http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=394096234

Since much of the team use to work on much bigger games, our biggest challenges has honestly been learning to adapt to creating games as an indie. How do you create a quality game with an ultra small team and limited resources? If properly embraced, it can result in a very novel experience.

Case in point: Could we create an experience that has some of the complexities of a bigger battle, like something you would play in such games like Battlefront or Starhawk, but boiled down to something more accessible for the gamer, and creatable (is that word? Nah...) for a small team. Something that feels novel.

Our initial solution: The POI. Otherwise known as a point of interest.

Spark Rising's core gameplay is built around our conquest mode, where you conquer one world after another. As you can see from the image above, it's possible to have several types of bases, or interesting locations in one world. Our worlds are relatively small compared with the endless experience of something like Minecraft, but they are quite a bit larger than the 256x256 voxel maps we had in Spark Rising Early Access 1.0, or even something from most FPS shooters. This size allows for faster paced gameplay, without having to slog through traveling here and there, while also giving you more freedom to tackle a world map as you please.

Each of the bases, just based on the name, should evoke some sort of understanding of its effect in the world. For instance, an enemy bunker isn't just filled to the brim with tons of enemies. It also can function as back up reinforcements to other POI if they are under attack. Thus taking out an enemy bunker before trying to take out an HQ might be prudent.

But wait... There's a radar jammer on the world map. That suggests some sort of negative effect on your mini-map radar. Could make it difficult to map your strategy. Maybe you should take that out first.

Or wait... There's a weapon's depot. Perhaps stocking up on better weapons is prudent first move.

A simple concept, right? Ultimately, your goal is to conquer the world, but you now can try to do so in various ways, adding a lot of strategic possibilities.

That being said, we hardly call this game a strategy game! It is still at its heart an arcadey FPS. But we love the idea of taking big game concepts and making something fun, fast, and accessible. While big AAA studios make their big Battlefield games, we're gung ho about trying to distill that experience down into something that you can just jump into and play and have fun!

you know i like the idea here interms of gameplay but what i see really shinning here with the POIs is multiplayer
i imagine an enemy strong hold where i in a stompier exo bust threw the wall wtih a charge and start wrecking enemy bots with melee as my freind jetpacks to the top of that wall and begins picking off turrets and other high value targets wtih range using his much smaller exo ezwuipd with a nice rifel( prefferbly a fancy looking one with some shiny bits on it)
another freind of mine could also has a stompy exo but his has little melee ability and instead has morters he can help with
thats how i see this game evolving as an assault based game where you and your freinds work to take out each enemie base with its uniquely generated chalanges
hopefully finding better and better gear along the way
just throwing this out their as a concept

@zombie dude. Yeah, love that idea! We'll see how well the different types of exo-suits compliment each other. The game has evolved to be more sandboxy in nature, so there aren't distinct classes anymore, but rather ways for you to customize at this stage from various guns, chips, mods, etc. We'll see how that plays and if people prefer more distinct classes.

So we just wrapped up version 2.3 and we finally decided to do some behind the scenes clean up work with the UI code. We been using NGUI for UI, and that software has been sunset. Why? Because Unity hired the guy who created it to work on their own UI system which was released in Unity 4.6!

The good news is that it's very similar to what we been use to, so it hasn't been that much of a headache redoing it all. Add bonus is that we're early on enough in the process that we have minimal UI changes to make.

That being said, it was a couple of days work just to do that. The sort of thing where there's no glory in doing it, but you know you just gotta bite the bullet and suck it down. Much kudos to Jonathan for finally making it happen!

We did move things around in the HUD. The fancy UI design we had before has been stripped, so that for now it's entirely functional. It's generally bad practice to lock in a visual style this early on, because it tends to deter you from making changes to the UX (user experience) when even moving a button around can be alot of extra work once you finalize art. But this runs counter to how early access games probably should work... I think our middle ground compromise should work for both our devs and for the fans. We want to make sure we don't lock ourselves into too many things that can't be changed when we get good feedback.

So things are moving along. POI system seems to be working, weapon system seems to hold up, UI system migrated over, and we're getting close to the next update which we'll share publicly!

i only just saw this so a late reply but to what you said in reply to me
the idea i mentioned did not really need defined clases beyond the basic exos acting as your begininng choice of prefrence but instead really thrived around your idea of mixing and matching whats found to build your bot up how you want
thriving with working together to take down an armoury type poi just to get a freind a gun type hes far better with
maybe working on a poi type that would provide sheild type upgrades and so my more melee orinted heavy hitter can take the kind of hits hes dealing
so we wouldent just be working together to assault buildings for the fun of it or for story progression but for the player to play how they want to and grow hopefully how theyd like to seeing as its random generation after all
and the best part is maybe a "dungeon" doesnt have what you need but youl still have fun working to bring it down helping to qualm the anger of bad loot out of a raid
maybe adding in something to make the enmies more agressive the more bases you take down would also help with this

and at the end of the day on your end its all just well thought out enemy structures with well done tiered loot pools put in a good terreian generation system witch is hard but you guys seem the type to make it a reallity

id like to add im sure getting that all right is a royal level pain in the ass and im just making it sound simple but im just putting out their where as a fan id like to see this game go
and i look forwerd to seeing it become what you guys are making it either way

Hey folks! 3.0 is out live now! Check out this vid for all the lovely good stuff!

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=407437986