarah spent a week in Berlin recording the acoustic parts of Robin's compositions (Cello, Timbales, Cajón). Mark also happened to be in Berlin for unrelated reasons so got to check out some of the recording process!

Also pictured: Naarah Strokosch performing cello on the score. Robin and Naarah were in the band Four Families together from 2012-2017. You can hear Naarah on the Four Families' albums as well as on Robin's solo project (Gabe Darling).

You can check out Robin's media art projects here and support and listen to their musical releases below:

And Now For The Changelog

Engine Additions:

• Added Burn and Overshield to the engine, with very basic UI about it. Added half-done WIPs of fusion cutter and aceso stabilizer to test appling burn and overshield, respectively
• Impaired applies to saves
• New line AOE calculation that's more consistent. (basically a width-1 cone)
• Grapple system! You can now grab someone and move them off a cliff. Grapple groups (called "katamaris" in the engine) can also link up and all move as one big ball o' mechs, with individuals getting peeled off and left behind as they get moved into walls.

• Units now get shunted when they end up in an invalid space (the WIP pictured below was a bug where they get stuck in a "no after you" infinite politeness loop)

• add dangerous terrain, lava block
• Only blast/cone/burst aoe attacks apply damage to the ground.
• Tested out some water shaders. Did not yet implement them in the engine because Carpenter put on his producer hat and told me there were more pressing matters to attend. It's pretty though!

Content Additions:

• Drake traits, gear, and CP: heavy frame, blast plating, and guardian, argonaut shield, shield generator, levi cannon, portable bunker.
• GMS gear: turret drones, personalizations, type-3 projected shield
• Nelson gear: ramjet
• Vlad gear: webjaw snare, caltrop launcher
• Finished Demolisher's basic kit
• Bombard's gear: bombard cannon + siege armor
• Draft of all three Nuclear Cavalier talents
• A scattering of core bonuses; I think we have at least one per manufacturer now.
• Add elite and veteran NPC templates, which spawn and pull boss subtitles from Kickstarter backer data.
• Goblin gear: Metahook, Horus upgrades II and III, and OSIRIS NHP actions.

• Dia has started writing work on the first campaign module!
• New color palettes available in the portrait maker.
• More portrait assets available.
   

Content Fixes:

• grunts now survive damage if they pass a save
• fix autopod only attacking allies
• fix Hunter II not showing all available aux weapons to throw
• singularity motivator no longer triggers on heat
• getting immobilized mid-movement now interrupts the movement
• prone now slows you instead of immobilizing you (I know, it's a little weird, but that's RAW)
• fix smoke mine not expiring
• consume accuracy buff from core siphon correctly
• can now clear lockon by stabilizing.
• can not stabilize to clear continually-applied statuses like slowed from spun up assault cannon
• invades and quick tech can be used multiple times on a turn.
• AI can use ordnace weapons
• large deployables (e.g. Drake Bunker) now require flat surfaces
• fix getting re-engaged after disengaging

Bug Fixes:

• fix "add objective" button crash on new maps
• fix hibernating actions not serializing correctly
• fix weapon mods falling off weapons as soon as they're applied (since they're unique, they become invalid to place on any other weapons and that made them invalid on the weapon they were on as well)
• fix crash when switching maps and then painting blocks
• fix two portrait slices not being able to have the same file name

UI Improvements

• Added text-to-speech accessibility options and button to read whatever's under the mouse
• Show attack roll in neurolink popup
• Add new fetchers for getting values in triggers, which allow you to do things like set up a zone that kills whatever walks into it

• set FPS limit to 60
• close mission objectives on ending turn
• Allow cardinal camera rotations; let's let it cook for a bit and see how things feel in gameplay
• Add boss subtitles effect when spawning elites/vets, pulled from backer survey data
• Compcon assist correctly places large deployables (don't have to be next to the top-left to place it)
• fix aoe deployment: can't double up, being size 2 doesn't block you from deploying lines downwards
• added dots to gear bar for charges

• animated health bars!

Next up for me is building out the campaign beat/combat engine and editor. It's a strange feeling from going to micro-bits of content like OSIRIS's fourth gate allegiance switching to finding myself back in an open field of "how do we want to structure this large part of the game on a basic level?" — large architectural choices require a very different way of thinking.

Oh, and for timelines: I've been telling people when they ask but don't think I've posted an update here. The timeline from this update still holds mostly true, except that everything is pushed about one quarter (i.e. 3 months) back because of the unexpected switch to 3D. Looking at it again, backer mapmaking calls will also probably not be until next year because we don't have the asset pipeline for maps that we were obviously expecting when we were in 2D.

Best! Olive

First alpha is available!
about 2 years ago – Tue, Jun 04, 2024 at 06:38:07 PM

It's time! Let's play some Lancer Tactics!

Early-access backers can download the Lancer Tactics 0.1.1 alpha by logging into Backerkit and going to lancer-tactics.backerkit.com/backer/digital_rewards. I'll also be sending out an email via Backerkit that should have a link to the download.

(It's PC-only for the moment; I'll be adding a mac build as soon as I can determine whether Gatekeeper is bluffing when it says it'll block running the game on other people's computers because I'm an unverified developer. Linux will come... sometime. Someday.)

We have a bug-report form here; please let us know when you find stuff that looks broken in a way other than us not having gotten around to implementing it yet!

My current plan is to include a new public build with each one of these monthly updates, but we'll have to see if that ends up being a good rate. I may update more or less frequently if a buncha game-breaking bugs get found or if it ends up taking too much focus away from the long-term features.

It's wild to me how it feels like we've skipped a lot of the typical steps in game development to get here. Usually, there's a long period of tooling around with demos and mechanics to "find the fun", but these mechanics have already had essentially the world's largest paper prototyping session via the TTRPG. Once again, I'm super grateful to Massif for making Lancer available to build on!

What's new from last time?

We've been stitching things together into a playable form like wild. I'm excited to send out this email so won't spend too long getting into the details, but here's some notable changes from the changelog:

Interface

• Keep camera snapped to zoom levels that doesn't unnecessarily blur the pixel art.
• Show current charges in Limited tooltips.
• Optimized the target-picker calculation; improved the worst cases (AOE with long range) from 30FPS to the game's maximum.
• Added backer credits with a fun little pagination effect

• Added splash screen on load with the legally-mandated logos.
• Added remappable controls.

• Add "protocols" highlighted action bar.
• Added "round max" to editor & settable via triggers.
• Updated colors of the range indicators to make them less placeholder-y.
• Added "apply" button for map size to emphasize that it edits the current map.
• Large terrain brushes with modes for restricting painted blocks to certain layers.

• Mousing over either the unit or the top-of-screen chit highlights both.
• Add status icons above unit tokens. This was WAY more helpful than I expected.

• Recolored all PC mechs to be blue until we get mech-recoloring working.
• Fixed VERY cursed bug where all portrait eyes were missing in exported builds only.

Mechanics

• Knockback can't knock units uphill.
• Add "stand up from prone" action.
• Involuntary movement paths go in straight lines instead of pathing intelligently.
• Overwatching allows you to pick your precise target for AOE attacks, change variants, and cancel to pick different weapons.
• Warn if your movement would trigger overwatch.

• Fixed origin of AOE attacks from size 2+ units.
• Fix visual movement ranges for size 2+ units

• Wrecks grant hard cover.
• Add all GMS weapons (not all tags are implemented yet tho).
• Jammed actually prevents attacks/rxns.
• Added improvised attack.
• Added stabilize action; basically a choose-your-own-adventure multiple-choice quiz.

• Added smoke fx to the grenade/mine.

• Fix autopods being able to be fired like a normal weapon.
• Fix reactive code triggering on normal weapon attacks.
• Fixed AOE attacks being able to hit outside of LOS.
• Fix getting overwatched when starting jumpjet movement.
• Fix Engineering limited bonus getting applied twice.
• Fix segment knife not getting thrown 5 from Hunter II.
• Fixed NPCs moving before checking to see if they could stand up, so they never stood up.
• Autopod now only triggers on allied attacks; RAW it technically can trigger on enemies consuming lock-on, but it's super rare that you'd want to actually shoot an ally.
• Can no longer consume lock-ons on your own allies.
• Can no longer ram larger targets.
• Can now continue using protocols if you start using another action but then abort.
• Prevent stapling a pistol to a rifle on a main/aux mount to be able to overwatch with the rifle at threat 3.

I hope y'all have fun playing this! Please let me know how it goes for you. (I continue to thrive on external validation :) )

Olive