Today I put together the city zone, complete with blocks of destructable buildings. The walker mechs can punch buildings to do damage, and hitting falling buildings into other buildings will chain into domino effects!

Also tweaked the climbing code + leg procedural animations further to better support clambering over the skyscrapers as seen in the video

Finally I put together a quick first pass on the wasteland zone - desert mesas with large gaps which need to be bridged across with the Bridg-O-Matic mechs

A lot of today’s time was spent iterating on the original IK + procedural animation code to make the movements smoother, and also to develop the foot finding code; Now if a foot would be hovering in air, it checks in 5 incremental steps from the desired position towards the central mech body to find a valid foothold.

This makes climbing up and perching on buildings way more convincing! I’m really happy with it so far.

I wanted something to show off while working on more backend stuff today so I added talking! Inspired by Vintage Story’s musical voices, now the mechs can play a series of musical beeps at the press of a button. I think this will be great fun in multiplayer (not to mention really cute!)

Lots more work on the procedural animation + foot finding

Added grab hands and tree eating procedural animation to feed the mech engine - this doesn’t actually give the mech any power yet (in fact they don’t have any sort of limited charge) but that’s the end goal!

Struck by a Fey mood, I added multiplayer today

As usual I’m using Photon’s Unity networking solutions to rapid prototype multiplayer, though this time I’m trying out their new PUN2 release. It still has the same 20 CCU free base deal, which is perfect for jam games like this.

Helicopters and mechs are synced, with some extra logic for player’s gaining (networked) ownership of any mech they dock with. Also added late joining syncronisation so existing players will tell any new joining players about the state of the world, where mechs are, etc

Lots more aesthetics work today! I really should have prefabed those mech legs when I was originally prototyping all the different mech designs, as that would have made this process of changing the models/shaders way more straight forward!

Still, it’s done now and looking great (if I say so myself). I also added a quick script to change individual mech highlight colours for some variety :)

The engines added to the back of each mech’s torso are intended to be part of the mech fuel feature going forward, but for now are purely aesthetic.

Finally I worked on polishing the heli-cockpits! They now properly face their direction of movement, cast dust off their blades, & have sound.

First aesthetic pass today!

I’m using the FlatKit shader plugin for Unity (which is fast becoming a favourite of mine, its super versatile - we used it for PsiFrost too!) along with various Kenney asset packs - mech bodies are built out of train carriages and monorail segments!

I love bodging stuff together like this, making things out of random other assets. It reminds me of my Garry’s Mod days, good times…

Still mostly just having fun with different mech designs, but also thinking about game design with traversal brige mech

I missed day 2 but here we are with some more Mech Jam II!!

Today I added the heli-cockpits! Allowing players to switch out mech bodies and control schemes at will. This is to feed into the planned puzzle platformer aspects of the game.

Today marks the start of Mech Jam II on itch! The jam lasts two weeks and I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve been wanting to make a mech game for ages! I’m planning to make a puzzle platformer style game about exploring a wasteland in various mechs - focused on different traversal tools.

Today focused on testing out a bunch of different mech movement mechanics; Crawler, hopper, walkers, & rollers