Road to Alpha Release

For the last 7 weeks, we have been working hard on really transforming the game and polishing it enough that after a lot of playtesting, we are finally happy to release the alpha version this week and see where we go from here.

A lot has changed.

When we started this development period, 72 Seconds was much closer to a roguelike RTS. During these 7 weeks we slowly started moving towards something quite different: an RTS with ARPG elements, persistent units, progression, professions, items, crafting, a campaign and late-game Signals.

This post is about the biggest changes we made and where the game is heading.

Mob Groups & Modifiers

We started by adding tiered units, so these are your white, blue and yellow groups.

White groups have no modifiers, blue have 1 modifier and yellow get 2 modifiers.

This makes combat much less predictable and makes players much more engaged and aware of what's going on. We will definitely be adding more of these modifiers later on as we think it's a fun mechanic borrowed from ARPGs like Diablo and PoE.

We had to also modify how the spawner works with these new groups.

With the new modifiers to the units, we had to add new mechanics like critical strikes, dodge, regen, and others:

• Tanky: +30% HP
• Vampiric: Hostile units heal themselves for 15% of the damage they deal.
• Evasive: Increase chance to dodge incoming attacks.
• Regenerative: Recover HP over time.
• LongRange: Increase line-of-sight and weapon range.
• Precision: Increase critical hit chance or accuracy.
• Vicious (Crit Damage Focus): Increases the damage dealt when a critical hit occurs.
• HeavyImpact: Attacks apply a small slow effect on hit.
• Berserker: Increases damage dealt as the unit's health gets lower.

Campaign, Missions & Signals

After the groups we were brainstorming about adding missions and a real campaign that would lead to late game signals, similar to maps in PoE.

So with these new missions we had to build a UI for it, a world map with the mission nodes connected together from level 1-20.

The signals UI is not a world map but works a bit differently because to run a signal you have to select it from your signals inventory.

As you can see, we heavily changed the game from a roguelike RTS to an RTS with ARPG elements, campaign and late game.

This was mostly fueled by our rethinking of how the game should work, because we thought the classic RTS campaign is rather boring and not as exciting.

Having to always build your base, collect minerals, build an army and then steamroll the enemy and destroy their base was not something we wanted for the campaign to feel like.

What we really wanted was continuing further with our vision of a persistent squad, leveling your units and having a passive tree and then later on having items being dropped from enemies and then crafting weapons to further grow and make your units in the squad stronger to go against stronger and stronger foes.

This is the vision: progression and persistence.

Mission Types

We had to add new types of missions to keep the gameplay varied, not just eliminate all enemies every mission.

Other than that, there are some missions that are:

• Mine X amount of resources.
• Survive waves of enemy units for X amount of time.
• Save civilians.
• Destroy enemy buildings/base.

Persistent Progression & The Passive Tree

One of the biggest parts of the the game is the persistent squad.

Your units are no longer just disposable units that you build during a mission. They are part of your campaign and become stronger as you progress.

Last blog we talked about introducing the passive tree. Now we have extended it to where individual units can unlock new abilities and eventually specialize into different professions.

For example, a Marine can now progress towards becoming either a Sniper or a Rocketeer. In the future we will be adding much more professions for more varied gameplay.

We also added profession nodes to the passive tree. Once the required technology has been researched, the profession becomes available. After the profession node is acquired, the unit changes to the profession type and its weapon changes automatically.

We have also added new nodes to the passive tree, like critical chance, critical damage multiplier, and we will be adding more in the future.

This is one of the systems we are most excited about because it is what makes the squad feel like something you are actually building over time rather than just another army.

Weapons & Armory

Then we got to adding the Armory where players can craft weapons and equip units with those weapons.

These weapons are part of the persistent campaign progression, so they have to be saved and loaded from our campaign file.

When you load into a mission or Signal, the bonuses from the equipped weapons are applied to the corresponding units.

This means that your squad isn't only getting stronger through the passive tree. You can also find and craft weapons to further specialize your units.

Tech Tree Changes

A bunch of much-needed changes to tech:

• Added Sniper Training research.
• Added Rocketeer Training research.
• Added Advanced Weaponry Technology research.
• Added Plasma Weapons research.
• Locked professions behind research.
• Locked advanced weapon crafting behind research.
• Make the tech have requiredTech, because for example Plasma Weaponry first needs Advanced Weaponry researched and finally then you can craft plasma weapons when you have both.

Making the World Feel Better

The Shuttle

Next we wanted to add a spaceship shuttle that would, on every start of the mission/signal, launch down, eject(spawn) units and leave by flying back up.

We took a bit of inspiration from Dark Colony and made a simple shuttle in Blender.

Let us know what you think. :)

Smoke Trails

We made smoke trails for the projectiles.

Actually, we were messing around with this a lot more because I added a custom smoke texture made in Blender, then adjusted it to not be blocky, then added a whole particle system to emit when the bullet is flying.

We adjusted this smoke, changed the size of each smoke particle to be randomized a bit, and made it possible to configure it from the projectile JSON.

For a sniper you want small smoke and for a rocket you want big-ass smoke, for example.

Map Improvements

Then we made a bit of changes to our maps using our map editor.

We improved some narrow spaces to make them wider, added ramps to some cliffs and removed trees to make maps more walkable.

New Map Decorations

To make the maps have a bit more character, we made more new decorations in Blender, specifically 2 types of plants and 4 types of rocks.

And then using the map editor we added these to all our existing maps.

More Blender & More Ramps

We added north and west ramps.

For some reason when I started to learn Blender in April I couldn't figure out how to make these ramps and back then I even convinced myself it was impossible.

Well, I tried it now after a few months of Blender experience and honestly it wasn't as hard as I thought.

And it adds a lot to the game than just having south and east ramps haha.

Finally, Polish & Playtesting

By the end of July we were finally finishing most of the features that we wanted the game to have and we started adding more missions and maps for those missions.

We slowly started moving to polish and playtesting.

This is a good place you want to be, and we took quite a lot of time polishing. We did 3-4 weeks in total.

This is time well spent making the game solid and logically sound and cohesive.

If you're interested here is a list of bugs and how we fixed them, you can check them in this blog post.

What's Next?

Alright, oof, this was a long one.

But we have a lot to show for our disappearance for the last 7 weeks.

It has been very exciting to work on these changes, so we hope it doesn't go to waste and that you guys enjoy the changes!

And as of right now, we are making the Steam page for 72 Seconds. Hopefully that will be live this week too, so you will be able to wishlist the game and play the demo there too!

With that, we are not sure what the next steps for 72 Seconds are.

We polished up the demo and now we're releasing the alpha and Steam page.

We need your help and feedback in making the game better.

Thank you for your time and see you soon.

Let's get back to work!