Hey all, here’s a rundown of what’s new in the new Test Build 24 of Cortex Command, which was launched in the Humble Indie Bundle:

• Support for an unseen (unexplored) obscuring layer of the Scene, per team. This enables a lot of interesting game mechanics where the players of the same team share the knowledge about a Scene they’re playing in. Only by having one of their bodies or ships literally ‘seeing’ an area will what’s there be revealed. This should make digging for treasure, hidden bunkers, and fossils much more interesting in the future. It will also be integral for the Metagame, where collected intel about a site or enemy base on the planet is key to winning.
• Scripted logic for revealing the entire surface of a scene by way of a “scan from orbit“. Naturally, while this scan reveals everything in the airspace and the surface of the planet, it doesn’t penetrate far into the ground and thus leaves everything subterranean a mystery to the team. See the “Prospecting” activity for a work-in-progress example of this in action.
• The Lua interface documentation in the CC Wiki (coming back online shortly!) is now updated automatically by scanning the source code of the game and harvesting the extensive comments we’re written for all the classes, functions, and member variables.
• The animation of the arms and legs of characters in the game are now much improved when their bodies are tossed around. They will cartwheel out as an approximation for centrifugal forces of a ragdoll flying through the air.
• Upon loading a terrain, the algorithm for randomly placing terrain debris like boulders and gold nuggets now take a lot more care in not placing these things floating in underground caverns and spaces under overhangs.
• The effectiveness of jetpacks has been reduced, but will be rebalanced a bit upward again by the next build. Got a little carried away..
• Landing and objective HUD cursors are now red for friendly, and green for enemy (sounds a bit backwards, but works well in the game’s color palette).. this is to accommodate more than two simultaneous teams playing at the same time.
• Any of the four players can now control the mouse cursor in any of the general or shared menus, like the Main Menu and all the editors etc. This also applies to the gamepad/joystick players, so one doesn’t need a keyboard/mouse to navigate the menus anymore. (yay for couch-friendly play)
• Added quit confirmation dialogs so hitting esc doesn’t make you accidentally lose game progress (especially important for the metagame).
• Teams can now have custom, mod-addable flags/icons, which will show up in-game instead of the previously hard-coded heart icons. This is important for the metagame as well.
• Speaking of changes regarding the teams in preparation for the metagame, there can now be FOUR teams vs the previously hardcoded two. Also, there can be ‘gaps’ in both the player and team numbers in a game. This is very important to note for poeple who script Activites.. take note at how all the included Activity scripts now iterate through all players and teams. Failing to accommodate this change will break any game that has, for example, team 1, 3, and 4 playing in a game. (note the gap in enumeration)
• Completely new Scenario Battle mode and menus, which replaces the old now obsolete Skirmish menus and setup GUI.
• Activities and Scenes are now decoupled, so that you can first choose an Activity (brain match, last man standing, CTF, whatever else we/you wanna script) to play, and then all compatible Scenes are presented where you can play it. The compatibility is determined by any named Areas used in the Activity in question, like spawn points, landing zones, flag areas etc. The Scenes will be automatically scanned by the engine to check if they contain all these Areas used by the selected Activity, but the script writer can also specify custom requirements as well.
• An almost entirely new set of general Scenes whose terrains match their different geographical sites on the planet. For example, the ones placed in the desert on the planet actually look like a desert landscape when you play them, etc. These will make up the bulk of gold-rich sites you fight over for the Metagame.
• New hand-pixeled backdrops by Simon “Snake” Stafsnes Andersen of Owlboy fame.
• A set of new Activities (with proper winning conditions!) to play on the above scenes, including “One-Man-Army”, “Harvester”, “Survival”, etc.

So, what happened to the Metagame/Campaign mode we’ve been previewing in previous posts? Well, most of the effort since the last build went into getting this up and running.. however, as we worked on it, it became clear that many changes (like support for four teams, etc) were necessary to the engine to accommodate the types of battles that would happen during a Campaign.

Then, as the deadline for the Humble Bundle loomed, I realized that all these changes to the engine had fundamentally broken the previous Skirmish mode and its menus for setting up games. It quickly became clear that we had to abandon the hopes of finishing a first playable revision of the Metagame in order to rebuild and have ANY kind of playable modes working in time for the Bundle timeframe. That’s why this build’s Campaign button is disabled; we couldn’t ship it in a half-baked and confusing state to all the new people (now ~200k and counting!) who would be exposed to Cortex Command for the first time through the Bundle.

The good news is that while the work on the Metagame’s menus and mechanics aren’t visible in this build, it is quite far progressed already, and we are excited to get the last remaining phase of the turn-based mechanic running so the whole thing can actually be played, round after round! We intend to have a first revision of the Metagame up and playable (albeit still rough and unfinished) in the next build.

Last note: for everyone who has bought the game directly from us prior to the Bundle, check the previous post below for instructions on how to get Build 24. We are planning some very interesting things in terms of updates and DRM (or lack thereof) in future builds 🙂 Rest assured that you won’t regret having bought a license before these changes…

Hey folks, just wanted to let you know that Arne has made a thread with a bunch of new Cortex Command art works-in-progress! It’s a cool place to check out the process HERE!

So after six months of development, it’s about time we pull the covers off the next big project Data Realms is working on! Before I say anything else, let me assure you all that Cortex Command is still alive and well. It’s what I personally focus my development time on until it is considered “done”.

For a couple of years now, I have been dreaming about making something out of these incredibly inspiring sketches that Arne made for his Metafight redesign page. The new project wouldn’t be set in the Metafight world (for licensing reasons, etc), but many of the game mechanics outlined in that sketch just looked too fun to not make a game out of!

A vehicular exploration/combat game where you can jump in and out of your ride, then run it into the ground until you find another one to replace it.. now that’s what the Cave Vehicle Engine is going to support! When on foot, you will have a little jetpack with which you can skim down slopes and do cool jumping and grappling tricks to get away from danger.

While Cortex Command and its Retro Terrain Engine was all about the dynamically destructible pixel terrain, the Cave Vehicle Engine is going to be about the dynamically deformable/destructible movable objects (as opposed to the mostly static terrain). The graphics and physics are now all polygon-based and fully hardware accelerated.

The person who has been working full-time on getting the CVE and its custom physics system going, is the very talented Miroslav Adamus, a Slovakian hero who is a much better (and faster!) programmer than myself. Among other things, he has so far managed to implement a powerful particle system, soft-body dynamics with volume (area) preservation, procedural fracturing of objects, and run-time generation of physical objects based on transparency data in their source images/textures. We are applying the lessons learnt while making CC, so this new technology should reach new heights of power and modability!

Oh, by the way, in addition to much other rambling, the maestro musician DannyB and I talk about the project about 25 minutes into this podcast by the 1UP Oddcast crew: PODCAST DOWNLOAD

In the spirit of transparent indie development, here is a very early test build of the engine in action! Have fun smashing objects around and driving the test vehicle. 100% of the art in here is placeholder test stuff, so don’t judge how it looks, only what it can do. In fact, everything (including the physics) is in early test stages. There’s definitely weirdness in many situations, but we think it’s already quite fun to noodle around with! See the included readme for the controls, and ENJOY!

Here’s a little preview of what one of the phases of the turn-based metagame will look like.

Specifically, this is the income-counting phase where all the revenue from each team’s owned mining bases gets tallied and added to their gold accounts in the TradeStar. When the lines actually point to the TradeStar, it indicates the money that team had left over “in the bank” since last turn.

In designing these UI animations, the challenge for us is to always show in a graphically clear and appealing way what’s going on with the flow of money in the metagame.. I hope this draft approaches that goal!

I know you are eager to try this thing out; the trouble with building a turn-based game system is that none of it is really playable until all the components have at least a baseline of functionality implemented. If any one phase of a game round doesn’t work yet, you can’t really play the game at all.

The good news is that we’re currently making good progress and are completely focused on closing that gameplay loop, at least in a basic fashion. As soon as we do, the long-awaited new build will be out for you to try and give us feedback on!

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Nice April Fools’ gag.. OR IS IT?!

Here’s a quick and dirty mockup of what a screen mid-round in a Campaign game might look like.

The whole thing will play very much like a board game, with each player (human- or AI-controlled) taking turns each round, deciding where and how to invest their funds in their bases and where to make their offensive move that turn. The choices have direct consequences over how the on-ground battles go, dictating how many bunkers and defensive forces you start with when defending, and how much of a budget you have to work with when attacking/exploring.

Also, the final outcome of each battle will cause players to gain and lose cherished and valuable income-generating bases (mining outposts), eventually ending the game with one player controlling all the available sites on the planet. The events on the ground will finally have meaning!

The lines you see in the image show where and in what proportions each player have chosen to invest their available funds that round. Yellow is for how much they’ve built in their already owned bases, and red is for the attack or expedition they intend to carry out that round. The floating team bars can be dragged around the screen to get a clear view of the situation.

We can hope this becomes as fun to play as we imagine it as we’re busy designing and building it! At any rate, we’re excited to find out ASAP..

Hello everyone, and belated happy new decade!

To the right we’re cranking away at one of the several menus and dialogs needed for the Metagame (aka “Campaign”) mode. In the coming days and weeks, I hope to throw up some more mockups, teasers, and info about this aspect of the project which will tie the whole Cortex Command experience together. In short: it’s a turn-based game which sits on top of the tactical missions (hence the “meta” – i.e. a game about the game) and puts them in a larger context. What happens in the tactical on-surface battles directly affect the orbital metagame, and vice versa.

We have cut away a lot of the feature creep and finally nailed down a feasible scope for this Campaign mode, and I think what we’ve ended up with is going be very fun to play. As always, we’re making it all data-driven, so you crafty guys can make and mod its content for a customized experience.

Having achieved a fairly clear and realistic picture of exactly how it’s all going to work is pretty exciting for us, so I expect productivity on this to really pick up! Stay tuned..