If you're just dropping by to say hi or wish us well, feel free to post here!
Still looking for a niche for it. Currently, it's already as fast as hovering and it doesn't drain your energy.
You can grab AGILE legs to turn faster or release movement input to force a brake and turn faster for a short while. Or use both and turn on a dime. You can use this to change strafe direction surprisingly quickly. Otherwise, you can turn slower so that you maintain a high speed instead of bleeding it out for a turn.
Or you can switch on hover to move dynamically and also stabilize your weapon accuracy at the cost of some energy drain.
Hi. Loved the mech genre and came across this game on YouTube, the gameplay immediately left me speechless. What an amazing work! And the fact that this is an indie project evolved from "walker" is simply unbelievable.
Gotta admit though I still sucked at it. I read the manual and completed the tutorial courses before tapping into the battle just to get absolutely annihilated. My sluggish gameplay is no where near those blazing fast gameplay footage and AI, as I'm still confused about what I'm seeing on screen (build stats, UI gauges, "STABILITY" status) and how I'm supposed to master the boosts without draining my energy reserve. If there could be some documentation breaking these mechanism down it will be super helpful.
Mech games be sophisticated and that's part of its charm. I'm learning to love this game!
Best advice I can give for managing energy is to not have all your weapons active all the time. Each active weapon adds a "drain" to your generator which causes its energy "output" to slow down or even lose energy if it's great enough. You can deactivate weapons by holding the Weapon Action button (default is "R" key for KB and "A" or "Cross" for gamepads) and pressing the desired weapon "fire" button. You can also switch to a higher output (albeit lower capacity) generator.
Mission UI is definitely rough. I can say that it's basically been kludged around the circular radar since that was really the first dedicated UI feature that got implemented. I should definitely write this down somewhere accessible, but I'm planning on changing it up in the future. Quick rundown of the current scheme is as follows:
Otherwise, the build stats sorta do what they say (Arm speed, arm angle, torso speed, torso angle). The mobility stats usually display two values, one being their performance on the ground and the other in the air.
In any case, I'm glad you're liking it!
Wow! This is a very detailed rundown. Looks like there's a few habits I need to change whilst piloting. Thank you for the enlightenment!
The UI could use some improvement but I just wanna say I enjoyed what we have. The wobbly effect on the radar and the 3D representation of targets at other levels are very nice touch!
Such a great mecha game, and i cannot believe that this is only an indie project. The fast combat is quite a challenge to master, and it does feel a bit chaotic at times with all of the crazy colours. I don't know if it would be possible, but it would be nice to have an option where the colours are a bit "softer" on the eyes. In future, I'd also like to see a bit more maps since it is currently only the one, with options to play in a night or day setting. I can't wait to see what this project turns into and the creator has my full support.
Thank you for sharing Hammer with us.
We all need more "quick-and-dirty-boost-and-shooty zoom-n-boomness" in our lives and what you
achieved with Hammer, even unfinished, is trully impressive.
You have a really strong demo/prototype and I wish you all the success you deserve for it.
Sorry for being inquisitive but do you plan to gather a team around you and eventually find a publisher?
See you all on the discussion boards for the next devlogs and updates!
Much thanks for the kind words and happy to have you along!
I don't know much about getting a team and publisher together so I'm not holding my breath for anything like that, unfortunately. It's probably just going to remain as it is: a fun side project which I add to what I think works and (try to) fix what's broke.
This game really scratch the high speed mech combat itch that AC offers, this one specially reminds me the closest to VD. I'm just wondering if there will be any plan for a certain type of heavy weaponries that allows pilots to aim manually (requires no lock on to hit a precise target) that might involve scope/zoom in feature? Would be pretty neat.
It's definitely a cool idea.
I've been playing with a manual aim toggle for a bit. Basically just turns off/on the FCS if you hold the "lock-on" button, and it works okay. Everything being projectile-based (except lasers) makes it take some getting used to. Just needs to take the player's camera settings into account more since at higher speeds, the offset between the player (the origin of the projectile) and the camera (origin of the aim point) can get really large so shot trajectories can get really wonky.
Maybe an additional function like VD where it automatically toggles to a cockpit view when you turn off the FCS would be useful. Basically minimize the offset between view and shot origins. An optional zoom function would be slick as well.
Personally don't know about making weapons that absolutely require manual aim. Maybe hitscan weapons? They're definitely harder to balance alongside the auto-targeting.
Hm, idk about rank. But I've been thinking of at least recording a player's top-scoring missions + variables (map size, mission length, extracted successfully, etc) and saving an accumulated "money" stat from total score. The reasons I'm unsure about actually implementing records that recording stuff like kills of a particular enemy might get easily deprecated if I rework or remove enemy or mission types or change how the data is recorded. So updates might break the count or just be another minor feature I have to make sure doesn't break when messing around.
Like apparently DEMO mode is broken again. xD