Short version: I have been very very busy on this, and feeling the time crunch in a major way for a variety of reasons, and so have been more silent than I should be.
Longer version: a TON of work has been done... all over the place.
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- The way the raptor handles
- the visual polish
- the destruction improved a bit
- the raptor audio much more raptor-y sounding (thanks to Pepisolo for big parts of this, and pushing me on it, too)
- other bits of audio sounding more varied and material-appropriate (thanks to Pepisolo on this completely)
- a fully custom AI system that handles traversal of VERY complicated level geometry like a breeze (and that will be showing up on the unity asset store in a month or two via a new partner in that area I'm working with to handle the asset store part and not distract me from actual development).
-integration with new pooling systems to make garbage collection better.
-upgrading to the latest version of unity (5.3.5p2) to get some bugfixes and some performance improvements.
-integration with the mobfarm smooth turret system (my AI does not do any targeting logic because there was already plenty of public code for that sort of thing)
-heavy improvements of said turret system to integrate it with pooling, with SECTR audio, and for nearly zero ram allocations during runtime.
-side-jumps/wall jumps for the raptor, which is a big deal for dodging projectiles.
-ledge hanging and jumping for the raptor.
-lots of particle effects are partially implemented, but more are coming.
-lots more asset store art has been worked on and partly integrated and optimized. More coming on that.
-the workflow for level editing has been figured out on my end, and a lot of improvements made in that department. However, it will be only for the developers unfortunately, and not client-side, because it requires the unity editor and the ability to embed prefabs for this. Such is life.
-a ton of the raptor animations have been improved or outright redone by Blue, making the raptor increasingly organic.
-lots of robot animations, only a few of which are in place thus far.
-a new sort of explodey-collapse logic for the small robots is partly in place, and I'll finish that tomorrow.
-a system for visual force field bubbles and the logic for that is about halfway done. It's super cool! it's for the robots, of course, not you.
-lots of internal optimizations to code, project structure, etc, to make for increasingly fast development of content as time passes.
-the game actually compiles for a standalone executable now, haha. I had not bothered testing that previously, and there were some issues (as expected). All sorted now!
Big things coming really soon (next couple of days):
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-the first actual procedural levels to be shown off.
-the main menu, with attendant settings for quality and performance and controls.
-fully getting the robot AI in there and letting you actually win levels. Right now the movement logic is done and the shooting logic is done, but they aren't put together.
-a much better antialiasing solution, which will really take that quality up a notch.
Big things missing but coming a bit after that:
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-the big "dismemberment enemy" robots will be implemented, to go along with the "pounce target" robots that have been my focus thus far.
-substantial camera system improvements that are needed.
Other related big news:
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-we are aiming to have a new trailer AND the first press playable preview build out on Tuesday.
-we're not announcing the exact date yet, but this will be heading to early access later this month.
About the early access pricing strategy:
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The final price is intended to be $15, but we'll be adding content as long as player interest is there to financially support it. Our goal is to always provide the game at a price that at minimum reflects the value that is there at the time of sale, so that if financial support for the game dries up, we can wrap up the 1.0 release at a lower-than-intended price while still providing a great price-to-content value.
