Lancer Tactics

Downtimes, module editor, water temple
about 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!
about 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!
over 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

Pre-alpha changelog + engine talent talk
over 2 years ago – Wed, May 08, 2024 at 12:33:39 PM

We're aiming for getting the first public alpha for backers by the end of this month! Carpenter and I scoped out mechanics that can wait until after the alpha (e.g. grappling, hiding) in favor of tying up the hundred loose threads that are needed for something that approaches a playable game. So this is mostly a big ol changelog of an update from doing that.

But I also gave a talent talk at a local Portland Indie Game Squad event about engine architecture! It'll sound familiar if you've been reading these updates; I laid out the basic idea for this talk almost a year ago, back in the June 2023 update.

We've also signed contracts & had a kickoff meeting with our writers to start on the campaigns. While I've enjoyed like a year of engine-work, it'll be so so nice to start getting to tell stories. Data structures don't mean anything beyond how they affect humans & other life.

New Content

Implemented flying as a status; unit counts as +3 spaces above the current ground level and ignores terrain and elevation extra movement costs. Added hover + takeoff/land animations.

Gave deployables the ability to have 3D meshes instead of 2D sprites; we'll probably use this mostly when the deployable in question is climbable.

Related, I fixed a bug where after terrain destruction, all units recheck the ground height under them so they'll move down if the ground is shot out from under them. When the Jerichos do that, they say "oh heck, the ground is taller! I better move up to stand on it!" — not realizing that the taller ground they're seeing came from themselves. Fixed by locking some units' rendering to the ground level; this means no stacking climbable things, which is a call I'm comfortable making. We ain't making minecraft here (I whisper to myself, gazing at the bottom of my tea mug).

Increase map elevation cap to 10. It's nice but definitely is risky with increasing the voxel space, gonna have to keep an eye on performance.

Block sizes are currently 1x1x0.5 — half as tall as they are wide. Since that was a size I pulled out of nowhere for convenience, we did some art tests for different block heights and camera angles. TLDR that size works great and we're leaving it.

Added Cone AOE pattern, courtesy of an algorithm NMcCoy sent me that guarantees the correct number of tiles are picked at the correct distance from the origin.

• pick your aim angle
• for each distance step N of your cone, make a list ("ring") of all the cells at that distance from your origin
• sort those cells by angular distance from your aim angle, and include the N closest cells in that ring in the cone's area

Here's a gif they made of it in Bitsy:

Units face where you're planning on moving/targeting them.

Got Walking Armory's Shock option working. Added subtle (too subtle, now that I look at it) electricity effect.

Added knockback and fall damage. Also added a bounce to units when it's using an ability or is available to start its turn.

Added Structured + Stress event and the associated popups. Also added meltdown status (and hidden countdown), but there's not animation for this yet so your guy just abruptly disappears and leaves huge crater.

Other things we've added but I don't have gifs for, you'll have to trust me:

• disengage action
• overcharge action
• Improved Armament core bonus
• basic mine explosion fx
• explosion fx on character dying

UI Improvements

Rearranged the portrait maker. Auto-expand the color picker so you don't have to keep clicking into a submenu.

Added topdown camera mode by pressing R for handling getting mechs out of tight spaces.

The action tooltips have been bothering me for a while; they extend up and cover prime play-area real estate in the center of the screen. So I redesigned them to be shorter and have a max height by putting long descriptions in a scrollable box. This sounds simple, but the redesign, pulling in all the correct data for the tags, and wiring up the tooltips took like seven hours. Game dev is hard, yo.

Put the unit inspect popups in lockable tooltips + added a bunch of tooltips to them.

Implemented the rest of Carpenter's cool hex-y action and end turn readout. I'm a big fan of whenever we can make the game look more like a game and less like a website (though he balances out my impulse for that for the sake of legibility).

Added a JANKY talent/frame picker. I swear we have designs for a better one, but sometimes you gotta just get it working. Also seen briefly here are basic level up/down and HASE buttons.

Other no-picture things:

• Negated the map-scaling effect that happens when the window resizes to prevent bad pixel scaling of mechs at different resolutions; making the window bigger now just lets you see more play area instead of making things bigger.
• WIP Objectives Bullets panel to give the current sitrep info
• Wired up a buncha tooltips throughout the character sheet.

Under the Hood

Serialization: can save/load games! This is the payoff for sticking with that engine architecture I've been going on about. I had to add a serialization function to everything in the center layer which took a while, but it was fairly straightforward work with few curveballs.

• Finished replacement of the kit/unit/reinforcement group/sitrep pickers with a new standardized system that can pull from stock data and user-saved data.
• Updated to Godot 4.2.2; the game (and editor) has been crashing on exit for a LONG time and for the life of me I couldn't track down why, but this minor update in Godot completely fixed the bug. I still have no idea what was happening, but it's so cool to be working in an engine that's this active bugfixing-wise! 

Other Bugfixes

Pulled straight from the internal changelog, no edits for public parseability:

• calculate cover for fliers correctly
• no overwatch when outside of vertical threat
• fixed skirmisher triggering for each attack in an AOE
• fixed jumpjets boost-available detection
• fixed mines not triggering when you step right on top of them // at a different elevation but still adjacent
• weapon mods not a valid target for destruction
• made camera pan less jumpy and adjust to the terrain height
• better Buff name/desc localization
• Fixed compcon planner letting you both boost and attack with one quick action.
• Fix displayed movement points not updating
• Prevent wrecks from going prone
• fix berserkers not moving if they were exactly one tile away
• hex mine uses deployer's save target instead of 0
• restrict weapon mod selection if you don't have the SP to pay
• fix deployable previews not going away
• fix impaired not showing up in the unit inspector (its status code is 0 so there was a check that was like "looks like there's no status here")
• fix skirmisher letting you move to a tile that should cost two movement if it's only one space away
• fix hit percent calculation
• fix rangefinder grid shader corner issues (this was like a full day to rewrite the shader to be better)
• Teleporting costs the max(spaces traveled, elevation change) instead of always 1

So um, yeah, that's my talk, any questions? (I had a professor once tell us to never end a talk like this, so now of course it's the phrase that first comes to mind whenever I end a talk)

— Olive

New mech art style! + terrain destruction, overwatch, ramps
over 2 years ago – Thu, Mar 28, 2024 at 04:13:55 PM

Hellooo again, friends! It's that time again!

Art + Sound

The most exciting update: I'd like to introduce you to Gen (@gentrigger), our new mech artist!

> Yo, I'm Gen. A non-binary artist who wears many hats including ttrpg design, pixel art, and illustration. I've admired mechs since catching Gundam Wing on Toonami and renting Armored Core 2 from Blockbuster. That love of their mechanical design and dramatic stories lead me to the lovely Lancer community where I've made a living illustrating over 100 lancer mechs and their pilots for players. I'm hoping to bring that experience to Lancer Tactics to bring these well-loved designs to life for way more people, and leave my personal touch where I can. When not working on mechanical friends, I express my other loves for masks, deities, and overgrown cities with my own personal TTRPG project Songs we Sing.

Gen has been working hella quickly, and has already made sprites for the Death's Head, Goblin, Nelson, and drafts for the Hornet and Drake in this gorgeous front-and-back-facing isometric style!

Other art updates:

- Added an x-ray vision shader so you can see mechs and planned movement lines while they're behind terrain.

- Added the ability of a mech to have alternate sprites; we'll need this for the Everest especially. A possibility (that I'd be interested in hearing opinions on) is in addition to some generic-ish Everests, we'll let you choose from any size-1 NPC sprite for your Everest. This'd give folks the most freedom in their appearance without making much extra work for us.

- I had a lot of fun in working on an out-of-bounds cloudy area! Here's some styles we decided not to go with:

I specifically did NOT want to do an Into-The-Breach "floating block island" style; I want the map to feel like it connects to a larger world instead of being an isolated chessboard. And doing any kind of "fog" style meant we'd have to add an out-of-bounds area around the edge of the map which meant reworking the coordinate system — not an ideal way to spend our dev time.

So here's where we landed. The map ends, but there's a flat animated area outside of it with blocky, shifting pixellated shapes meant to evoke "weather radar". The map is also slightly inset with a small lip to literally make it "embedded" in that outside world. I had a very focused few days learning enough about shaders to make this kind of effect, and picked up a few techniques that I'm going to bring back to other effects like command zone edges.

- Robin convinced us to integrate FMOD as the way to handle sound composition and mixing. I was skeptical at first because it meant pulling in a hefty piece of third-party middleware that is only kind of community-supported for Godot, but I have been won over by how much easier it makes adding interesting variations like having multiple footstep sounds as units move. It also lets Godot delegate that kind of logic over to FMOD's editor, allowing the game engine to just say "play a footstep sound" and not worry about it more than that.

I also ended up submitting a PR to the Godot-FMOD integration, which I think was both my first time contributing to an open-source project AND was my first time writing any C++!

UI

- Made custom versions of a lot of basic godot UI components so we could easily control font size. This will be an ongoing effort to make sure the various sizes are used on and work on all screens, but I'll rest better knowing the that we have a solution on the technical side.

- Added basic settings menu + persistent config file for audio volume and text size.

- Can edit pilot background/name/callsign/mech name in char sheet.

- Carpenter added manufacturer icons + colors to the character sheet, and improved the gear/weapon picker.

- Can add weapon mods in the character sheet (thermal charge).

- Added a lockable terrain attributes inspector.

Game content + mechanics

- Whenever Gen makes a new sprite, it inspires me to add its content immediately. By following these breadcrumbs, I've added Nelson frame traits + its simple gear, some Archer systems, Everest frame traits and CP, Goblin traits + autopod + Horus upgrade I, Deaths head frame + traits + a lot of its gear. I'm learning that the speed at making a frame varies greatly: some things are very easy (weapons without more than the basic bells an whistles), while others require reworking a bunch of internal logic and unique moving pieces (giving a free boost for the Everest was weirdly hard because it's the only thing in the game that provides one and needs to be available for anything that interacts with boost).

- Added Overwatch reaction.

- Mechs spawn wrecks on destruction.

- Added a context-verification system for Reactions to guard against situations where the triggering unit dies before it reaches the second reaction, e.g. if two overwatches trigger and the first destroys the target, the second won't crash the game because it's targeting a dead unit

- Added "additional damage" field so weapons like bolt thrower can do multiple types of damage. As a bonus, this has made it easy to add weird amounts of heat on hit for things like the Hornet's Impale tech attack.

- Set up Manufacturer as resources instead of hardcoded values as a future investment in modders being able to add their own manufacturers. Once again, mod support isn't on our list of promises, but I'd be a fool to leave a landmine like "manufacturers are hardcoded" for our future selves. 

- Ramps! These aren't a mechanic in Lancer RAW but they make a lot of sense to have as a mapmaking tool — there's no extra cost from climbing for stepping up on a ramp, which ends up being a 1-move discount for an equivalent climb. It's the same numerical niche that the DH magnetic clamp feet thing does, and I learned this last weekend that Eld had independently invented the exact same thing for Solstice Rain.

- Line AOEs are calculated correctly and show up during the attack process.

- Ironed out terrain destruction & a single instance of damage being able to cascade down to lower layers if it destroys the top layer. This is a lot of fun!! Here's a juiced-up railgun digging a ditch across the map.

There's more thinking to be done about how let AOE weapons interact with destroying the ground like this (nobody wants Jackhammer round to be used literally anywhere) but the dream of a Barb Apoc Rail leaving a huge crater will be realized, and I think that's beautiful. 🥲

Coming up/status update

Some of my next todos are:

- Get writing/narrative work started up

- Sort out our block height; we've been defaulting to them being half as tall as the are long/wide, but we want to try out a few other ratios.

- Figure out how to handle attaching separate units for grappling, goblin CP, mule harness, etc.

- Implement the Flying status.

- Set up a "pilot roster" screen

- As always, keep working towards a playable demo by playing the game and adding missing things. We should probably get a clear version of what a "vertical slice" needs to include instead of just kind of feeling our way there.

As for the Portrait Maker, Martina's not had a lot of time to work on the assets, so making the standalone version of that is on pause for a bit. Always better to kick things back than crunch to hit self-imposed deadlines.

Oh! Also, I don't know what it looks like on your side Kickstarter's UI, but one of y'all has found a button that sends me this very annoying notification. Please don't. I hope you're just trying to send encouragement, but it just makes me spiteful. These update are ~monthly because even as a changelog they take a fair amount of time to write, and I'm already going as fast as it make sense for me to do.

Until next time!

~ Olive