What's next?

Given that we’ve reached Macro March, it seems fitting to work on this game some more!

The update itself is pretty minor. I rearranged the UI a little and enabled some basic monster AI. This replaces the old “AI” checkbox on individual units – it’s enabled and disabled for the entire force now.

It also adds a radial menu! It’s a little wonky still; activate it by holding Z. Tap Z to just use the ability in the first slot as usual. I’d like to make the menu change the ability in that first slot, but that’ll come later.

Anyway, here’s what I’m thinking of doing next…

AI

I’ve already got the basics worked out for villagers, and the latest build introduces some basic monster AI as well. However, there’s still lots of work to do here.

Villagers will need to get more things to build (and more kinds of units to produce with those buildings). I haven’t thought too hard about what, exactly, that will entail – probably some mixture of light and heavy melee and ranged troops?

They’ll also need logic to handle combat. Notably, the worker units should probably run away when a monster gets near…

Monsters don’t need new features; they just need to get a bit of personality. For example, I’d like for AI-controlled monsters to claim territory and, for the most part, lurk within it. They should get bored and raid nearby settlements from time to time.

Villagers

As mentioned above, the non-monster factions need some more stuff to do. I don’t think this will be anything groundbreaking.

Monsters

I have better motion capture hardware now (i.e. even more VR trackers), so I’d like to refresh all of the existing animations. You can also expect to see some new abilities (like new kinds of vore).

Other stuff

• I want to create some scenarios, but I think I need to design a saving and loading system first…
• I’ll probably copy the menu system over from Predatory Pursuit, since it works pretty darn well.