Project Quantum Game Dev Diary — May 5th, 2022 — Jason Tennent

A happy belated May the 4th be with you to you all. We have some exciting news and goodies in here.

Design:

• Longer-term goal formulation
• Representative proof-of-concept gamemode
• MODEX loadout designs

We’re currently working toward and nearing having a playable gamemode of POC1 (Proof of Concept Milestone 1). This gamemode won't be the same a player may experience in a launch/public version of Project Quantum but it will serve to prove (or disprove) our ideas. This gamemode is much faster and reflects very nicely a lot of the core elements that our flagship gamemode will have (including MODEX customisation and losing MODEX pieces). We expect to have this up and running, with as few bugs as possible, in roughly a month. As you may expect, this is subject to change.

In this faster gamemode, each player chooses a starting preset MODEX loadout and enters the map. There are three teams of three. Each team is trying to acquire the most MODEX parts by eliminating opposing players and looting MODEX parts from them. Players need to safely bring these looted MODEX parts to safety and “bank” them. They can also customise their loadout throughout the game with their looted MODEX parts. This is cool because it allows for some pretty interesting combos to develop as the game goes on. After extracting, players can drop back in with a customised MODEX loadout.

Programming:

• AI
• Gamemode Setup
• UI Refresher

The programming side has been integrating some UI plugins to act as pseudo-placeholders. For the sake of proof-of-concept, it’s not necessary to build everything ourselves. This will elevate the look of the UI significantly, and save extra design time. While this is happening, they’ve also been setting up the systems for the proof-of-concept gamemode. They’re laying the foundations like building the functions that actually allow scoring, looting, loadout editing, and extracting/spawning.

Third and finally, we’ve also started to integrate AI systems into the project to fill empty places in teams. While AI can never truly replicate player behaviour, it will help us playtest quickly without having to arrange teams together. It also acts as a foundation for when we start programming AI for the indigenous creatures who roam and lurk around Charnel.

Art:

• Placeholder Weapon Models
• Placeholder MODEX Part Models
• “Family” Animations
• Cutscene Animation for proof-of-concept Gamemode

Since the new gamemode is so loot-intensive, we need plenty of weapons to loot. For now, we’ve chosen to go with quick production of lower fidelity assets for a number of reasons:

1. The art style isn't fully formulated so making assets at production quality now makes no sense.
2. It enables us to produce assets much faster rather than one or two weeks per asset.
3. It allows players to visually interpret information much more effectively (what weapon is that guy using? What style of MODEX do they have equipped? etc).

With those placeholder weapon models, we’ll need some “family” animations. What are “family” animations you ask? It's a phrase we’ve coined here where items of a similar type can use the same animations without looking terrible.

In this case, we’ve made animations for Pistols, Assualt Rifles, Heavy Machine Guns, etc., etc.. so that every weapon within that “family” will use the same animations. So every pistol, for the proof-of-concept, will use the same animations for reloading, firing, and running.

Now while it may not look perfect, it looks a lot better than using Assault Rifle animations for everything. It also means we don’t have to dedicate so much time to bespoke animation sets for every weapon and every action while wielding that weapon. Why you may ask? Same reasons as above.

This is a proof-of-concept we’re working toward, so going production launch quality is an unnecessary sink of time that is better utilised elsewhere.

Thank you for reading,

Jason Tennent, Design Director

If you’d like to join our game’s community well before its release date, I’d like to welcome you to our Discord here