The Em-8ER Playable Mockup roadmap is here! This has been long awaited. It answers many questions the community has about features, timelines to Kickstarter, and when builds will be delivered.
The Light Omniframe Whitebox is Done
But before we go over the roadmap, we would like to update you on the progress of the light omniframe. The light omniframe is more of a suit of personal powered armor than a MEK (our name for mechs in Em-8ER). It shows more of your character/pilot and is quite nimble.
We talked about how we first “whitebox” our frames to ensure they have the proper proportions and freedom of movement. We do this quickly, without much detail, in order to get a working version into the game and test for any issues that might come up.
Below is the newly complete whitebox for the light omniframe. You can see we have tested it in a variety of poses to check for range of movement. So far everything seems good enough to proceed to final rigging and placement into the game as a test model.
The giant fists strapped to the frame’s arms are optional melee weapons. You can equip the light omniframe with firearms, or kit it out for melee. In this example, the pilot has equipped the frame with dual power fists instead of a projectile weapon. These can pack a wallop as they punch through enemies.
Now that the whitebox is complete, the next step is preparing the armor for animation and then getting it into the game engine. The whitebox, standing alone in a 3D program, can only tell us so much. We have to see it in game to make final appraisals before heading to high poly modeling.
The Roadmap
The first thing we need to do is to establish the goals of the Kickstarter Playable Mockup. This demo will be streamed and seen by those who are considering backing the project, and those that back will get early access to this demo. Leaving a good impression at this point is key to word of mouth and getting more backers on board during the duration of the Kickstarter.
The objective of the demo is to provide the first solid hour of gameplay, and to make that a compelling and convincing argument that the game is fun and engaging. To do this, we have to establish the main game loop of Em-8ER.
Em-8ER is a resource and crafting game. You can think of it as harsh survival on a planet where Gatestriders must create everything from scratch. It has roots in survival games, mixed with boss monsters we call Kaiju. While you can collect resources in Em-8ER, there is currently nothing to do with them. We’ll fix this by adding a loop to the game, the main loop, which is to gather basic resources, to build better things, to allow you to collect even better resources, to build even better things.
What are these better things? Frames, weapons, abilities, and other items which we will discuss in a future update. For now, it’s just important to recognize the core loop of Em-8ER, and that everything we build for Kickstarter will go towards this loop.
To get there, we’re going to need a roadmap with some dates:
There are a lot of components here. We went over them in detail on the last Chief Chat, and you can watch the stream on our Twitch channel (jump to 24 minutes in). But we’ll also outline a few of the key points briefly here:
Main Planetary Zone -The main playable area of the map is 64 sq km. The maps are large in Em-8ER because we have gliding, player bases, and giant Kaiju. It is impossible to fully detail an area this large in time for Kickstarter, so we will concentrate on 2–3 smaller playable areas in this giant biome.
Home Station- After much thought, we’ve made Home, the orbital space station, less of a priority, moving it to the back of the schedule. It isn’t core to the gameplay loop and we can devote the resources elsewhere.
Cinematic Models- Some assets on the roadmap will not be in the game, but are needed for the Kickstarter movie. This includes Crodus, our Kaiju Prime, and the City Base (player bases) that he gets to destroy during a simulated invasion. These cinematics will be rendered in the Unreal Engine.
Personal & MEK-A THMPR Encounters- These are high on our priority list. We want a crafting progression from mining with personal mining equipment, to crafting dropship deployed personal THMPRS, to building full scale THMPR MEK-A (A.I. driven Meks). Each type of mining yields different resources.
Crafting & Building Systems- These are currently TBD as we are still working on the design for this system. This is an important part of closing the game loop, and once we have a better idea of how crafting and building works in Em-8ER, we will break these larger tasks down into subtasks.
Player Claimstakes & Server Transitions- We are not discussing these at the moment, but will do so in a future Chief Chat.
A New Build Every Month
Our goal is to deliver against this roadmap with monthly builds you can download and play.
Needed Resources and Risks
In order to keep pace with this roadmap, we’re going to need to find some additional help and resources. We estimate we need:
- 2 Hard Surface Modelers
- 1 Animator
- 1 Technical Animator/Unreal Developer
If we cannot locate additional help in a timely manner, the roadmap can slip. We will be actively looking for the best talent we can source right away and will update everyone as we do.
That’s our massive update for today. Reminder that we are having another 10% Friday Flash Sale on the Em-8ER main site as we phase out the current Newcomer Packs in preparation for the Rumble Packs. Thank you for your support!
