Leges Motus Progress: Guns, Gates, and Gameplay

Greetings! Goodness – gigantic gobs of time go galloping by as I greatly neglect to give good glimpses into the game’s growing completion. Today, I’d like to update you on what we’ve been working on with Leges Motus, focusing on guns, gates, and gameplay.

Gates are mostly done being ported to the new version now, aside from the graphics. We can sit on them, lower them, and win the round!

Gun functionality is also nearing completion. We have all but area-of-effect guns in place (again, except for graphics). So we can once again freeze our opponents as they make their futile attempts to sit on our gates!

Guns are actually implemented in a much more intelligent fashion, now – whereas before, separate gun types (such as spread, penetration, and thaw guns) could not be mixed, so their features were limited, they are now all part of a unified standard gun framework. This means that you can add thawing parameters to shotguns, or whatever your crazy gun design happens to be.

Gameplay is coming along, and with freezing, unfreezing, gate lowering, and all related physics in place, a basic game of Leges Motus is nearly fully playable in the new client!

So where are we going from here?

1. Finishing guns and map object types, and other remaining gameplay features: We need to complete the map hazards, forces, and other special map objects before we can equal our old feature set, and we need area-of-effect guns as well. Then, we need to round out the remaining minor gameplay features to approximately the same state they were at in the old client.

2. Graphics: We need to add gate graphics, gun/firing graphics, and frozen player graphics. This includes animations.

3. Interface: We need the HUD, chat, player names, stats, etc. to be re-implemented with our new graphics setup.

4. Menus: We will need menus to be finished before the next version can finally be released.

5. AI: Somewhere between 2 and 4 above, we’ll need to implement AI players. We will start on the AI around the end of January, so we’ll see what we have done by then. Theoretically, the AI could be started any time after #1 is complete, but I’d really love to have some of #2 and #3 done before it if possible.

As my final tidbit of news, we have an artist starting to draw up some concepts for new player graphics for Leges Motus. We’re very excited about the possibilities, and I’ll try to get his permission to show some of his ideas on here in the future.

We’ll keep you posted.

~ by greywhind on December 28, 2010.