I've got another big update to Gearbits! Read all about the new features here!

New missions!

The most significant feature in this update is the new missions. These are important because they are made with a new, more modular style of level creation. The test missions I made earlier were made in a pretty stupid manner. The entire mission had a single script that controlled everything.

A lot of missions are going to need you to destroy a certain number of enemies. Or to protect some target. So I made templates of these mission types that can be duplicated easily. I can re-use the scripts for the more common parts of the missions, and I only have to make new code for the unique parts. That seems much smarter, but let’s hope that hindsight doesn’t reveal some horrible flaw in this clever plan.

New Playable Unit!

The GR-05 Regulus has been in the game for a while now. But now is its official reveal! This unit has a different skeleton than the others. All the units use the same skeleton, which allows them to run the same animations. But due to the Missile hatches and the back thrusters on the GR-05, I added some new bones to its skeleton. Despite the new bones, I managed to get the animations working without issue. hopefully I’ll be as successful when adding the other playable units.

New weapons!

The new weapons were created in a bit of a backwards way. Instead of making weapons for the player to use, I made these weapons for the enemies. I tried to come up with new kinds of weapons for the enemies, since at the moment they only have bullets and missiles. I wanted the rockets and energy balls to be new kinds of projectiles for the player to dodge. I also revamped the NPC weapon system. It’s now more modular and versatile, so that should help with increasing the enemy variety.

New enemy type!

The the spider drone is combination of several different features already in the game. It uses the animation controller for the alien bugs. It uses the target locating script of the tanks and it uses the weapons script from the enemy GBs. This enemy was created because I realised that I had all the pieces to make something new, so I did. Hopefully I’ll come up with some interesting uses for this new enemy type.

This will probably be that last update in a while. If i’m planning to sell that game I need to start making some actual content. So hopefully the next big update will be the playable demo for the full version of Gearbits! That’s the plan anyway, Let’s hope that I can stick to it.

If you want to help, you can do so by playing the game and telling me your thoughts. Since i’m the sole developer, there might be some horrible oversights that are invisible to me, but obvious to an outsider. It helps to know what players think about the game, but it also helps to have more people know about the game. So spread the word and get more people to play it. I know I should probably start looking into shilling my game a bit harder and asking for feedback more aggressively.

That’s all for now. I’ll take a break and start making some more content for the game.