Welp… another week, another build update. I’m sure I’m a bit too excited about having a real honest-to-god key configuration screen, but I’ll take the little victories. Hooray for Rewired!
Some bug fixes in UI are coming in also, but more important is the fact that options screens hold settings that persist across sessions. Yay quality of life!
Finally, the vehicle selection popup at the start gives you more information so you can pick a car that matches your playstyle.
Don’t worry, I’ll be back to the shooty-shooty kind of update next time. In the meantime you can go get v0.5.10 on Itch right here.
All the things. Pretty much highlighting the stuff I wrote about in the last post are ready for prime time. The best thing is that I finally got a settings screen in there. And, hey, a Quit Button (guh, can’t believe I dragged my feet on that).
I’ve had a pretty busy last month (and some weather drama), but luckily I did get some meaty things done on Auto Fire.
Controls
Many people have lamented that it is difficult to control Auto Fire because the “forward” key also accelerates. Responding to feedback, the new controls are thus: If you press forward, your speed is capped at 40 MPH (that is, 2 actions per second). This way you can manage most maneuvers without crashing into everything around you (previously a popular activity in urban areas).
Speed is still king however, especially out in the badlands! A separate Boost key is used to accelerate beyond 40, up to your vehicle maximum.
Citadels
A citadel is a civilized city where you can take a break, get repairs, and buy/sell items. Eventually different citadels will have their own specific functions, depending on which corporation owns it.
The cool thing is that you can now load up courier missions at a loading dock, giving you a non-combat way to earn more cash.
Cool Stuff
Gaw’bless Unity. It took like a half hour to put ragdolls on the soldiers.
I’ve also got some transition improvements, added new features in the overworld and improved the entrance/exit of areas.
We now save out fog of war between maps. (Whew that was annoying).
Quests work better! They’re improving all the time… but in this case I needed to create a quest on the fly when the player had to deliver cargo. This way I can use all the quest features like lists of rewards, player tracking, unique generated descriptions, and hooking into triggers such as arriving at a destination and showing quest markers.
Lame Stuff
Some significant bugs were also dealt with… I had previously been very diligent about properly and safely deleting entities, so that I wasn’t deleting them from a list I was parsing through. Unfortunately I wasn’t doing so when adding entities to the list. Thus C# was complaining at me nonstop, and it was nice to deal with that.
I also had a few remaining Entity pointers that I was saving across frames, which was not safe. I had changed everything over to a unique token method of tracking entities, but I had missed a few things previously. Again, good to get that out of the way and run some stress tests!
Some smaller updates to Auto Fire today… But since a good friend put the game through its paces on his stream, I discovered a number of bugs that I wanted to squash but quick:
Screen darkens behind popups, drawing your attention to the UI when necessary
Adjusted the vehicle view in the UI to reduce visual noise.
Bugs
All cars now have everything socketable and swappable. Locking equipment slots with fixed components is a feature, but not something I wanted to lay onto players at this early stage.
The equip popup now has a functional scrollbar, so you can use whatever you pick up.
Fixed hover information getting stuck if you exited the menu from the inventory screen
Fixed boss taunt popup issue
As always, it’s free right now, so go check it out on Itch!
Some new Auto Fire coming in! Check out what’s new:
New Equipment:
Mines: When anybody (including you!) moves adjacent to one, it arms and then explodes 1 second later. Be careful!
Oil Slick: Lay down a strip of this, and any cars that hit this immediately lose their grip… perfect for tight quarters like the city.
Flaming Oil: Leave behind a trail of flaming death. Sets whatever enters it on fire.
Wide Smokescreen: Create a whole volume of smoke, 3 across
Gameplay:
The player can choose one of three cars at start with different weapon and equipment loadouts:
The Stallion has 3 Junkthrowers, a smokescreen and an oil slick. Good starter vehicle if you’re just getting familiar with the firing arcs
The Panther puts 2 Bolt Rifles, one front and back, as well as a minedropper and smokescreen. Its longer range makes for stronger hit, but you’ll need to pay a bit more attention to your facing.
The Cricket is small but has a short-range machinegun on its front. It also can spray flaming oil behind it. Good vehicle if you wish to stay mobile.
Things can now be set on fire, for continuing DOT. Right now just hooked to the Flaming Oil, although other weapons including the flamer will definitely be dealing this out.
There are now two sizes of cities… There’s a medium-sized 64×64 city, and the old huge 100×100 city (which is much rarer). The appearance of the smaller city in the overworld map is different.
The default boss is far less overpowered now. Sorry ’bout that!
User Interface:
Automap icons for exits and garages
Title screen popup allows player to enter name and choose starting vehicle.
Health and armor UI over various enemies only appear when that component is damaged… reduces UI spam overall.
Took a unifying pass on my amateur-hour HUD, so that everything has a more consistent look. Thanks to my developer friends for the feedback!
The vehicle display is now unified with weapons and armor in a single location.
Weapon names now pop up on the vehicle display so you are clear what weapon (and what side) you’re firing.
Updated icons for some equipment
Status icons are larger and more attention-grabbing.
Audio:
New sounds for rockets, flamers, and cannons.
Stingers and music now doesn’t start until a map is fully loaded.
Ram and explosion sounds are replaced with less terrible ones.
Vehicle acceleration (and visual effects) only play when speed is actually gained, rather than when you press forward (so it adjusts to “coasting” once you hit max speed).
Visuals:
Rockets have new effects and sound
Car body shakes when moving at high speed, camera shakes less.
Overworld cars now visually swerve and arc like the cars in tactical maps.
The borders on terrain maps look a hair better.
Bugs:
Fixed some elements of map generations on height-mapped terrain (although there still is a bug in there).
The Homestead and Walled City (both of which were ugly temp maps with very little functionality) cannot be entered. Will be replacing them soon. They are marked as not being able to be entered in the overworld.
The Boss site in the city (which announced, temporarily and rather cheesily, “Here Comes the Boss”) no longer can be seen. It was intended to be a marker for system use, not player facing.
I’m starting to enhance the equipment now, and am looking forward to new usable items and updating the inventory for its use. The future is bright!
Another update to Auto Fire has come down the pike! A lot has happened in the last couple of months, so it’s great to get a build out…
Thanks to Itch.io for providing the app and the Butler tool so I can more easily post patches in the future. It’s like Steam for the rest of us. 🙂 Checking out Perforce and my Trello, here are some things that went down:
Added an automap so you can see where the hell you’re going. You can bring it up with the [Q] key.
Added a faction system. Each sector has a generated gang that rules it, and a boss that controls each combat zone. Defeating the boss clears the zone.
Boss arc now includes escalations that spur the bosses to taunt their forces and you with procedurally-generated shouts.
The quest system had some work done on it. Now the player is automatically assigned a quest to take out bosses of places they conquer.
You can check out the current quests in the Character menu, by pressing [Tab]
Quest completion now has a dialog box and some information on the results.
The encounter dialog has a new layout, and it shouldn’t justify its text strangely anymore.
The Shotgun soldiers are much less deadly than they were.
Unity 2018.3 update, which should improve terrain performance a bit.
Some of the road decals had dreadful performance, so exterior spaces run a bit better now as a result.
Toying around with a little bit more of an intro on the title screen.
Visuals:
I’m trying an outline shader on all gameplay objects to help them pop from the background.
Pulled up and adjusted the lighting to mellow some of the hard shadows that was creating visual noise. Terrain is a fair amount brighter now.
The garage looks a bit less out of place now. Still work to consolidate the colors.
Difficulty now represented with bullets.
Time slows when you die.
Bugs fixed:
Armor sides weren’t appearing on the vehicle with the proper direction.
Multiple Line of Sight fixes. You should not be able to be hit through obstructions now. Fog uncovering on the map, the fire arc grid, and actual combat should all reliable return the same LOS results.
The player was able to exploit a bug that allowed them to use any side weapon against enemies in any direction. Fixed.
Removed some visual stray VFX sprites on the scouts.
The (correct) car model appears again on the inventory and garage menus.
Exploding barrels had stopped harming things. Fixed now.
Vehicle models now have manufacturer logo in info.
I had a bit of a weird week because I was coming off the RoguelikeCel, but after the feedback I got I knew just what to focus on for this new update.
Get Auto Fire v0.5.01 on Itch.io
Enemy Cars
Enemy cars can shoot again!
Yeah sooooo I recently added some infrastructure so that player vehicles can have unique loadouts that are independent of the model of car itself. …annnnd while I got it all working for player vehicles, I broke the ability of enemy cars to have their own weapon loadouts too. So they didn’t actually have any weapons mounted. :-P Fixed!
Health Bar
The existing health post attached to vehicles in the world was straight up and down, and hence blocking the view of important info such as the state of the front weapon, or your speed when reversing. The style of the health bar is now adjusted to be a bit less disruptive.
Speed UI
The speed indicator was pretty rough, hard to see, and clunky to look at. A few things were done to improve this:
Smoothed out the speed indicator angle so it rotates more gracefully.
Improved the speed chevrons (both the green and red) to be more visible.
Added grip indicator for the player on top of the speed indicator, for the player car only.
Speed arrows and grip indicator grow in a more visually pleasing way.
Skidding functionality
So the previous model of vehicle skidding either gave you complete control or zero control. It never felt good since people’s instinct is to push against a skid in various ways to try to influence it.
I wanted skidding to be fun and also kind of do what you expect. So, it got a heavy overhaul:
The speed indicator now has a display of “hazard levels” beyond the speed itself. A broken chevron means that you are skidding more out of control.
The “hazard skid” levels supplement the standard “grip down to zero with a red speed indicator” style of skidding.
If you have a hazard skid, you can turn but can’t influence your movement.
If you are skidding but do not have any hazard skid levels, you can influence your movement by 45 degrees by accelerating to the side. Thus a skidding vehicle can still trace wider arcs.
You can accelerate or decelerate your skid by pushing towards or away from the direction of skid.
Skidding and grip now recharges more reliably based on whether you are facing in the direction of the skid.
So that’s it for now. I’m adding a little more info on the Itch page about the systems that Auto Fire (in its current state) will support for now. Someone asked for a 32-bit version, although I’m not sure I’d recommend older machines until I slim down some of my meshes. In the future I’ll put more work into optimization and alternate OS’es like Linux.
