Yes, double holiday blog posts! Sorry, but I have been lazy with this post. While I wanted to cover the whole year of 2014, honestly I think way too much happened! It started off with a whirlwind ride with the Kickstarter, which lead straight to being greenlit. Then there was the push to launch on Steam, then a move around …
State of the Game #152: Happy Holidays!
Welcome to this special Christmas Eve State of the Game! This past week I have been busy re-writing the whole game mode system to better accommodate the features of the new pre-game lobby. This includes having the AI added to the game before the game start, so their teams can be switched or they can be removed. There is also …
State of the Game #151: Pre-game Lobby
Welcome to another State of the Game! This week I have been focused on the pre-game lobby system. This is designed to help people stay playing together once they have a game going, allow people to have more strategic battles with allowing them to properly establish teams, and make it a little easier for people running ‘headless’ servers, or servers …
State of the Game #150 : Start of the Social Update
Welcome back to another amazing state of the game! As you can see, this is my 150th consecutive update. I want to just take a small amount of time to address all the people that said I would give up on this project after 3 months. SUCK IT!!! But really though, I am glad to be continuing the updates and …
State of the Game #149: Commander Update!
Recap of the features in this update! + New battle role – the Commander + New parts – Hexapods, Hovers, Hawk, Eagle, and Dragon Cockpits + New Level – Outpost Alpha v2 + New Test Level – No Man’s Pass v2 + New Long range weapon cross hairs And many more new features [and bug fixes!] Commander Role The commander …
State of the Game #148: Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving, here is a Turkey MAV In other news, I am continuing to work on my secret project and am planning on having a new stable build out before December 1st. In the mean time, everyone should go to the builds section and submit their best holiday themed MAV’s! Happy Thanksgiving! -Chad
State of the Game #147: New Cockpits
This week I have been busy working on some back end items, along with a secret project ;), but I did get a chance to take care of some annoying bugs and add a large line of new cockpits to the game! This new line of cockpits covers all the cockpit types, from light, medium, and heavy, and even adds …
State of the Game #146: Introducing DSMF
What is DSMF? Well, a long time ago, there was a piece of concept art, with these initials on the cockpit. Much speculation was had on what they mean, but it was not quite ready to be revealed. Well today, it is ready! DSMF, or Dynamic Systems Manufacturing, is the next part manufacturer! Back story: As adoption of MMV [Modular …
State of the Game #145: Rise of the Hexapod
Welcome to another State of the Game! Remember this concept? Well, one of those parts have made it into the game! Introducing in snapshot 0.5.20_19 [available now] there are several new hexapod class mobility platforms. What makes them unique? They are the slow, mobile fortresses you would expect. carrying extreme loads, and having unrivaled stability, they make excellent mobile gun …
State of the Game #144: New Parts!
Another week, another State of the Game! This week I was working on some secret parts! In the newest Snapshot build [0.5.20_18, available now] you can check out the all new Hover legs! I know, the long awaited, always denied that they would exists, hover legs have finally made it into the game. And with this new addition, that means …
State of the Game #143: Podcast and Updates
Welcome back for another State of the Game! This week, I actually took a small vacation! It’s crazy, I know, but I went up to the Texas State Fair [even with all the Ebola scare!]. I have lived in Texas a long time, but had never been. I did enjoy it, but think it will be the one and only …
State of the Game #142: AlienFX and Models
Welcome back! This week I have mainly been focusing my time on finding a new environment artist [I think I have one!] and creating models for the last of the parts that I consider to be required to fully know if the levels are properly designed. In between all of that, I did manage some super small bug fixes and …
State of the Game #141: No Man’s Pass Alpha
Welcome back for an exciting State of the Game update! This week, I have been solely focused on finishing up the alpha version of No Man’s Pass V2. There were two snapshots this week, one on Saturday and one yesterday, with playable versions of the map in it. The first version of the map was met with positive reviews, but …
State of the Game #140 : White boxing a Level
Welcome to another State of the Game! For a good portion of last week, I was fighting off a terrible virus that sapped the energy right out of me. It’s always been funny to me, that no matter how big of a ‘man’ you are, a tiny virus and always bring you to your knees. So, to catch up, let …
State of the Game #139: Sick :(
Unfortunately I have contracted a virus that has made getting much progress done this week very difficult. I am hoping to feel better in the next few days, and when I do I will have a new snapshot ready and an updated developer video. Thanks for understanding.
State of the Game #138:Team AI
Welcome to the State of the Game! New this week, AI no longer use the ‘default’ green colors. You can now tell who is actually on your team! Exciting stuff! So I created a system that will assign each team a set of team colors, which can be a solid color or a camo pattern and colors. When AI spawn …
State of the Game #137: Advanced Crosshairs!
After much pain and suffering, trying a grand total of 8 [EIGHT!] different methods of getting a better crosshair, I have successfully slayed the Unity beast and have created the ‘Advanced Crosshair System’. What is this and why does it matter? It’s a system to have smart crosshairs, as before they were just static images. Now the can animate, they …
State of the Game #136: Howitzer/Rocket changes
This week I was focused on adding in batter support for long range, indirect fire, weapons, namely the howitzer and the quad rocket packs. The goal was to change the way they fired to allow more consistent ‘ranging’, basically allowing you to place rounds in the same general area over and over. Part of this included a range estimator integrated …
State of the Game #135: Commander Progresses
Welcome back to another State of the Game! This week I added a very highly requested feature to the server system of M.A.V.. The server operator can now queue up levels, select the levels to play next, and remove levels from the rotation. This has allowed players to really test out the latest version of No Man’s Pass and provide …
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State of the Game #134: You are not Worthless
So, this is going to be a little different of a post from me today. I saw some stuff yesterday that really fired me up and now that I am free from all other game studio overlords, I feel I can speak completely free about them. Warning, I am going to use language that I don’t typically use. Really, it …
State of the Game #133: Engagement Range
Welcome to this weeks State of the Game! Work continues on the new version of No Man’s Pass and it has brought up a very interesting discussion on the forums. The basic idea is, what are the ideal ranges to be fighting at? This has a major impact on the level design and it’s something I had gone through a …
State of the Game #132: No Man’s Pass Remake
This week has a few updates, so this will likely be a short State of the Game. I did release the new snapshot build, and players are already having a great time on the new No Man’s Pass. If you forgot what it looks like, here is the final concept again: Already, there is a lot of feedback about the …
State of the Game #131: T-Shirt Winner!
It’s time to announce the T-Shirt contest winner! The winner is shadow0716, with their ‘Iceberg’ design. I will be working with them to get a free shirt to them and get this design added to the M.A.V. merch store. In development news, I continued work on the next snapshot, which will include a work in progress remake of No Man’s Pass. …
State of the Game #130: Another Release
Welcome back to another week of development! This week I got fully back into the groove of development and put out a build with code fixes in it. It took a little while to get full acquainted with the code base again (it is close to 100k line), but once I was the fresh eyes made finding some long standing …
State of the Game #129: 0.5.20_4 Release!
Welcome back for another State of the game! So, if you haven’t been following me on Facebook or Twitter, you will not know that I ran into a small issue when building my new computer. In my hurried haste of ordering all the parts (hey, I was excited!) I ordered a 32 bit version of windows and not a 64 …
State of the Game #128: Ramping up
As you know, I just recently moved across the world. I still don’t have my belongings, they are still 3 weeks away, but what I did do was order a new development computer. Sadly, due to some shipping delays, I didn’t get all the parts in until ~10 pm last night. So of course I stayed up late putting it …
State of the Game #127: Sorry for the Absence
I wanted to start this state of the game off with an apology. I have not been attentive to the message board, the steam community, or facebook, as I normally am. The reason I have been so with drawn is because I have been right smack in the middle of moving! And not just any move, a MASSIVE move. I …
State of the Game #126 : Logo Reveal
Bombdog studios has a new logo! Thank you everyone that helped pick the new logo by voting in the logo contest. This week I have been busy continuing work on the website. I had been making great progress on the redesign, but I hit a limitation in the framework I was using. The website is currently authored in a CMS …
State of the Game #125: T-Shirt Contest and new Logo
Welcome to another State of the Game! This week I am continuing on my journey into creating a newer, better, website (and thinking about how much nicer it would have been for a professional company to be doing this and not me :/ ) but that is super boring! So, lets have something a bit more fun! NEW LOGO So, …
State of the Game #124 : Website Work
Welcome to another State of the Game! So this week, it’s a little bit different. Unfortunately, my computer has been suffering from some massive overheating issues, in part due to the unforgiving heat that had descended and the lack of air conditioning. This made tasks like working on M.A.V. or compiling code, not only incredibly slow, but also potentially damaging, …