Ok so here’s some trivia about my entry :
Some obvious and a bit of Technical stuff :
Many changes had to be made for performance’s sake, among those, 2 of older versions can still be seen in the screenshots
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Projectiles were all in 3D and a bit more varied, but to save frames i reduced them back to sprites except the lasers.
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Levels used to have way more enemies present especially level 2, so if it feels there’s not much enemies in there compared to the size that’s why.
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To stress test the game rendering so many models and handling multiple enemies processing to pathfind to the player, I playtested all levels by just running around without killing any enemies, although not recommended, it makes this technically feasable to speedrun the levels ignoring the enemies and focusing solely on destroying the target objectives.
Some non performance related stuff :
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I initially planned to showcase more the “Sequel” aspect of the game by re-using the characters from my Mech Jam 3 entry, being the ones that told you the controls in the tutorial in a more diegetic way, as if they were training the new pilots themselves with the retrofited mechs, but i cut it and simplified it as just a basic immersion breaking tutorial due to time.
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I had a bit more in mind with the large warship shown docked in the final level, at first i wanted to have it fly by slowly above during level2 to tease its appearance in level3 and even planned to have it as a bossfight during the final level instead of it just being docked there but level2 appearance got scrapped to save on performance (again…) and level 3 got cut to it just being a background prop/story mission justification, due to time.
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The game has 3 music tracks, but technically you could say more 2/half, the menu loop music is a medley of elements from the 2 actual level songs mixed together at a slower speed to spin them off in some sort of jingle that fits.
Some feature origin :
- I wanted to have scoped weapons for long range in the game but since i found it wouldn’t make much sense to have the mechs putting the gun closer to their head to aim with a giant scope with lenses i took another approach inspired by how older games before Fullscreen scopes or ADS systems used to do it, in particular Bethesda’s Future Shock terminator games and Nove Logic’s old delta force games. So by playing around with viewports in the engine i was able to acheive a similar effect of a small secondary screen showing a zoomed up view of whatever aligned with the regular view’s crosshair. Lore wise i made it that scopes on mech weapons worked this way since they were just cameras sending their feed directly on the pilot’s interface to allow better visibility while moving.
And that’s about all the trivia there is about my game, hope this wasn’t too long or boring :p