Friendly (and not so Friendly) Faces — October Development Blog

Last time we talked, we were showing off the cool metro police stuff we were making. Through doing that we realized how much potential we have lying before us, therefore over the past two months we have been hard at work at creating an expansive and modular enemy system that’ll be capable of housing several different units, all in one. We are really excited to show you what we’ve been working on, so without further ado, let’s hop right on into it.

Clearing out the cobwebs

After the devblog we publish in August, we found a few flaws in our animgraph system, so we did what any normal development team would do; We rebuilt it from the ground up. Most of it remains the same but we did enhance a few things for better compatibility and overall stability.

I’d explain this myself, but John CO. does it much better (I am animgraph illiterate) “the first subtract node creates an additive animation of the mp7s root bone, the add node then adds that additive animation to the initial position of the weapon. the first bone mask resets the fingers to the position defined in the SMG reload animation, the second bone mask resets the mp7s magazine and bolt, along with the IK targets for the hands to the positions defined in the SMG anim. The third bone mask takes the corrected animation for the fingers and the mp7 and blends it with the existing animation. The fourth bone mask resets the left arm to a different pose in order to avoid an issue with the arm bending backwards during the reload, then the 2 two bone IK nodes use IK to connect the hands to the IK targets on the weapons skeleton. The state machine disables the reload logic while it isn’t in use in order to save on performance cost and also deals with resetting the mp7 reload animation so it can play when needed.”

Weaponry changes

And in addition to all of our reload logic, we added a new weapon! We already showed the MP7 and the USP Match, so the next logical thing would be the Shotgun right? WRONG, we added an AR2.

The AR2 Is more of an aesthetic change than it is a fundamental alteration, but it gives us an opportunity for a whole lot of freedom when it comes to how versatile each encounter with these guys will be.

We are going to show off the MP7 once again because we decided to make it better. We overhauled a lot of the IK stuff we did for weapon holding and handling and added a handful of new animations. Thanks John CO.!

The variety of weapons we have added and plan to add down the line open up opportunities to shake up the base gameplay that Half-Life: Alyx is known for. While we all love Half-Life: Alyx’s combat for what is, I think we can all agree that once you get the hang of the combat dance so to speak, it gets a bit dull, so we are looking for new ways to make this combat feel interesting and new. The weapon variation is a huge player when it comes to this. Currently we have the 3 weapons we mentioned previously, the USP Match, the MP7, and the AR2. The USP Match is what we consider our lowest tier weapon, units will either only have this weapon or they will switch to it after they use their primary weapon runs out of ammo. The MP7 is our mid-range weapon, it can fire fast but it won’t be as effective as something like an AR2. The AR2 is a high tier weapon which basically means it’ll just work in the same manner of a weapon currently in HL:A. As I previously said, the AR2 really is just an aesthetic change more than anything because, in the bigger picture it is more powerful than the other weapons. We currently don’t have a set plan for how many more weapons we’d want to add considering readability is very important to us, but in theory we could add a whole lot more weapons (which would just add to the chaos).

New weapons isn’t all we plan to do though, we are still exploring new ways to make combat fresh once again. We are putting a whole lot of care and effort into this in order to create a combat experience that provides satisfaction and challenge. We’ll keep you posted in the future.

Half-Life: 2 combine soldiers remastered by Nemez, DPotatoman, & WESThaemer.

The white elephant in the room

It is pretty clear now that we are including combine soldiers in Anti-Citizen since we just showed you quite a few images and clips of them in action. If you are just finding this out when reading this line, please consider getting glasses.

These iconic soldiers debuted in Half-Life: 2, that game came out in 2004, that is just a little under two decades old. Therefore, we can’t use those original models from 2004 in Anti-Citizen as the quality won’t be up to par with VR standards, luckily we got in contact with Nemez, DPotatoman & WESThaemer. Thanks to their generosity, they granted us with up to date, remade from the ground up, Half-Life: 2 soldier models. These look CRISP, they have details upon details, and they have no business looking as good as they do. Thank you so much Nemez, DPotatoman & WESThaemer!

Now that gratitudes are out of the way, we can discuss the technical stuff (yay). First things first, we are still working on getting these models up to our standards by adding details such as jiggle bones and other details, so if a few things look a bit unpolished, that is why (we got these models about a week ago).

Preview of Soldier death effect NOTE: We haven’t gotten around to replacing the sounds for the units just yet.

Secondly, I’d like to just quickly eliminate any confusion associated with Anti-Citizen’s story line since it seems like we are giving off the vibes of this being an HL:2 Remake. NO THIS IS NOT AN HL:2 REMAKE, this is a completely new story set within the Half-Life universe. It takes place long after Alyx, but a little bit before HL:2, this gives us creative breathing room and allows us to expand upon the nothingness that exist between both of the titles. Since the storyline takes place closer to the events of Half-Life: 2 rather than Alyx, we decided to adopt some of Half-Life: 2’s elements such as a more oppressed looking City 17. This doesn’t mean we are sticking too close to Half-Life: 2 though, which brings me to my next point. We are at a bit of a crossroad internally, we can’t really make our minds up whether we want to use a different skin for these soldiers to better reflect the enemy these replace which is the grunts whom were introduced in Alyx, or stay true to the original and keep the classic Half-Life: 2 style.

Exhibit #1

The HL:2 Combine soldiers look similar to the Captain in Alyx. Readability is very important to us so we worried that players might mix the two different units up. Misidentifying the enemy during the heat of battle can prove to be deadly (for you).

Ok so this was actually the only issue that we thought of when it comes to the soldier’s skins. Just to be safe, we have a new skin currently being created by the talented Allen Scott but there is nothing concrete currently. The pros to what this variation offers is good readability and a similar style to the enemy we are trying to replace, the grunt.

Combine Grunt x Soldier skin, experimental.

The issue is they stray away from that classic look that a lot of people know and love. We are split right down the middle, and we’d like to hear your opinion, Do you think we should stick with the classic look or use a new skin? You can contact us on either our Discord server or reach out to us over on our Twitter, your feedback is very valuable.

Lenny is still in development, as you can see.

Leonard/Lenny

If you know who Lenny is, woo-hoo, you’re awesome! If you don’t know who Lenny is you are not awesome. But we don’t blame you, not like we’ve talked about him all too much. Quick rundown, Lenny is the side character in Anti-Citizen who will basically fight by your side (not to mention he is the one who gets the whole plot of Anti-Citizen moving). We’ve spent a considerably unhealthy amount of time on getting Lenny (sorta) working, and when I said we I meant John CO. Lenny is still pretty far from finished since he is such a monumental task but since our last dev blog he is in a much better shape, depending how you look at it. If you follow us on Twitter you might be familiar with this image. If you don’t follow us, you should we post quality stuff over there, take a look if you dare. Oh and please don’t mind the haircards, we were messing around with them and created a nightmare, we have yet to fix it because it provides laughter internally.

We couldn’t have described this better ourselves.

So the purpose of “GOD’s compass” is to tell Lenny when to stop moving, and when stopping which animation to use.

Lenny does much more than just follow the player around, he is also going to fight alongside the player, with providing great dialogue such as AHHHHHHHH! (We put a lot of thought and care into that line ❤).

Jokes aside, Lenny is capable of using yet another weapon we have, a pump action shotgun we totally didn’t find on sketchfab. Alongside his shotgun, he wields the ability to walk, talk, and look around! Just like a real human being! (I think they do that, I’ll need to fact check this).

Wrapping it all up

I know I always thank you all for reading these and it may seem disingenuous or repetitive, but I’ll say it again because I really do mean it. Thank you, all of you for reading these. These are awesome for us because we finally get to show off what we’ve been slaving away at for the past month or two. Each and every single one of us is committed to shipping a quality product at the end of the day, which brings me to my next subject, release. Last year we mentioned we wanted to release in 2021. In our anniversary dev blog we said it was unlikely we’d be able to accomplish this unrealistic deadline we set for ourselves. Today, we have come to terms with the fact that there is no way possible we will be able to achieve a full release in 2021. When will we release then? We aren’t sure, we still have a mountain of work to finish and we truly care about the quality of what we are shipping, we plan to get this thing done in a somewhat timely manner but with such a huge project and small team, it’ll take time. We appreciate your patience, and we hope to deliver the best damn experience we can possibly make. Thank you for all the love and support, and for everything. ’Til next time.