Welcome to this weeks State of the Game! Good news, I have finished most of the functionality of the main menus and have started to implement a better sound system!

Also, I vastly under estimated how amazing a full featured game option menu could be. Do you know how much fun it is to hop into a Arena game with 3 teams of 3 and work with your AI team mates to dominate? It’s wonderful :)

So, I did say I finished ‘most’ of the functionality. There are some minor polish items I need to do, like have proper AI portraits so you can identify the AI in the menu better and have the AI role type selection work. The difficulty setting is currently hooked up, but all it controls is the ‘level’ of the MAV that the AI will use. A lower difficulty level will have AI using MAV’s that have been intentionally weakened. Examples include: Not using all the weight available, swapping for light weapons instead of large ones, using more limited range weapons [Like AR’s instead of Snipers].

So, back to the sound system! I have implemented a plugin called Master Audio. I am using this to help speed up the process and so far it seems to be doing the job. It has at least saved me $11.25 worth of time so far, so who can complain?! :)

As I explore what problems it does and does not solve, I will be putting together a full plan for the audio design that I have in mind for M.A.V.. I have been watching lots of videos and doing research as much as I can, as this is an area that I have not worked in before. If you are interested in learning about audio design in games with me, join me on Twitchtonight at 7:30pm PST!

Welcome to this week’s State of the Game! I am continuing to slog through the UI update and have made a lot of progress. Even though I promised no new features, this last main UI screen I am working on has really grown into what could be considered a full feature.

The game options screen will allow a player to fully customize the single player quick battles, which will allow you to practice and be prepared for multiplayer action much better. No longer will you be limited to only 6 AI players, of totally random types. You will also have full control over the AI difficulty, so you can ramp into certain game modes much easier.

You can watch me wrangle with this ‘feature’ tonight on http://www.twitch.tv/cyberdogs7, live! [Starting at 7:30pm PST]

My goal is to be done with this menu and the game options integration in time to begin work on the sound system by new week. While I will be skipping over some of the UI functionality to move on to the next system, I feel that I need to move on from the UI and finish that up off camera. New stuff is always more fun to watch and nobody wants to see all the tiny things that are left of the remaining UI tasks.

For the sound system, I will be stumbling through it a bit, as I have never done any audio related development before. I am basing it off of a lot of technical papers that I have read about the Frostbite engine and how the audio system in the Battlefield games works. Nothing like no experience plus super high expectations for entertaining live streaming!

That is all for this week! Don’t forget to hop on twitch Wednesday and Fridays to watch me work/play and pester me with questions!

Welcome to another State of the Game! This week I have been continuing the work on the UI, finishing up the menu screen that I showed last week on the Live Dev stream.



This included adding some MUCH needed additional controls over the video settings of the game. Instead of having a silly, one size fits all, drop down of hidden options, you can now use presets or customize the settings exactly for your machine. This should also allow lower end machines to better play the game, as they can individually tune the settings to their hardware.

The last of the UI is making the game options screen functional [which I will be doing live on twitch, tonight] and then it’s off to much more exciting things, namely the FX system and the sound system.

That is all for this week! I wanted to remind you that I am doing twice weekly twitch broadcasts now. There is a development stream every Wednesday night at 7:30pm PST and Friday nights I will be participating in the Friday Night Fights starting at 7:30pm PST. You can always join me in chat or hop on the Raksal Teamspeak server at ts3.knolif.com. Hope to see you there! [http://twitch.tv/cyberdogs7]

Welcome back to the first State of the Game since the great GPU debacle of 2015!

So it turns out, this was the true order of events for fixing my development PC.

1. Issues start to arise with PC losing power randomly.
2. Check all internal wiring to make sure everything is good.
3. PC shuts down, fails to restart. Windows recovery points are all corrupt.
4. Fresh install of windows, everything is good again.
5. Install GPU driver, back to failing to boot up.
6. RMA GPU and wait 1 week
7. New GPU works, but with artifacts all over the screen. Try integrated graphics.
8. Still random shutdowns, RMA Power Supply. Wait 1 week.
9. New power supply, still getting GPU artifacts [even in the bios!]. Integrated Graphics are fine as well as an old gtx 260. RMA new GPU, wait 1 week.
10. New, New GPU, new power supply, everything is back to working!

When I run into bugs, I don’t mess around!
So to cap it off,

3 GPUS – 4 counting the old tester

2 Power supplys

6 weeks of trouble shooting

5 hours on the phone with manufacturer

3 frustrated nights of disappointment

1 fixed PC

That time was not wasted though, as I made massive progress in my massive ‘spreadsheet of everything’ to determine all the parts that the game will need. In doing so, it was also made apparent to me that while I am very proud of the procedural part system that I created, M.A.V. will do much better with manually created part stats. In looking at the full line up of parts I will need to create, doing it manually is not only feasible, its the most likely path to get the narrow design characteristics that each part will need to make it feel unique.

And now that I have my GPU back and working, I have jumped right back into the UI redesign. Here you can see the layout of the custom game options menu.




The new server UI will be taking a lot of elements from this screen as well, but with a few added tabs for control once the match has started.

Also, my recent broadcast on Twitch has shown me that the server admins need an easy way to kick players out of a match and actually ban them from the server as well. I suppose it was just wishful thinking that this feature wouldn’t be needed.

That reminds me: Be sure to follow me on http://www.twitch.tv/cyberdogs7. I will be doing development broadcasts on Wednesday nights and doing gameplay broadcasts on Fridays. Tonight I will be working on the UI or naming more parts, depending on the people that show up.

Until next week!



[Also, if you are going to troll me on twitch, at least be entertaining!]

So, in my great stokes of luck, I got my replacement GPU and still had issues. So we replaced the power supply. Nope, new, different issues, but still not resolved. It appears that I am the most unlucky person in the world, as I had a bad GPU, a bad power supply, and a bad replacement GPU. So I have another GPU on the way. Awesome. While it would be super easy to talk bad about the company that makes these parts [all the same manufacturer], they have been incredibly helpful with this process, have provided great tech support, even at midnight, and are really proving that they care.

So, I am running on integrated graphics still [they are better than my old gtx 260 card] and have been doing some more UI work. I am working on the new game options screen, which has a lot of hooks and tie-ins with actual backend code, so it’s been a bit slow.

One thing that has been super fun though is doing the Giant Spreadsheet of Names with players on twitch! It’s been so fun, I am doing it again tonight!

I will also ‘try’ to make Wednesday nights official game dev stream nights and also participate in the usual Friday night fights. To make sure you catch me when I am live, go to http://www.twitch.tv/cyberdogs7 and follow me and you will get a notification when I start streaming.

As for tonight, I will be live in about 1 hour from this post!

Welcome back! So, catching up from last week, the issue turned out to not even be my graphics card! The current speculation is a bad power supply, so I have a replacement on the way.

In the mean time I have been digging through some spread sheets doing some fancy lore and production planning. I have created a master spread sheet to track part rewards for the unlock system. This then spun off into creating a master list for all the part manufacturer parts and is now going through a final lore phase where I start to do rough part ideas and naming. I plan on streaming some of this dev work on twitch tonight! So stop by and help me name some parts!

After I finish up this spread sheet, I will be hopping back into the UI, which will be the game launching options screen. I will be needing to create a better backend system to handle the new options as well, and then make it all available on the server UI and in the server prefs file.

That is all for this week. I hope to see you on twitch!

So I am still waiting on my replacement graphics card. In the mean time, I have been doing what I can from my laptop. This includes messing with website code a bit and, honestly, playing a lot of Civ 5 :) . There are actually a lot of things to learn from Civ 5 in the ways that Campaign mode in M.A.V. could play out (not exactly the same, but similar).

I am also doing a lot of planning for what HAS to be in the next update before it goes out, and what updates will follow that. Other than that, it kind of sucks to lose a week to a broken GPU, but it’s not all lost. It’s been incredibly weird for me not being able to work like I normally do, but it’s been a nice, if forced, break. My new GPU is slated to arrive next Monday and I can’t wait to get back into the fray!

See you next week!

Well, this has been quite the week! I have made great progress on making all the new UI’s functional. I started with the main ‘hub’ menu and have moved to the profile and the quickplay menus. The profile menu is fully functional, minus 2 features [the deployment graph, as those stats don’t exist, and the medals, as they don’t exist, yet]. The quick launch menu has been a bit slower going.

I had to make some design changes to better accommodate the functionality that I wanted. One of the issues that was pointed out was the fact that the server list was actually limited in the total number. I also had very limited options for expanding the UI with additional elements, considering that the server list was a floating UI element. To address this I added a background to the server list, which also allowed me to make the list scroll-able. This also gives me a great location to house all the custom game options for customizing a game before launching.

The game settings tab will allow you to setup the game mode, the time, kill limit, etc., as well as give you options for assigning AI bots to teams, setting their role, and even their difficulty. All these options will be extended to multiplayer as well.

Now, for the reason why I don’t have a screen shot of all this awesomeness I am talking. I have been having some PC issues ever since a windows update last Thursday. I have been getting BSOD randomly, with increased frequency when using the graphics card [like when making a game :/ ]. I have traced my issue to the graphics card, I believe and am looking to get it fixed / replaced. For now I have just been having to save a whole lot while I work! I am experiencing a crash/reboot about once every 30 mins, so it has made things a little slower going.

Well, that is all for this week!

Welcome to another state of the game! This week I have been exploring out more UI screens and actually started programming them all up to be functional. Below you can see what I am planning for the player profile:



Each of the bottom hexes will show your current level progress for each role type [this is already functional]. The main stats will be shown in the middle of the screen and to the right, I really wanted to do a great looking radar graph. I felt that doing a percentage of deployments was a perfect use case for this, as it really can convey a lot of information in conjunction with a simple ‘total deployments’ stat.

Other than that, I have been pretty head down working on getting all this stuff nice and functional. Once I have it functional I will start looking at options for doing a final art pass on the UI. While I could always create the final art myself, this seems like it could be a great place to outsource and get a higher quality and free me up to move on to the next task. We will see how it goes when I get to that point [and my luck with outsourcing larger items].

That is all for this week. See you next week!

Wow, almost didn’t make it in time this week! Well, I have been continuing to frame out the UI, completely re-thinking how players get into the game, the menu options they have, and how ‘smooth’ it is, for both new and experienced players.

Last week I showed you the new main menu [which has already changed some!] and this week I have done both the server browser and started on the player profile.



I was challenged to create a browser that was NOT just a scroll-able list. I wanted to create something unique, but that would still convey all the information you get from a good ole list. Sticking with the hexagon theme, I went with a grid layout, with color coding, to show the available servers and game types. More information is easily contained in the hexagon and I still have the option of including additional server information on a hover box [like ping, and advanced server options].

As for the player profile screen, it’s not quite ready to be shown to the public. I am having to use an actual box though, but there will still be plenty of hexagons!

I am entirely focused on layout and flow right now, so these screens are not completely hooked up and functional yet. After the player profile I have the options screen [which will be very similar to the profile] and then the garage. Since the garage is a completely stand alone UI, I will likely focus on getting these new layouts up and functional before tackling the entire garage UI. But that doesn’t mean I am not sketching out ideas right now though!

That is all for this week, see you next week!