Em-8ER is a game of survival, crafting and fighting giant Kaiju. You craft everything in Em-8ER, including your Omniframe MEKs (Frames for short), weapons, abilities and more.
The end game activity in Em-8ER is, among other things, taking part in the massive invasions that happen across the planet. Hordes of alien Tsi-Hu and their Kaiju warbeasts attack player built bases and attempt to capture hard-won territory that players must defend or risk losing.
In addition to crafting mechs, you will also be able to craft vehicles and upgrade player bases with turrets and improved defenses. These vehicles are personalized to you and your own specifications, since you are the one who crafted them. One of these vehicles is the Em-8ER Tank.
While you’ve seen concepts of the Em-8ER tank before, we are pleased to unveil the 3D whitebox blockout models for the first time, courtesy of HeineSnow. HeineSnow originally created the tank as fan art, but we recognized it was fantastic and made a deal to use them for the game itself.
The whitebox and blockout phase for creating a vehicle consists of quick, rapid modeling to lay in the basic shapes and profile of the vehicle. Not everything drawn in 2D translates well to 3D, and this is our chance to make changes and verify that the design on paper will work in the game.
For vehicles with moving parts, it is also important to test the range of motion and mechanical consistency of the movements. Basically, everything has to make sense and work mechanically. The only way to do this is to rig and animate the whitebox 3D blockout. Below you can see a test of the Em-8ER Tank’s deployment into siege mode.
Next up will be a testing of the scale we will need to model the interior of the tank. The plan is for every vehicle in Em-8ER to eventually have interiors and be fully pilotable. We feel this is the new standard in MMO immersion, as pioneered by Star Citizen and now propagated to games like Elite: Dangerous and Starfield.
As great as the tank is, we are pausing work on it for now. The most important work, and our current priority, is creating the new line of Omniframes to be featured in the Kickstarter Playable Mockup. The mechanical design and proportions of the new light frame were especially challenging.
We had a lot of trouble fitting the leg armor to the characters and ensuring the mechanical knee joints worked correctly. After going through 3 different versions, we are currently at a place where we can test poses with the Light Omniframe:
This limited sneak peek gives you an idea of how we test our frames. While nowhere near finished, we are confident enough now to make final tweaks to this test model and will see how it works in the game before we proceed to high poly modeling.
We’re excited about the progress so far, and hope to share more development updates with you soon. In fact, next week’s Chief Chat on Thursday, the 23rd at 11am PDT will announce some major news for the game! Don’t miss it and be sure to join our discord server!
See you next Thursday!
