A Xmas Update! Dev Update #22

December 25, 2018

A Xmas Update! Dev Update #22

Game Beats

A lethal virus has infected Treasure Island,San Francisco. It is up to Captain Winter, a U.S. Army soldier working with the Center for Epidemic Research and Control (CERC), to stop the mysterious and deadly Pangu Virus from spreading to the mainland. The Cepheus Protocol is an independently developed top-down RTS inspired by XCOM, Company of Heroes, and Parasite Eve.

In Cepheus Protocol, you will make decisions that will force civilians to either rally behind you or attack you outright. How you decide to combat the virus is entirely up to you. You can fire bombs and leave no trace of human life behind or you can try and save everyone at the cost of your squad’s safety. The game features a full day and night cycle and will adapt over time to make the Infected more dangerous as the days progress. The Infected will mutate and adapt to the player, creating a challenge at every turn.

You will control fully customizable teams that you will send into the infection zones to do CEDA Missions, help civilians, or just seek out Patient 0 . You will lose men if your arent careful and be forced to train and recruit from your player base. Each solider will be unique to a point with randomly generated traits and skills allowing you to tailor them with specific tactics.

You will have to use all the tools in your arsenal and research the plague to discover its origins. You will use your knowledge to cure it to stop the virus before it causes everything to spiral out of control. You will hunt Patient 0, a unique carrier with special abilities that gets stronger as the days progress. You will be confronting and fighting her over a span of main missions and side objectives riddled across the island.

A Xmas Update Dev Update #22

Past this Dev Blog: We will be omitting certain tasks people have done throughout the week in sake of spoilers! Sorry :), but over the past 2 weeks we worked to resolve, optimize and ensure performance was stable. We brought on a few new animators to help out Clara in wrapping up the gameplay animations and generally to start on cutscenes in January.

We also had to let a few level designers go as they didn’t have the time we were looking for, best of luck to them! We took a few days off this week for XMAS but right after we’re hitting it pretty hard up to new years to apply some final coating for our build. In some cases we would see very low frame rates across our hardware so now it comes that time to optimize our code and levels and get them ready for internal play testing.

Our website went up this week as well folks! There are some story hints here as well!

We’re also now twitching daily or every few days based on our schedule pop in once in a while share the love! Drop us a subscribe to follow as we work on the game!

Level Design

So over the last 2 weeks we had quite a few delays relating to the holidays and personal life issues. So the goal was how could we apply the final layer of polish? As a few months ago a level designer that has finished the previous right island had applied an auto material that well put the performance to be lack luster. So Over the last few week Dimitry whipped up his own custom setup that would bring performance back to more management levels for the Shader Complexity levels. Said quite frankly Auto material setups for a game we want to be as widely enjoyed across different hardware configurations was simply a bad idea.

So Thad, Vesa and Anthony and Derrick started out with this layout and brought it up to par with this layout.

Vesa pretty much knocked the Military base outta the park over the 2 weeks. As with the police station

We also talked Mission planning layout and the final paths for some mission objectives to force the player for the opening tutorial to bring them to the military base. Suffice so say we settled on the red path.

Thad worked on several zones and took over zones 7-8 to wrap them up before the 30th. He also did Chesley’s house for the mission that takes place there.

Early Play Tests

Add silly bugs like this where the Cougars would bump into each other or skid nearby friendly ones into the water. xD We tweaked these up over the past few weeks to ensure everything was honky dory for their path finding and overall mass to how they respond to objects.

We had some odd bugs with the player Camera not being able to zoom in so we ended up making the camera a bit more simplified and adapting an approach of doing it via the spring arm component and trace channels prebuilt into UE4.

Character Modelers

Peter, Andrew and Clara worked on Retopo of various character customization objects for all the characters

Vlad worked on the boats

Dimitry wrapped up the Voyager ship textures

Cara worked on the Thunderbolt

Elfrain modeled the different tiers of the gates you can build

Vesa worked on misc objects

Programmers

Thad whenever we talk programmer to him ^

Derek and i worked across all the various divisions to support them and make sure mission scripting, Infected and Civilian zoning systems were operating .He also managed to finish up the defensive stricture system

Setup gates and enterable segments

He put together a debugging tool for Dimitry for tweaking the handling.

I worked on some minor systems like adding it so units talk and bark out dialogue when you issue orders, change out temp tracks to our composed theme and music and basically helped out across the board to ensure everything was running smoothly.

Came up with some icons for the game we went with 1111.