This week in AV:

We're continuing our push to a solid MVP (Minimally Viable Product) which was slated for a few weeks ago, but a major bug was introduced that slowed production down for a few weeks. Fear not! We're back to full steam and have been making both visual and improvements which we'll try to highlight here.

Visuals

Because everyone likes pretty pictures

New Disc

The old Disc was dark, small, and didn't match the overall feel of the game. Though the new disc could still use some love, but I think it will stand out much better against the back drops.

Old	New

In the old disc image I left the new discs bounding box visible for reference on the size change.

City Level

Some work has been started on the MVP map. We're going to be leaning heavily into the 50-70s scifi pop art for inspiration. So mega cities are 100% a thing.

As you can see from the picture we're still blocking things out and determining the best balance between looks and performance. The buildings themselves will be created using a tool I designed for a game jam some time ago, but with everything the assets used in the tool need to be updated to match the game. Once that's done these images will really begin to pop!

Coding

AI

With all the base game mechanics done we're fine tuning the games flow and implementing bot AI. It's coming along slowly but has already created some funny results. With any luck we should have some videos to share in the next few weeks.

Game Flow

This has been a bit of a challenge since we don't really have a user base to get feed back on. But we believe (from our own experience) that we are getting much closer to what needs to happen in the local multiplayer mode. When we move on to LAN and internet games we're pretty sure the flow will need to change to better represent the game modes.

BIG BUG

For those wondering what kept us from releasing the MVP on time? Steam. That's right, in trying to upload and distribute to the worlds largest game store we had to enable the Steam SDK into the game, and with it, the Steam Overlay, which broke all of our input code! The problem wasn't hard to solve, but given the size of the team and the time we get to spend on developing the game it was a large time suck.

Thankfully that's all in the past now, and we have a Steam Page so that's awesome...

Conclusion

That's about it for the week, it doesn't seem like much from the outside, but with only 2ish hours a day to work on it every little movement towards release is worthy of report. As always feel free to ask questions or make suggestions in the comments.