DEVLOG 5: SOLDIER STRESS TEST, FACTION EMBLEMS AND GUI

Hello everybody!

FallNation world is growing up so fast and we are excited to bring you some news this week. First of all, let us structure what is this Devlog about. We gonna talk about the soldiers AI, some stress tests we've been doing and how the characters reacted. We also bring you a big Lore update: factions are here! We'll present them to you with a short description and their emblem's iconography. And finally we will show you the first GUI screen of the game: the Start Menu. Keep on reading!

Soldiers, a lot of them. Hello darkness, my old friend.

Remember that moment while playing Project BlockchainZ and you stop by hundreds of zombies? That was a really cool battle, wasn't it?  In order to make a huge graphics improvement, we are now testing the number of soldier units that can appear at the same time in the battle (Its drawcalls, polycount and the time needed to render them). The more units that appear, the more entertainment for you, of course, so we will try to bring the more the better.

When developing games, we need to "create" or instantiated a lot of stuff, like units, bullet drops and much more things, the problem is that "creating" stuff requires to read and write on memory (really slow actions) so in order to reduce this hiccups we use "pools" that are places where we placed the objects that we will need beforehand, and also the ones we "destroy" (We really move them to the pools and deactivate them). A great example of this is our "members" pools, when you deal a lot of damage to a zombie it looses some parts... In a bloody battle that could be a lot of members, so we use the pool tool, and to make it clear we also made a visual example 

  

FallNation Factions

Kamau Nation is located in the North Atlantic Ocean, between North America, Russia and Europa. Previously populated by Natives and Nordic Tribes, finally colonized by the American, Britihs, French, Dutch, Turkis and Russia people. In 1890 with the Civil War, Kamau proclaimed its self-determination as a full independent Nation. the aftermath government form was a Parlamentary Republic and it last former Prime Minister was Eugene Barry.

The Fall of Kamau Nation started a long time ago with Patient Zero. The main theory was that a failure of a laboratory technician mixing samples of the Ophiocordyceps fungus contaminated his own blood, causing a symptomatic reaction that led to cardiac arrest, death body and neuronal resumption with severe behavioral abnormalities, since the loss of Human awareness of uncontrolled aggression and anger. Causing a rage reaction, as well as abnormal motor movements. This contagious disease began to be called The Red Death, for the characteristic blood color of the eyes of the infected people.

Just because the zero patient was in Kamau, its population was feared that other countries could take military action against them. The govern, through the Minister of Science Robert J. Peyton, displayed the problem and proposed along with the United Nations a repatriation and extradition law for all the infected people outside of Kamau. That law meant that any infected will be remain considered as human being, but with restrained freedom instead of a lost cause. In this way, the rest of the countries would respect Kamau (They need a place to send the infected people) as long as Kamau itself is able to managed the pandemic, they will be treated as a sovereign country, so for security reasons and border control purposes,  Eugene Barry authorized the Kamau army to take the control of the frontiers and strategic strongholds.

After some time the virus became a pandemic, infecting so many people that Kamau society itself cracked into different factions. The nature of each faction came from the different ways they appear and how they face The Red Death. On the one hand, the people of Kamau, commanded by the Govern of the Parlamentary Republic and the support of the Police Forces, chose the path of science and experimentation in order to find a cure. On their way of experimentation, they made some mistakes. Scientific tests with a  doubtfully morality and ethics were carried out. On the other hand was the Army of the Nation of Kamau. When the pandemic became uncontrollable and once Kamau Prime Minister Eugene Barry was murdered, the army commanded by General Quinton Hopper made a coup and establish the control of the territory through a Military Government, called itself The Hammer Society. Hopper maintained that an infected person was a threat and so had to be erradicated. That is how Ernerst Boers, Colonel of the Cerberus Division of Spec-Ops and right hand of the General, reluctant to Hopper's ideas to eradicate all those infected, and after a secret mission called the long dead, he made the decision to defect from the Hammer Society and founded his own Faction, a militarized force that considered the infected as humans,  and moreover as viable troops. They called itself the United Rebel Front (URF) and has the motto "One Man, One Gun" because Boers always says everyone should fight for themselves and are allowed to carry a weapon. Colonel Boers was one of the main supporters of the Extradition Law idea.

At this point, the Colonial Alliances are structured in semi-independent colonies, the United Rebel Front is formed by militias and The Hammer Society is formed by Divisions.

In the image above you can see the Factions Document, including emblems, descriptions and mottoes for every one. Next weeks we will present you every faction individually. Hope you like them and as always, any suggestion will be welcome. We are creating an exciting and interesting background for the video game and we'll appreciate your help!

GUI. Start Menu.

What does a video game need to have a nice user experience? We're sure the first answer will be gameplay, and that's certainly true. But user interface is extremely important in order to understand what he sees and how it feels.

This is a very strong point for a FPS game, but also for all the strategy games, because they usually have a lot of features, mechanics and information that you need to manage and understand in order to enjoy the game as better as possible.

There are good examples out there. The Division, for example, has a very nice diegetic integration of the HUD, mixing only two colors: dark blue and orange. it is true that there might be some grey color in its GUI, but primary colors in the GUI color palette are those two. Warface is another good example. They do as The Division GUI and applied the same key points to its own game. Is not about copying one to other, but taking good ideas as inspiration. With those kind of games in mind we started designing our GUI. We had the idea of how we wanted to make our GUI: clear and minimalist. To do that, we have decided to use dark blue for the Start Menu, combined with some yellow to enhance the importance of what the player touches and sees.

This is a WIP draft of our FallNation Start Menu based in a clear and minimalist GUI:

(Yeah, it's only black and blue right now, but we are not going to show our cards so soon!)

As you can see, FallNation development is on fire! We are so excited to show you these news and hope you enjoy them as much as us. Don't forget to join us on the  ARF Initiative Discord Server, we are now discussing about this devlog and the recent others. Have fun and enjoy video games!