Star Renegades development is heating up!
Hi all!
It’s Softcookie here from the MDI team! For those of you who are new to our upcoming game, I am the UI designer/community manager! Our UI developer Linda has stepped away on maternity leave for a bit, so I have been giving a hand in the UI of STAR RENEGADES (i.e. the game we’ve been obsessively working on).
We’ve been a little quiet on the social media front lately, and that’s because we’ve been holed up in our dev caves working reeeeeeeal hard to submit a build for PAX West and Gamescom! We finally submitted this last week (and on time too lol), so fingers crossed that we get in! Being able to cross off this deadline from our task list has given us a bit of breathing room to come out of our rooms, see the sun, interact with other hoomans, etc.
We look FIIIIINE!
To prove that we’ve been working hard on Star Renegades, here is a list of movies that most of us HAVEN’T seen:
- Avengers: Infinity War
- Deadpool 2
- Black Panther
- Pacific Rim: Uprising
- Tomb Raider
(And the crazy thing is these all take place in the same universe, right??)
So, with the point of these DevLogs being to fill you in on STAR RENEGADES, we figured we’d jump straight to the topic of our new combat engine!
(Not that the entire game is combat! It wouldn’t be Massive Damage if we didn’t have a pile of supporting systems on top of our core game. We’ve got a super flexible mission and event system, for all your future content needs, plus we’ve got an AMAZING equipment system, as well as a few SECRET systems that we’re working on that we’re hoping will blow everyone’s socks/pants/boots(?) off, all of which we’ll tackle in future dev logs.)
COMBAT
So first off, it bears asking what the heck are we trying to do that hasn’t been done before?
Well, the answer is a few things!
First off we’ve got a built-from-the-ground-up combat engine that revolves around the idea of enemy transparency, that is to say, you can see what your enemies are planning to do at the beginning of a round, and it’s up to you to use your heroes’ abilities to counter your enemies’ actions. Make a wrong move, get a little impatient, and it might lead to devastating consequences!
Here at Massive Damage, we’re calling this system our “Read-And-React” Combat (Peter’s term, stolen from basketball, which you can vote for in the comments section) or Reactive Action Battle System (Garry’s Term, which you can choose NOT to vote for in the comments section, because it’s way less elegant and doesn’t really communicate anything).
So, a simple example of one of these Read-and-React (yep, I’m using it! Take that Garry!) moments is say an enemy is targeting one of your squishies with a flurry attack (it does 6 hits, and 6 damage each hit) for a whopping 36 damage, enough to kill your squishy. Now you COULD choose for your squishy to defend (incoming damage is -50%), thereby reducing that damage to 18 (not great, but as you can probably tell, unlike most turn-based games, you have an actual reason to defend).
Or, let’s say your machine gun fella has an Overwatch power, which allows him to return fire on the attacker for each hit (return fire on the attacker for 5 damage per attacker hit). So he does that, AND THEN your damage soaking tank GUARDS your squishy, taking attacks intended for them (allowing her armor to soak up all that dreaded DMG). AND THEN your weird portal-sword wielding robot man conjures up a reflective damage portal vortex in front of your damage soaker, and now each time your tank gets hit, the attacker gets hit too!
Well that didn’t go according to plan
Anyway, that’s pretty much the system. We’ve got tons of other stuff on top of it, some of which we’re pretty sure has never been done before in a squad combat-based system, like personal shields systems that interact with debuffs in interesting ways, and a power selection flow that emphasizes experimentation with an maximization of squad powers so as to really emphasize TEAMWORK. Oh, and interrupts. And SO MUCH MORE!
INTERSTITIAL ANIMATIONS
And wrapping that all together is a really cool in-house animation system that we’re using to build all the nifty and dynamic attack animations anyone could ever want!
And the best part about it is its acronym: C.A.T.T.L.E. (Combat Animation Tool That Lucky Engineered). Garry came up with that one. You really came through this time with that one, Garry.
Anyway, so that’s a wrap for our first dev post! We’ll have tons and tons of more stuff coming your way soon as we continue to experiment and tune Star Renegades to perfection!
But for those of you who don’t give a damn about perfection, and who might live in the Ottawa or Montreal areas, you should absolutely come on down to CGX in Ottawa (June 23/24) or Comic Con in Montreal (July 6-8th), where we’ll be showing a PLAYABLE version of the build.
That’s right. A PLAYABLE version of the build.
Hopefully, that’s a deadline we won’t regret announcing!
Remember to WISHLIST us on Steam as well- for firsthand beta testing 😉
Steam: Star Renegades
Feel free to join our Discord server or follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more spicy GIFs and updates.
Anyway, back to our work caves.
Cheers,
MDI Team
