As title explains, we have a demo due soon, check out or discord if you are interested in trying it out. https://discord.gg/H872Ev

As holidays are approaching we want to offer the chance for readers to discuss the concept that is Squad based RTS with us developers. You can find the discord here https://discord.gg/Dmnqyzr

This Sunday over the course of the day we will have discussions open for anyone to join and answer questions and talk about suggestions to our best ability.

You will see new things posted soon, a more proper map for example is underway as well as new assets that will bring us one step closer to the demo we want to release.

Stay tuned

If you read the previous blogs you may notice some additions in the images above. More gifs showcasing different things will come soon. But i chose these because they matched best out of the ones made with what feel we are going for. Making a squad based RTS some things are important to weed out first. The units you control that makes up the squad, since the player will be using them a lot, as well as the combat, highlighting and movement that comes with it. We have a model now at least replacing our previous little snowmen, and for clarity they are painted in team colours for testing purposes.

We have yet to fix the networked combat enough to test play properly with each others and others, but there’s progress over time, and it will continue. If all goes right we can release a free demo on itch before the course this is for is over (January) and if things goes smoothly we can keep working on the game after more long term.

For our game Hired in Hell the combat mechanics is gonna be key and most other things revolve around making the PvP enjoyable and functional with everything else. Line of Sight, pathing, all that we have talked about in previous posts come back to combat in the end. After testing it in its earliest stage we found some issues to solve. Unfortunately there’s not much to show in terms of footage but we want to convey that we are working with focus on that aspect. In terms of unit response to orders, unit and weapon models, effects and damage and ability balancing. We will elaborate more on all the fun stuff it entails in a week or two.

Right now the priority is to be able to fight player versus player in a typical game and implement a few different weapons as well as mechanics for taking cover that allows for some kind of damage reduction or other solution. Pictures of weapon and unit model examples will come up in short time.

One of the most important mechanics to get working properly when it comes to shooter games is Line of Sight, especially when you as we do plan on having cover-mechanics as well as terrain/object based LOS. As shown on the pictures below we have something working. The green lines indicate that the units can see each other, no lines means they cannot target anything.

Originally we had an indicator as well for when a unit just stopped seeing anything. Just as with the green lines this is all for our own developments sake.

Naturally players wont have this kind of indicator for when they can and cannot shoot a target, we will figure out visual and audio based feedback of a different kind. But one thing that will happen if you have vision of an enemy unit but cannot fire at it is that your unit will move towards it. This will mostly just happen with terrain requiring your unit to path around it to gain vision and LOS on the target. Units will also have different LOS depending on weapons and other factors not yet implemented. The objects giving cover on the pictures above will in almost all cases give only partial cover, which means that you can still shoot at them but with reduced damage and/or chance to hit. How exactly that behaves is not final.

Hired in Hell is the idea we have stuck to for the game name so far, it will become more apparent why as we have things to show for. However this is not what i meant to talk about in this blog-post. I will rather cover different subjects as we ego starting with ‘Maps’.

So on the screenshot provided you can see something we work with. Namely creating maps for our game, being a tactical top down shooter with primarily PvP we will need some variation in map layout so that players don’t have to do the same one over and over again until they get extremely tired of it. Building maps is done with the integrated terrain sculpting tool-set in Unreal as we don’t have time to make something of our own. This will suit our needs as we add stuff to it.

The green field on the picture represents the path-able area, since we have pathing for our units in the game as a necessity for them to move around obstacles and not just run in straight lines we implemented a calculation for the path-able areas based on how steep the terrain is. Everything 35 degrees or flatter can be walked on with the units. Being able to toggle this on and off in the editor helps significantly when shaping terrain and tweaking everything to look alright and work smoothly for the units to path on at the same time. Might make an update about this later but the priority is to cover different parts subsequently.

Welcome to ‘Toasted Bath Games’ world
We will be publishing regular updates on our game development progress here.

The game we are making is currently titled “Hired in Hell” and is going to be a small scale RTS game, think alike Xcom but real-time, or Fallout Tactics. You control four tough units with customisable loadouts in a sci-fi PvP setting. Elements of strategy and tactics as the aim is for more than just quick paced skirmishes.

The player themselves is the Contractor managing their squads gear and economy, hence the perspective and way we will refer to the play as a Contractor throughout the game. Expect screenshots, GIFs and possibly videos in the future to accompany each post.