A lethal virus has infected Treasure Island,San Francisco and 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. Will you fire bomb and leave no trace of human life behind or will you 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 go on mutating and adapting to combat the player at every turn.
You will man and fully customize teams that you will send into the infection zones to do CEDA Missions, help civilians or just seek out Patient 0 . The game is being designed from the ground up to support replayability at its core. 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 specific tactics. 
You'll have to use all the tools in your arsenal, research the plague to discover its origins and cure it to stop the virus before it causes everything to spiral out of control. You will hunt Patient 0 an unique carrier with special abilities that gets stronger as the days progress as she mutates and losses her humanity along the journey. Confronting and fighting her over a span of main missions and side objectives riddled across the island.
More Details will emerge over our following new posts! Stay tuned!
Development Begins
Over the last month we have gathered talented developers from across the internet and got to work on developing a new RTS. Its name "Cepheus Protocol" which is a new RTS in the vein of inspiration from games like XCOM,Company of Heroes & Parasite Eve. We also take inspiration from many other mediums but at the end of the day our goal is to build a brand new experience overall.
We are a team of around a dozen seasoned indie developers from various backgrounds. Developing the game alongside our normal jobs and school. We started out the month by organizing and rapidly building our extensive Game Design Doc and laying out internal pipelines and guidelines. Our preferred engine by far was Unreal Engine as it was the system we had by far the most experience in. Right off the bat we dove right in establishing huge portions and planning for gameplay, level layouts and cutscenes.
It should be noted our games first chapter takes place on Treasure Island San Francisco.
Concept Art
Jon worked on the player structures and other various player controlled objects. These are still awaiting approval.!
Level Design
Then the grand question presents itself? How do you take a real world location and make it suit the gameplay needs required? We started by analyzing treasure island and the surrounding cities. Through extensive usage of Youtube and Google Maps Street View we started to formulate out how the beginning level would play out based on the rules in our Game Design doc. There were some conversations that stretched several hours long just based on the associating zones and overall it was a great conversation back and forth of ideas and how to approach certain situations. Basically meant to plan for what the player might encounter or definitely will over the span of 6-8 hours of the planned initial level.
In the following months as we work to implement and test gameplay we will eventually turn over to cutscenes and overall planning via story-boarding. When we enter this stage we are planning to visit San Francisco for planning out shots and initial cinematography planning sessions. We will blog and post videos and screenshots here as a blog post for that adventure. 
Jacob
Did a deep dive on just getting the levels layed out and situating key mission zones our writer had established in his story treatment. He's since then started blocking out and situating his area of the play-zone for the first locale in the game. Over the next few weeks he'll work to polish up and establish the overall flow and work on detail passes.
Anton
Planned out the upper districts and again conformed to the standards of requirements our writer and game director had overall. His area will start construction from the modular sets over the next week
Joel
Established and setup the right player building zones and established further points of interest . Blockouts started but scale was adjusted over the past few days to allow for better spacing between objects. 
Programmers
The base RTS Camera, HUD and controls were established as with a free Look camera 
Derek:
Formation Types Currently Planned:
Default (0): Basic Rows
1: Column
2: Line
3: Wedge
4: Vee
5: Left Flank
6: Right Flank
7: Circle Up
Experimenting with some Rotation Arrows for previewing the direction your units will focus when you right click and drag. It should be noted these are wip and the final will draw smaller arrows for where each individual unit will go in formations.
Building System WIP
More will be added upon requests and internal playtesting. Next I worked on the Building system. Early off we have a very cool idea of having the actual building being delivered and dropped to your sites. We took a bit of inspiration from Battle for Middle Earth on building tiles and took the idea of a transport chopper and ended up starting to prototype the idea in gameplay.
So the idea is to make the world seem more dynamic and immersive and by having entities coming in and out of the world at any time. This method of implementation is driven by a helicopter AI. Which is quite error prone... So far this method has worked out great. But we're still testing and adapting as we go. 
3D Modeling:
From Kevlar vests to base meshes for all the characters our modelers have been hard at work developing the base modular sets. From Dimitry brilliant work on modular set work and helper tools for the level designers to the excellent vehicles and weapons Elfrain,Lauren, Danillo and Rich are churning out things are progressing nicely for the first month or progress.
Danilio Worked on Vest Variants and the base BDU
Lauren Banged out the Transport Helicopter and Quick Travel Boat
Rich Worked on the Cougar
Elfrain Focused on the Weapons there are 11 planned in all which we will show over the next few weeks
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.
- Animation
- Prop Modeling
- Character Modeling
- UI Designers / Concept Artists
Email : recruitment@halcyonwinds.com
