I'm curious, what are your plans going forward with this game?
As Chris said elsewhere, Arcen itself is basically done with non-bugfix work on Bionic. This is just me working on it in my hobby-programming time. Same as most of the non-expansion work on AIW (except that's not getting tons of time right now because it's just polishing up for the official 8.0 release and the idea is to fix more than I break).
Like with AIW, Bionic won't get updates year-round, but it is my intent to have at least semi-regular updates (like every other week, or once a month) most of each year. And right now I'm targeting weekly-ish because... well, let's be honest, there's a fair bit about this game that needs attention. Still lots of fun, but there's some stuff that holds it back.
As for the nature of the work, I'm mainly focusing on refinement rather than expansion. There's some expansion like the addition of the conducts, but since I'm not an artist that basically means no significant new art (new exo graphics, new bot graphics, new weapon graphics, new commander graphics, etc). I could do recolors of stuff to some extent if we really needed more bot types but right now I think it's more important to get the existing bot types to not randomly generate apparently-unwinnable (or nearly so) situations due to total health on the board, etc.
The actual things worked on, and what specifically is done about them, will depend mostly on player feedback. Though I may do a fair bit on an alternate-customization system I've been thinking about, as honestly I don't have the mental energy to play a serious game of Bionic due to the sheer number of inventory choices between each mission. And I'm the one who designed and implemented the customization system pretty much 100% on my own
I'd love to see something like, say, enemy presence on the city map
Yea, that's really interesting to me too, and I have at least one idea I'll try out soon there. But it won't really be an AI doing stuff there at this stage. I'd like to go there some day, but I want to get what's already in the game to a better state first before messing much with the core formula.
And I like the "conduct" ideas with these; that's a great sort of difficulty-related setting in a more customizable way, I think it's a good idea. I dont suppose TLF might get something like that at some point? It seems like it'd REALLY fit that one in particular, to have that sort of really customizable difficulty stuffs.
TLF is in Chris's court right now, I probably won't have much to do with it (aside from a couple hours a week if Chris asks for it) until the second expansion. So feel free to ask him for those
Iirc it has the same underlying conducts system as Bionic so it's easy to add new ones.
Glad to see you're still interested in Bionic
