Devlog #88: new look of the soldier character

I am not sure whether I mentioned it before, but I had an issue with the "retired soldier" character type. I mean it looks badass and has that great combat suit. The problem was that he was moving too slow compared to other characters:



He obviously had no choice, as that combat armor - even if powered - was surely heavy.

Now, there was another issue present: the weapon. I am planning (well, already started part of it) on having modular weapons in the game - meaning that every weapon will have different parts that can be swapped (scope, barrel, energy core, etc.). Every character type will have a single weapon proficiency, and characters with the same proficiency will be able to swap certain weapon modules.

The problem appeared when I was planning my next "heavy" class character (the "retired soldier" character is a "heavy" class guy). I don't want to go into too many details, but that other character will be physically smaller - so their combat suit would have to be smaller as well. And because combat suits have their weapons embedded (it's basically an arm extension), weapons for different sizes of combat armors would've been incompatible.



Why on earth would the Empire create multi-size, incompatible heavy weapons anyway? That would be a huge inefficiency. Waging war against the Rat Vermin is expensive, one needs to optimize!

So the new soldier is using a lighter version of the combat suit:



And the combat suit allows him to carry a universal, one-size-fits-all heavy weapon:



Heavy weapons still have the slam attack available, to satisfy all the player that like solid AOE attacks:



And you can see that - due to lighter armor - this character is able to move faster, which solves the first issue!

That's it for this entry! I hope that 2021 is going great for all of you!

Take care!