For September, I was noticing that most of the core feature were complete so of course I decided to add 2 extra game mechanics and another feature. I'm also continuing to make sure that progress in the game is steady such as the AI and going through some of the bugs I have in the backlog.
So the new mechanic that I decided to add to the game is squad weapon specialization. The way that it works is that the squad's weapon specialization is determined depending on who the leader of that squad is. So now 3 important characteristics are decided based on the squad leader: stats, special ability, and weapon specialization. What this specialization does, is it restricts the squad to only being able to use a certain weapon type so the play-style of the squad will be more distinct.
Shotguns: high damage/close range/medium sped
Snipers: medium-high damage/far range/slow speed
Pistols: low damage/close range/very high speed
Assault rifles: All-a-rounder
The extra feature that was worked on, was the formation menu. It's a way for you to orient your squad that makes sense, like tanks in the frontline and healers in the back. The original idea was to just make it random since that would be a lot easier on the development side but after playing around with combat for a little bit, it just seemed too necessary to have a formation menu.
Been also trying to create different classes of AI, so I did some work on AI for healer characters. They'll react differently depending on the game state, so they'll perform combat attacks when they're in a very favorable position, but when their ally's heal goes below a certain threshold they start healing and when they are threatened with being killed they start retreating.
On the art side, there's been a lot of great character portraits made by the artist, just take a look at these four!
Getting closer and closer to a demo I can release and I'm getting pretty excited! It's hard to tell if I can get something out before New Years since December is known as being the worst time to release anything, including just a demo. This means either late November or mid January are my targets but I'm going to try my best to buckle down and hit the November deadline.
If you want to follow Bright Red Skies more closely, follow me on Twitter, I always post the latest stuff there.