If you've been following us on Twitter over the past few weeks you'd have seen the steady progress fixing ant bits, spots, design issues, and general revamp and polish on all the existing COs.

The redesigns range from subtle (Bradshaw barely changed at all) to complete and total redraw of the Bomb Disposal woman. Of all the designs, the Bombsuit woman I did not expect to take as long as it did, while I left the Gasmask guy (Smiles) for last fearing he'd take the most effort.

Time Lapse of a CO

This week on Twitter I've been speaking to one of the developers of Fabular: Once Upon A Space Time and with their okay, spend some time drawing the Lost Count, a character from the game as a CO in Super Combat Squadron.

It took just over four hours from start to finish, starting with rough sketches that are cleaned up, shrunk down, and eventually turned into what you see on the right.

I recorded myself while working this time so you can see the full four hours just bellow compressed down into one ten minute video of the Lost Count from Fabular from conception to final product.

The Building Queue

The building units design doc. Pictured above is the current design sketch explaining how unit buying/building was meant to work. It went through many iterations to reach this point.

It's all pretty cut and dry, but features that have been in flux since this point:

• This design shows 4 units in the queue but we've begun to considered that we could squish them together with some overlap to fix more, as much as 8 or 10 without losing visible recognition.
• The bar that fills up to show you progress/time before the unit is produced is quite small, so a building animation was also came up with to show building on the main game space.

Capture Logic

Today we're looking at capture logic:



Both the art and code behind capture points changed multiple times over the game's development (and still has some changes to go) before coming to the state it's at now. In the current iteration, we've settled on this push/pull design with directions and destinations.

For this example, we use Team Red and Team Blue, but this math works with any number of colors or players. Placing a unit on a Neutral un-owned capture point begins the capture process; filling a bar until its full and giving you control of that point.

Captured points provide income over time to their controlling player or team, or in the case of Factories, Seaports, and Airports, construction of Land, Sea, and Air units.

What happens however if your capture doesn't go off so cleanly? If your unit stops capturing for any reason, there is a short delay whereupon it begins de-capturing back to whatever it's default state should be; neutral or team-owned.

 If your point is almost captured back to Neutral but not completely pushed there, you can recapture your own point back faster than if you let it go completely to Neutral ownership and start to be captured towards the enemy team.

With a push and pull perspective, the point is always pulling towards a state, and units can either fight against this flow, or ride with it, aiding it to get to its destination even faster.

In the above design sketch, in examples A and C, the point's native recapture speed is suspended as the unit performs his capture. Unit capture speeds are based on how much HP the unit has; damaged units capture at much slower rates than healthy full HP units.

In B and D however, the capturing unit is actually assisting the point's inherent capture speed, adding his own speed to the mix and incentivising you to assist in recapturing points rather than just letting them time back out naturally.