State Of The Game

Since it's been a fair while since anyone heard anything from us, I figured I'd do a quick update as to where everything is at

Art

The Corpus crewmen are in the middle of being cut up into pieces, so that we can use the same body sprite (but with different colouring) for each type of crewman, and then just attach the correct weapon to it. This will allow us to only have to make stuff like electrocution/burning/frozen/etc animations a single time, and then use them across all crewmen

Audio

Quite a few audio tracks have been made, and now just need to be added to the game's main playlist. Eventually, they'll be split up based on the faction/mission type that they're most suited to, but at the moment we only have a single mission, so that's where all the audio goes

We have a new addition to the team, specialising in sound effects, so expect to see (or rather, hear) more of them in the near future!

Engineering

No real progress on the feature side, sadly - none of the programmers have had much free time in the last few months. There is however some work being done to convert the project from Java to Kotlin (no real functional difference, but the code tends to be nicer to work with, which has the potential to speed up future development). Kotlin is also compeltely interoperable with Java, so we can migrate the project 1 piece at a time. The move to Java 9 modules is also underway, which will allow us to ship the game with the Java runtime (which Kotlin still uses), instead of asking players to download Java before they can launch the game, and also let us use bleeding-edge features, which should be a nice quality of life improvement. Conveniently, we only have to ship the bit of the runtime that we actually use, so the size of the game shouldn't increase massively (entire runtime that you normally have to download is hundreds of megabytes, whilst the amount we'll include will probably be tens of megabytes). Also, the Itch.io app will only re-download this part if it's been updated :)

Story

Plenty of background progress here; we're currently toying with the idea of splitting the game up into a couple of "acts", with each one focusing on a different Warframe and set in a different location, but with the same overarching storyline. This will let us keep things interesting by changing up gameplay with different powers, weapons and enemies, whilst keeping everything coherent enough to still be classed as 1 game. It also means that we'll get to use even more Warframes in any sequels!

Conclusion

Although nothing much has changed on the surface, a fair amount of work has been going on in the background, and it's only a matter of time before that work manifests itself in visible changes.

Until then, we'll see you in the Void, Tenno

Ezard (programmer)