Devblog #4: A belated update news

Hi I am Servius, the Map Design Lead for Separatist Crisis! I am happy to bring you a quick update on our immediate timeline moving forward as well as some behind the scenes previews of where we are as a project at this time!

To start this off I think I want to go over what is probably the biggest departure from previous materials related to this project, our release schedule and what exactly we are working towards. Over the course of the last 4 months we have sat down several times during team meetings trying to grapple with the massive undertaking we have committed ourselves to. Most of these meetings has been R&D and trying to smooth out the edges in how the team conducts itself, with becoming more productive the main benefit of our efforts. We have learned a lot about the editor, the capabilities of the game, and what we will be able to really do when we get to start playing with what weve created. We came to a realization that the equipment teaser as it was known was both too broad and too little in the grand purpose of the minor release, and that realization lead us to really discuss what we should actually be doing to best achieve the goal we were working towards when focusing on the afore mentioned Equipment Teaser. We landed on the following for releases:

• Custom Battles #1
  • Character Models, weapons and armors for the first three tiers of the Clone Army and Mandalorian Troop Trees
  • Troop tree Equipment Rosters and stats for the first three tiers (with some balance)
  • Troop Tree selection UI and iconography
  • 2 Geonosis battle maps (landscape, not city)
  • Grenade/explosive Weapon Functionality
  • Custom Ranged FX (Lasers, Laser Damage [burns], explosions)

• Custom Battles #2
  • Character Models, weapons and armors for the first three tiers of the CIS Droids and Hutt Cartel Troop Trees
  • Troop tree Equipment Rosters and stats for the first three tiers above (with some balance), Additional Balance pass on the GAR and Mando tiers 1-3 Weapons and Armor
  • Troop Tree selection UI and iconography
  • 2 Geonosis Fort 'siege' map
  • Dual Wield Weapon Functionality
  • Custom Melee FX (vibroswords, shielding)

• Custom Battles #3
  • Character Models, weapons and armors for ALL tiers of the Main Four factions (GAR, CIS Droids, Hutts, Mandalorians)
  • Troop tree Equipment Rosters and stats for the first three tiers (with some balance), Balance pass on all previous Troops.
  • Troop Tree selection UI and iconography
  • 1 Geonosis City 'siege' map, 2 spaceship Hangar battle maps (GAR, CIS)
  • Additional Troop 'Powers' Functionality
  • FX for Gas/Cloud based powers, Drones [healing,shields,PDS, etc].

• Custom Battles #4
  • 1-4 Force Wielding Hero Units
  • Functionality for Force Powers; Lightning, Push, Pull, Speed, Jump
    • FX for Force Powers above
  • 1 Geonosis City 'siege' map, 2 spaceship Hangar battle maps (Mando, Hutt)
  • Balance pass on all previous NPCs, Weapons, Armors, Costs, Powers, etc.

As you can see the above breaks up what we are doing as a team in smaller chunks that have been organized to more easily be worked on productively. By the time we reach the completion of Custom Battles #4 it is more than likely that an effort will be made to release a Geonosis Campaign, more or less as described in previous postings. A land only military campaign on Geonosis set in the "First Battle of Geonosis" time period of the four year war.


So far Custom Battles #1 is well on its way to being completed.

• Troop and equipment trees as listed have been fully thought out and listed by the mission team and are being passed on to the 3d and coding teams to be worked on.
  • Most of the armor sets needed for grunts have been completed for both republic and the hutts.
• UI is ahead of the game, and Zade is already at work patching the UI to be ready for the transition to 1.6 ( currently everything is rated for use on 1.5.9, changes to 1.6 requires some things to be patched)
• 1 battemap is at the testing stage and is pretty much completed. The second is starting production
• VFX and Explosions are in a bugfixing stage and an R&D stage respectively.

Outside of development towards CBs(Custom Battles) #1 we have been jumping ahead on weapons and armor sets. We several high quality sets that arent necessarily required for CBs #1-4 to release already imported or getting imported. A wider variety of troop looks will be possible because of this, hooray! Check images for this project to see some of the newest previews related to this topic!

As always you can enjoy more consistent updates on our progress via the