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Frozen Synapse 2 - phase-based tactical combat in an open world

Lucky

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Apr 28, 2015
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Frozen Synapse was good. Haven't played Frozen Cortex.

They could be going for an open world map structure where you pick your assignments instead of following a storyline. Maybe add procedurally generated missions as well for more map variety. The units weren't visually distinctive to begin with, so you can already randomise those as you please with the only problem being mission balance.
 

vean

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I hope that doesn't mean that there'll any xcom-like management between missions.

The whole draw of FS were its puzzle-like levels where you were given a predetermined team to go against predetermined enemies with slight variations in level layout.

If level outcomes get to affect what happens in future levels it will ruin that completely.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Rather brief press release: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/pressreleases/265804/Mode_7_is_proud_to_announce_Frozen_Synapse_2.php

Mode 7 is proud to announce Frozen Synapse 2, an open world tactical game:

www.frozensynapse2.com

It will be out this year on PC, Mac and Linux.

More details will be revealed over the next few weeks. Enigmatic.

Logo: http://files.mode7games.com/fs2/img/fs2Logo.png

Screenshot: http://files.mode7games.com/fs2/img/screens/fs2screen1_full.png

Track from the soundtrack:

https://soundcloud.com/nervous_testpilot/complicity
 

Athelas

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Great news. Hopefully open-world means things like a more open mission structure (i.e. the game continues even if you fail the mission objective, as long as at least one unit survives).
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014


(Starts in 1:01:20)

Grand strategy layer on a procedurally generated city with faction interaction, heavily inspired by Alpha Centauri, heh.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Cool. The original Frozen Synapse's story already had Alpha Centauri-esque factions so maybe they've always been inspired by it.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


http://www.pcgamer.com/frozen-synapse-2-preview/

In most turn-based games you see the consequence of your decisions pretty quickly. You give the order to attack; bullets fly. Frozen Synapse delays that gratification, asking you to wait until you’ve given orders to each of your squad of vat-grown sci-fi soldiers before showing the results, because those results play out simultaneously with your opponent’s—a machinegunner rounds a corner and is surprised by a shotgun blast while a grenadier ducks behind cover before a sniper can line up his shot, and a rocket harmlessly demolishes a wall several seconds after everyone behind it has buggered off.

What prevents all that action from being confusing is that it all plays out in abstract neon shapes. Everything in Frozen Synapse is seen through “the shape”, a digital overlay that clings to the future city of Markov Geist like a pair of yoga pants, making it readable at a glance.

Frozen Synapse was released by Mode 7 in 2011, and its success surprised creators Ian Hardingham and Paul Kilduff-Taylor. While many multiplayer-focused indie games languish, unable to attract or maintain the critical mass of players needed to make finding a match hassle-free, Frozen Synapse’s design makes it easy to have multiple games going at once, taking turns and then being alerted when one of your opponents had done the same. Plus, lag isn’t an issue. You can still find a game today.

Five years later, Hardingham and Kilduff-Taylor think it’s time for a sequel. They’ve been working on it since June of last year, recently announcing it with a screenshot and the words “Open World Tactics” and “Coming 2016”.

Towers of commerce and faith
So why are these factions fighting? There’s a mysterious external force making incursions into Markov Geist to uncover valuable long-lost artifacts, and the city’s cults and gangs are competing for them as well. An alert on the city screen will warn you of each incursion and it’s up to you how to respond.

While Mode 7 says that knowing the story of the first game isn’t necessary, Frozen Synapse 2 is set after it, with its citizens attempting to rebuild and forge new alliances. “Because you have these generated cities each time it’s gonna be a different version, a different hypothetical city,” says Kilduff-Taylor. “This is about the idea of the city as a very complex compromise between different ideologies. Each faction will have its own ideology, they will relate to the incursion force in a different way. Some of them might want to enslave it and use it for their own goal, some of them might want to research it, some of them might want to ally with it and have it take over the city.”

He cites Darran Anderson’s bookImaginary Cities as an inspiration, “He talks a lot about cities as being reflective of ideologies and I though that was a really interesting idea, this idea of towers of commerce and faith, that buildings represent different points of an ideology and they’re all trying to reach towards competing goals. It was an idea that I wanted in Frozen Synapse 1 but we had to convey that with linear missions, whereas here we can have a real living city with these real personalities all competing,”

Beyond the complicated warring belief systems, there are elements you might associate with a more typical open world game. Hardingham gives an example: “You can go and piss off faction A, you can take the weird church and go attack one of their temples and see what happens. They’re probably gonna attack you, they’re gonna ask their friends to attack you. All that stuff you’re completely free to do at any time.”

As Kilduff-Taylor puts it, you can either choose which factions to side with to push for a specific endgame, or “you can also decide to be nonsense and to prat around as well. It’s important to me that we manage to find a way of having a really strong story without railroading how the player feels they should play at all.”

As for the player, they’ll be in charge of a small group who have been sent into the city to deal with the situation however they prefer. “We want you to have an open remit,” Hardingham says. “You’re there to find out what’s going on with this incursion force and why it’s coming in and attacking the city, and to manage everything to create some kind of power balance or establish some kind of order. It’s up to you to define what order that is.”

On multiplayer and sneakiness
The first screenshot of Frozen Synapse 2 revealed details that weren’t present in the original game. There’s more variety to the objects that can be used as cover, including a car and trees outside the building, and what looks like a toilet inside it. (Obviously video game toilets are Very Important.) Separating the inside and outside is a wall with a curved section, something else the first Frozen Synapse did without. It may seem a slight change, but it’s an illuminating one.

But as nice as the campaign’s procedurally generated city sounds, it won’t be a feature of the multiplayer mode. “It’s just too big a challenge to do at this stage,” explains Hardingham. “I think the primary thing for multiplayer above all else is probably the new units. In singleplayer we have all these new units and we also have stats, basically it’s based around signing mercenaries that are a kind of FS archetype but will have different stats and different perks. In multiplayer we expand on the original roster of six different kinds of units with another seven or eight units that we spent a lot of time designing.”

Those units aren’t just new varieties of gun. They’re designed to interact with another new feature: stealth. Both singleplayer and multiplayer will allow units to sneak into position before everything kicks off. “Being unseen and sneaking around is a huge part of it,” Kilduff-Taylor says, “and if the AI spots you then units will go to defensive positions and others will come round and attack you and try and flush you out. We’ve got some new units that are relevant to that kind of gameplay.”

They’re tight-lipped about most of those new units, but Hardingham mentions one favorite, “a smoke grenade launcher, which is really nice because it allows you to create a dynamic bit of terrain, in some ways a short-term bit of terrain, so I hope that gives the idea of the kind of thing that we’re talking about. Any new unit has to fit in perfectly with the really hardcore mechanics of FS, and what’s FS all about? It’s about sight and prediction and preparedness and being able to plan really cool, complicated stuff.”

Another new feature that will particularly change the multiplayer is what they’re calling “advanced tactics”, a new set of orders that can be programmed into troops to tell them how to react to changing events as they occur: “if X happens, switch to plan Y.” That’s a big change, but smaller ones are in the works as well. “We’re just trying to deal with a few of the problems people have with the first game,” says Hardingham. “We had a problem with people abandoning games, we’re gonna be working really hard to fix that. There was a specific ploy in multiplayer called the distraction ploy¹ that I’m not a particular fan of, we’re getting rid of that.”

Interface/off
Frozen Synapse has a tricky interface to come to terms with, and it takes a while to realize how to get the most out of it. It’s easy enough double-clicking to set waypoints but when it comes to telling a soldier to glance in one direction while walking in another, or ignore a close enemy to focus on a distant one, things got trickier. “We had an additional feature in the first game where you could define a zone and then ignore it or do other things related to it,” Kilduff-Taylor says. “The interface for that was quite poor so we’re going to make a good interface for zones.”

Rather than drastically rethinking the interface as a whole, they’d rather come up with better ways to teach it. “What we have to do is try and understand what a new player experience is like for this kind of game and really, really make an effort to improve that as much as we humanly can,” Kilduff-Taylor explains. “It’s about giving people a very very powerful toolset. If you look at any software that does that, music software, video editing software, that kind of thing, the UI always has a steep learning curve at the start. There really is no way round that.”

"It’s about giving people a very very powerful toolset."
He goes on to praise his colleague’s work on the campaign map interface. “If you just want to be supplied missions, you just want to click through and do the missions, you can definitely do that. If you want to get into micromanaging which road your squad takes or exactly which address you’re gonna go to on the way, do everything manually, you’ll be able to do all that as well. We’ve been playing around with this a bit and I really really like how he’s designed that system. A lot of that came out of some of the work we did later on with Frozen Cortex, with doing a complex management simulation, making that accessible and immediate.”

Frozen Cortex was Mode 7’s future football game, a kind of Tron Blood Bowl. There’s an overlap between football and strategy games, not just that you’re controlling a team of specialists, but managing their changing abilities in the downtime. While they acknowledge the urban warfare of X-COM: Apocalypse as an influence, NFL Head Coach also comes up. “That was the first sports game I saw that really nudged you along and helped you during the off-season know when it was the right time to be deciding to cut your punter,” Hardingham explains. “People want this deep simulation that they’re interacting with, but they don’t want to feel like they’re doing the wrong thing and they’re gonna lose a 20-hour playthrough because they don’t know what they’re doing. Balancing that is hard.”

Now entering the conclusion phase
One final detail of interest to Frozen Synapse fans: Kilduff-Taylor is composing the music again. Frozen Synapse’s soundtrack is one of its most-praised elements, shifting from the pummeling electronic beats and synthesized strings of an action movie to an ethereal voice like a machine intelligence echoing through a glass skyscraper. Kilduff-Taylor receives messages from new fans discovering his music to this day, and he’s so excited to be working in this style again he’s completed the sequel’s soundtrack already. “I think it’s the best work I’ve done and I just got the masters back yesterday and it all sounded great. I can’t wait to play it to people.”

Mode 7 played a live demo of Frozen Synapse 2 on stage at thePC Gamer Weekender earlier this month. Kilduff-Taylor says it’s earlier than they would normally show their work, but they’re too excited to hold back. “We’ve talked up this procedurally generated city but it’s real. We’re playing with it right now. It has gameplay. You can do this thing where you zoom down into the city and play a tactical encounter. There’ve been so many instances of people trying to aim really high with this stuff but not necessarily having the foundation of the gameplay, and we want to get on the stage and go look, this works, right now! And it only crashes occasionally!”

“Our real target at the moment is to work really hard on delivering the kind of beta early access launch that we’re known for,” Hardingham says, explaining they will definitely release in 2016. “That’s absolutely something that’s going to happen. The most important thing for us is getting the game into a really solid early access release.”

Five years on, Frozen Synapse’s simultaneous turns are still unusual. There have been plenty of other games about small-squad tactics, but none have approached the genre in the same way. “I have a combative design philosophy where I’m taking a bunch of things that I don’t like in games and trying to do the complete opposite,” says Hardingham. “For how popular FS is, it is a bit surprising that it’s still so unique, but we definitely feel that it is. FS2 needs to be as unique again.”

¹The distraction ploy allows you to defeat a single enemy in a better position by using one of your troops as, well, a distraction. Move the first unit into the open for a second, then back into cover while moving the second unit out. The enemy wastes a precious instant targeting the first unit and is unable to refocus on the second until it’s too late. The designers dislike it both for being against the principles of the game, and for being fiddly to pull off. It works, but it’s no fun.
 

ColCol

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Jul 12, 2012
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How will units work now, I wonder?
 
Last edited:

ColCol

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In what little game play we have seen the team you command was always vastly outnumbered. I wonder with stats and upgrades if your team will be able to survive more than one hit.
 

Infinitron

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https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...ign-and-inspirations-behind-frozen-synapse-2/

From Alpha Centauri To Apocalypse: The Design And Inspirations Behind Frozen Synapse 2
Adam Smith on April 20th, 2016 at 9:00 pm.

fs21.jpg


Frozen Synapse 2 [official site] is, without a doubt, one of the most exciting games I’ve ever seen. I’ve spent a long time considering how best to put my thoughts about it into words, having met with Paul Kilduff-Taylor, composer of lovely electronica and co-founder of Mode 7 Games, to see how development was progressing. The simple fact is, it ticks so many boxes in the ‘dream game’ column that extreme enthusiasm is entirely appropriate. Here’s why.


When I met with Kilduff-Taylor, I had plenty of questions. The reveal of the game’s procedural cities had filled my brain with all kinds of ideas regarding how both the short-term tactical combat and the long-term strategies might play out.

Would factions behave as proper entities in the game world, with their own duties and objectives? Would it be possible to zoom into any area in one of the infinite cities and get an impression of its purpose in the grand scheme of things? In short, would the game simulate as much as possible, creating a sense of life and events unfolding, rather than simply providing a randomised canvas for the player to decorate?


As I was given a guided tour of a pre-generated city (the procedural tools were working but take a great deal of time and are imperfect in this early build), every question I asked met with the response I was hoping for. Emergency services will respond to events when needed, civilians can be caught in the crossfire and buildings aren’t just decoration – they have functions and owners.

I’ve always wanted to see a developer take some of the ideas in X-COM: Apocalypse and run with them. A strategy game set in a living city, with organisations that provide both services and resistance. While Mode 7 acknowledge the influence of MicroProse’s hugely ambitious game, Kilduff-Taylor tells me that Alpha Centauri is an even bigger influence, in terms of how factions behave. They have their own ideologies and objectives, and, most importantly, they have agency. They will act as well as reacting.

cortex2.jpg


When the game begins, each faction will have control of an area of the city and they will perform a role within that zone. The catalyst for the events that kick off the strategic struggle is a series of incursions by a force as yet unknown. They might strike at an area controlled by the player or they might strike at an AI faction. Either way, their efforts will cause the shape of the city to change as they gain power and drive organisations to desperate survival measures.

Control doesn’t involve simply owning areas of the map though. Kilduff-Taylor talks about ‘painting the map’ in a pejorative way. You’re not trying to cover the whole city in your colour through direct conquest, instead you’ll be identifying useful resources or locations and attempting to ease access to those things using brute force or misdirection.

A simple example plays out. We need money so we storm a bank. It’d be possible to use stealth, performing a careful heist, but this time the squad goes in all guns blazing. Even so, there are a few ticks of quiet tension as our infiltrators move into position. As soon as the guards spot them, they respond, but not in the way you might expect.

cortex6.jpg


Rather than returning fire and calling for backup, causing every unit on the map to zero in on the attacking squad’s position, the guards use their artificial brains to figure out what’s actually important. What should they be doing right now?

Engaging in a shoot-out on the bank’s periphery, in a lobby, doesn’t seem like a particularly smart use of their lives, so they set up defensive perimeters around the vaults and other items of interest instead. They take a good guess as to why your squad might be attacking the bank in the first place – to steal cash or important data hidden in secure deposit boxes – and they react accordingly.

The encounter plays out using the rules of engagement laid out in the original Frozen Synapse. You give orders and then advance time to watch those orders play out as the AI acts simultaneously. In this particular version of events, a guard fumbles a smoke grenade and ends up lost in the clouds, while our squad make their way into the building, killing as they go.

cortex1.jpg


There will be gas grenades as well as smoke grenades and seeing them in action is a reminder of how elegant the game’s aesthetics can be. The gas forms a circle around the explosion but that circle will deform as it hits walls, trees and other objects in the environment. It looks like a fluid, spreading and reshaping itself around obstacles.

The biggest change from the original game, in terms of the tactical combat, is in the early stages of each encounter. Rather than starting in media res, with combat the only option, you’ll have time to scout out the building and enemy patrol routes. The vehicle that your squad arrives in is customisable, which began as an aesthetic choice but became an important mechanic. Because you’ll be arriving at street level, with little cover in sight, the design of the vehicle will allow you to create cover for your squad, ensuring they’re not completely exposed.

You’ll be able to use all manner of loadouts to get the job done, whatever the job might be on any particular mission. Squads are made up of units based on ‘vatforms’. You buy the rights to a form and can then replicate it whenever the current version perishes. That means there’s no permadeath – once you’ve bought the rights to an individual, you can recreate that same person, with a persistent portrait and stats, at will.

Kilduff-Taylor admits that something is lost in terms of emotional attachment when units are effectively immortal but the fact that the same characters will be accompanying you through an entire campaign should create a different kind of attachment. You might not be afraid of losing them but they’ll be involved in plenty of stories, allowing you to impose plenty of character traits on them should you so desire.

cortex4.jpg


The battle for the city isn’t fought with guns and vatformed soldiers alone though. Frozen Synapse 2 is a game about control of information.

When you click on a faction on the map screen, you can talk to them and declare your intentions or try to smooth over any recent ‘misunderstandings’. Deeper than that though, Mode 7 are considering systems that will allow you to intercept communications between factions – that might be a way to learn about movement of squads, the strength of incursions or the location of important resources.

Clicking on a building opens up a different interface, showing everything you know about the factions that are likely to be present there and any objects or information that you might be able to steal or otherwise secure. If you choose to send a squad to the building, the game will identify objectives based on what is present in the scene. An enemy faction is holed up there? You can choose to assault the building. A vault full of cash? You can try to pull off a heist.

But you might simply want to loiter, exerting pressure. When you arrive at the scene – and squads will physically move around the map and can even encounter one another en route to a building at which point the game will generate a map based on the street where you meet for combat purposes – you can leave your soldiers outside, encouraging the controlling faction to react rather than initiating contact. You could even call them, laying out a list of demands.

cortex3.jpg


Just as they’ll react believably within the tactical mission spaces, factions will make moves on the strategic map. As well as moving their squads around the city, they can issue contracts. If they want to get something done but don’t have the tools or standing to do it themselves, a contract will be listed and another faction might pick it up, forming a temporary alliance. The interplay between AI entities should lead to a convincingly dynamic environment, all undercut by the incursions from outside that threaten everyone.

Both layers of the game, the tactical and the strategic, are driven by intelligent systems that don’t just simulate behaviour but encourage participation. Ideally, you’ll be able to nudge a particular faction and see a convincing response – whether it’s the hunkering down of a militarised faction or the violent onslaught of vicious cult – and then you’ll be forced to react to the AI when it pushes back.

There’s an enormous amount of work to be done but there’s a sense of calm around development. Even as I was showing signs of astonishment at the scope of the simulation, Kilduff-Taylor insisted that every element of the game sensibly led into the next.

cortex5.jpg


“We weren’t sure that stealth would work, but it does – it worked right away, in fact – so that’s good. Frozen Cortex was very important because it forms the middle-ground between the two Synapse games. It was the point when we realised that introducing stats for units didn’t upset the simplicity, and that it became a sort of metagame in and of itself.

“We’re moving away from the blocky buildings of the first game. There are curved walls, trees, cars that you can vault over. We’re implementing parks and outdoor areas as well, with water and rocks, and mabe even tunnel networks. It’s all a case of adding to a foundation that has already been tested though. We didn’t know Frozen Synapse would become something so big but as soon as we realised it could…

“There are still things that we’re not sure about. You might be able to steal data that gives you information about a faction’s plans, for instance, but we don’t know how valuable information will be until we’ve put it in the hands of players. We need to know how useful it is before we decide what to conceal and what to reveal.”

Speaking of his colleague and Mode 7 co-founded Ian Hardingham, who is handling most of the coding single-handedly though with some freelance support, Kilduff-Taylor describes him as “a very particular sort of programmer. That’s what it takes to build something like this.” I get the sense that the level of trust and awareness of those particular qualities runs both ways – this is a big game that perhaps necessarily had to be made by a small studio, with a detailed knowledge of their own capabilities. In person, I get the paradoxical sense that this most ambitious of games isn’t actually that much of a stretch at all.

“It’s a very complex game. And that’s fine. It works. It’s all fine.”
 
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Liked the first one. Will probably get this one too. I'm hoping we get a dark mode campaign this time. It was the most fun nice for multiplayer, when you didn't know where the enemies would be
 

vean

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Looks great. I like the contrast between the blue interface and the green city.

Hope they show some complete map gameplay soon.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://medium.com/@mode7games/frozen-synapse-2-dev-update-1-incursions-d556d5ff6ae0#.ld4bzw3pp

Frozen Synapse 2 Dev Update #1: Incursions
Hello! Every time I talk about this game, people tell me they didn’t realise we were making it. If that’s the case, have a look at the trailer here.

Frozen Synapse 2 takes the combat system from the original and uses it to underpin a vast grand strategy game:


1*W7nbw0ZY__1gD2FwRoXXMQ.png

Markov Geist: the regenerated city

With FS1 we focussed on Laser Squad Nemesis as our basis; taking the core of its situational gameplay and refining it.


1*vuCU_mSvicOMT3e7kJQxgA.jpeg

I used this slide in a presentation and said “LSN by the amazing Julian Gollop” then looked up and Julian Gollop was standing there looking at me

In FS2, we’re taking inspiration from Xcom Apocalypse:


1*5ctsH5ir5N71Ha05Z_3n6A.jpeg

I like how cars just explode for no reason in this game

We’re trying to refine what was cool about having a weird persistent city map full of activity, with rival factions vying for control.

Apocalypse is really useful from a design standpoint because, as well as the freeform city, it also has a good blueprint for a core structure. Tasked with repelling the invasion, your number one priority is always to deal with incursions as they arise.

In FS2, we’ve adopted a similar scheme: you’re required to respond to the escalating severity of attacks on the city and its power structures.

We call these events “Incursions”. From very early in the game’s development, we knew we had to have some kind of strong progression for the player alongside the more ambiguous machinations of grand strategy. You still play factions off against each other, make and break treaties or make ambitious diplomatic plays but you’ll also have a definitive yardstick by which to measure your progress.

There are two types of Incursion: major and minor. Major incursions will take place on levels which are largely hand-crafted, with a specific enemy unit composition. This will allow us to do some narrative stuff as well as some scripted enemy behaviour.

Minor incursions can happen basically anywhere on the map, in any type of building. They’re defined in a few ways — the number and nature of enemy units; different types of spawn configuration etc — but they’re effectively entirely generated. They also scale up in difficulty as the game progresses.

Ian (Ian Hardingham — Lead Designer and Programmer) made a nice little interface for testing the different levels of minor Incursion, meaning I can just simply click on any building and trigger one right there:


1*SqE9NxVQy0F9kPe2pKd7Dg.png

Here’s some early results from the minor Incursion generator:


1*kAwVpaYspgbucMvYfOYk9A.png


1*yRJcPmPlnw-RR7_Fn71pjA.png

There are some nice things going on here — Ian’s brilliant work to create generators which can adapt to any building shape is on display, plus we’ve got some sane unit compositions in relatively sane positions.

The text stuff there represents objects which will be found on these missions. By defeating Incursions you’ll receive “relics” (or “ArtInt Shard” in bewildering placeholder language). These have also been placed reasonably well; occasionally a unit will carry them around as well, which is cool and mixes things up a bit.

One problem we spotted with this was that the generator had become obsessed with placing units “outside” buildings. This was something to do with a system which was originally intended to make sure you started next to cover.

Once that was fixed, things went up a level:


1*aWKASWKY44P1qf15_TemHQ.png

This looks like a fairly “classic” FS level to me…and it’s completely generated! Ian added a tweak which now means units spawn facing in different directions, and instantly you have more “realistic”, tactically valid scenarios:


1*frXtmpzc1i7dD6Kh551N-w.png


1*ia04-3v0-a-JxjEsaWJbIA.png

There’s lots of different minor variation we can do here, and loads more stuff to go in, but essentially this means that you can go anywhere here…


1*8c8asllgTlIE0W2GKmCFUA.png

…and have a plausible tactical experience waiting for you.

This is a huge milestone for the game; it’s not the kind of thing you can shout about with a trailer or send out a big press release about. But it’s a stage which matters so much: FS2 is now properly playable to a meaningful extent, and we can start the major content push which will take us into beta.

What’s Next
If I take a look at our Trello right now the following things are in progress…

  • Writing for the core faction interactions on the map
  • Avatars for faction leaders
  • Icons and 2D map objects like cars
  • Implementation of weapon effects for new units
…some of that will allow us to release a new trailer fairly soon, which is good as we’re slightly overdue on that.

That’s it for now — I’ll be back with more soon.
 
Joined
May 5, 2014
Messages
1,677
I didnt realize there was Gollopian influence in Frozen Synapse.
Neat.
 

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