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.
Is that a Fog of System You got there?
Dev Update #11
Character Modeling
Clara worked on the basic infected and took a few weeks off animation to help catch us up on some character modeling that has fallen behind.
Andrew Smith was a recent hire and got started on his task of being in-charge of all player customization aspects. Its coming along great.
Currently we're implementing or planning to at least test customization in these fields. So stay tuned!
- Head Accessories(Masks etc)
- Choosing the unit of all your units
- Basic naming ability
- Gloves
- Knee Pads
- Elbow Pads
- Face types /color shader
Concept
Maik drew up some quick character concepts for Clara to get the base male infected situtated
He also drew up this mock up of Winters clearing out the hospital in the beginning stages of the game it looks great overall but just wasn't the camera angle we wanted. So we gave him some edits on the perspective we wanted and cant wait to see his next version.
Bongani worked on the final paint-overs all CERC and Coast guard vessels in the game
Cary worked to get his vehicles textured and delivered to the level designers
Vlad worked up and did the news truck
Level Designers
We setup and sliced up the level for the first vertical slice and talked greater focus on optimization across the board. We used the engine tools to assess and locate areas were artists had gone a bit overboard for the quality and scaled it back across the board while trying to retain as much as the high fidelity that was feasible for an RTS game. We also took the liberty of shrinking the World Composition grids by in some cases 3/4's to optimize loading times for each grid.
By utilizing the Shader Complexity screen several problematic materials were mentioned and we are in the process of revising and ensuring the game preforms better across the board.
From the recent black ops beta one of our modelers noticed they were utilizing a better method of drawing grass that was relatively inexpensive so thats a goal for this week as well to replace the grass with more efficient ways of rendering them.
Programmers
Derek stormed ahead and resolved some screen jitters that was occurring, it seems the Interpolation i added in last weeks dev update resolved it partly and it came back with a vengeance
Aside from that he worked on formation code refinement and ensuring the system was mostly bug free!
The threat system was revamped and rethought by myself and and frankly its a lot more responsive as the infected and military units are a lot more fearsome.
Derek worked on some corrective logic for when you reform squad/formations as well continued here
We located a better approach to handling the units fog of of war line of sight and implemented it this week as week over a huge programming pow wow we had over the last week.
We later refined the system and tied in the actual sensor component to control how far they can actually see. But now it was time for a field test
It certainly didn't play too nice with object blockers the code will take a bit more refinement but its getting there!
Me just fumbling around with the formations/new fog of war system its all coming together quite well
Recruitment
Currently we are seeking talented individuals in the following roles. It should be noted the project is post launch compensation and we are incredibly willing to work with any individuals schedule that might be interested. Feel free to send me an example at with your reel.portfolio and/or website.
- 3DMax Animators
- Prop Modeling
- Character Modeling
- Concept Artists
Email : recruitment@halcyonwinds.com
Community Discord Server
We started a Discord! Join it and support the game we're still turning on the lights so it will be more filled in over the next few days!
