Devlog #46: The soldier class

Until now, two player character classes had their visuals ready: the rogue (coming in two flavours) and the ranger. Now, thanks to Kurt's great work, the last character class has arrived: the soldier.

The idea for the class was that it should be a heavy/tank guy. Initially I thought of naming the class as "Mechanic", but having a mechanic guy in a battle suit did not feel quite right. So soldier it is.

Finally, whole squad can therefore be presented in its glory, without the need to use any placeholder graphics:

Note: the demo that I am working on will always have this squad composition (so two rogues, one ranger and mechanic). However, I aim to give the player control over squad composition in the final game.

Also, possibly another class might be added in the end. It's hard to say right now - I need to focus on finishing the demo, so it's not a good thing to get distracted with potential scope creep.

Additionally, I have some new shooting animations for characters ready. The characters are finally looking better when targeting enemies. I had to implement the mechanism for choosing the correct animation depending on the angle between the attacker and the target, and after some tweaks it started to behave quite nicely.

Still, the corpses are able to fall only to the sides. We'll see whether I'll be able to put more death animations in the demo.

Also, I've slightly fiddled with the UI, making the buttons less round. I am aware that game developers are often introducing these minor changes that would probably be unnoticed and unimportant for the players, but I just felt I had to try it out.

In the end, I cannot say whether the new version looks better ;) Anyways, I will stick with the new one.

What's next?

Well, I believe I will focus on setting up sounds for the soldier and adding in-game menus. There are four months left until the end of the year (so not very much time), and I will surely release the demo before 2019 ends. Right now I need to finish the coding part and focus more on audio and improving my own graphical skills.

Additionally, there's still a lot of other stuff to tackle. I believe I should have a Steam site, to allow people to wishlist the game. Also, the demo should have a screen navigating to my webpage, Steam page, etc. - just to make sure that the players (after they will become hooked) will have a clear way to subscribe to game progress notifications.

Man, this is gonna be hard. But I'll make it anyway.

Thanks for reading!

As usual, if you'd like to receive more frequent updates about the development and a heads-up about release of the demo, follow me on Twitter at @bryquTheDev.

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