Welcome along to the November 2019 Dev Diary for Absolute Territory. In this developer diary I demonstrate the full power of this fully armed and operational--- Mission Editor! Most work for the last few months have gone into Conditional Actions allowing the player to create unique and exciting missions in an easy to learn environment.
Absolute Territory is a space combat action game heading to PC. It's available to be wishlisted on Steam. You can stay up-to-date on the games development by following the @abs_territory on Twitter.
You can read below for a summary of whats on offer or jump straight to the dev video where I show you how to create your own custom mission.
The mission editor has 5 main areas. The first 4 are your bread and butter where you can quickly create some interesting yet very simple missions...
Player Loadout
- Choose which ship the player will be flying in the mission.
- Customise player weapon loadouts to suit the objectives of the mission.
Ship Loadout
- Customise weapon loadouts for all flyable ships.
- Save custom loadouts as presets for easy use later.
Navpoints
Accessible from the Placements and Conditional Actions view, navpoints are like self contained dungeons which the player can progress through various scenarios that you create. However, there is nothing stopping you from keeping it all in one navpoint.
Placements
- Place down opponents for the player to go up against. Perhaps add an asteroid field, or even a mine field with seeker mines for an extra challenge, or why not both!?
- Add cargo crates for the player to either pick up (perhaps containing secret plans to some mega weapon), or to destroy (illicit substances being traded by pirates).
- Waypoints are used to guide the player in a general direction, whether that;'s to safety or to trigger an action with dangerous consequences (that's for you to decide).
Conditional Actions
This is the meat to the potato (of the 4 above). Conditional Actions are actions that are triggered when a certain condition is met. For example, if the player gets within 200m of a waypoint marker, then an action to spawn an enemy opponent can happen. There are multiple conditions you can use to check and many actions that can be run as a result. It's even possible to create branching events based on the actions of the player and the opponents you've place.
How to create your own custom mission - a tutorial
If you want to learn more about the mission editor and how conditional actions are used to create unique and varied missions, watch the dev diary video below. In the video I will show you how you can create a mission using conditional actions to add creativity and depth to your custom missions.
