As the captain of a Mandate starship, you lead a crew through the galaxy where they will adapt and grow as they fight alongside you.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Operation Reclamation
almost 9 years ago
– Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 04:05:14 PM
Hey backers,
Time for another update! Today we start by outlining a schedule for the next few updates:
Update #42 boarding combat (this update)
Update #43 space combat
Update #44 (tentatively) status of development
When discussing the boarding combat it makes sense to first talk about some of our goals for the boarding operations.
The Mandate focuses on the crew inside your space ships and the marines are an important part of your crew. We want boarding combat to come alive with drama and action. These interactions will be more high-paced than space combat, with ample explosions, memorable characters and the occasional acts of heroism or stupidity. After a firefight, the corridors should look banged up with bullet marks and bodies.
Scalability is an important property for two reasons. First we want you to be able to manage anything from a couple of fire teams to a dozen squads as you build up your strength. Secondly some players prefer to be hands off while others like to micromanage. We plan to facilitate both approaches and this requires clear communication through the GUI to give feedback and critical information on anything that could affect your decision making process. Furthermore, the marines need to be semi-autonomous and able to act without detailed input from the player.
We touched on the GUI and familiarity is important and we also acknowledge that space combat and boarding combat in The Mandate have a lot of depth and there will be a learning curve to master each mode. Therefore we are investing time and effort to ensure the space combat GUI and the boarding combat GUI use similar metaphors. As part of this process we reached out to select members of the community who have provided very useful feedback. When we present the space combat GUI in update #43 you will see the similarities with the boarding combat GUI later in this update.
Moving along, we want to make you feel like you are commanding proper marines (from rookies to battle-hardened veterans) and their behaviour should be suitably "military". This means that the traditional real-time strategy approach -which involves box-selecting a bunch of different units and telling them to go somewhere- does not really work for us. Instead we are relying on concepts like fire teams, squads, battle drills and the "maneuver wheel". We will explain all these terms a bit later in this update.
So what are the steps a boarding operation will go through?
First of all you need to decide how many marines to assign to a boarding operation as well as what type of equipment they should bring along. There are several things to consider here including the expected enemy resistance, the skill of your marines as well as what type of equipment you have in your armoury.
So who are your marines? A marine is a member of your crew who belongs to the security service branch and has received training in boarding operations. Marines can either be generalists (riflemen) or specialists that focus on for example breaching (combat engineers) or first aid (combat medics).
Once the equipment loadout has been selected you can then assign your marines to assault transports. As part of this process you, the captain, also define the Mission Order which is basically a fancy word for informing your marine commanding officer about which ship should be boarded as well as how many marines are available. We are not expecting you to sit and type this document out but rather we plan to use the choices you make to generate the Mission Order for you. This is similar to the character prologue tool where we put together your military dossier based on the choices you made when generating your character.
One part of the Mission Order where you do get to give input is Rules of Engagement. It defines (among other things) how to handle non-combatants (neutrals), what to do with enemies that surrender as well as weapons posture: basically whether your marines can open fire at will or first need to identify new contacts as enemies. For example you could imagine a hostage situation where you really want your marines to be careful. Similarly if you are playing as a pirate you may not care or wish to restrain your (pirate) marines. If Mission Orders and Rules of Engagement does not sound like your cup of tea, do not worry, you will be able to select from pre-made templates instead. In addition to specifying the Rules of Engagement we are discussing ways to allow you to inject extra side objectives for your marines which if completed successfully may grant extra experience to your marines.
Speaking of experience, at the start of the game you will start out with green marines. They know which way to point their weapons but that is basically it. As your marines take part in (and survive) boarding operations, they will gain experience and become better marines that also work more efficiently together. There are three components that factor into the performance of your marines: their individual skill, their formation's experience and the skill of their squad leader.
Formations, you may be asking? Well, initially your marines will be organized into fire teams of up to four marines each. In The Mandate the fireteam is your basic tactical unit. Later on you may promote experienced marines to squad leaders who can lead squads. A squad contains two fire teams and up to eight marines. Squad leaders may in turn be promoted to platoon leaders and your best platoon leader can be promoted to company commander. A platoon contains four squads and a company contains three platoons; for a total of twelve squads or 96 marines. Since this is a lot of numbers, the diagram above should sum this all up nicely.
Now, assuming that our assault transport managed to successfully dock with the target ship and unload marines, we may start the boarding operation. Remember that this takes place in real-time while space combat is going on outside the ship. In any event you can pause the game at any time to appraise the tactical situation. For space combat we showed off the battle orchestrator earlier this year and you may remember that we also demonstrated a waypoint system to plan the movement of your ships. For boarding operations you will have access to similar planning tools to maneuver your fire teams and squads.
Before we continue we want to introduce the boarding combat GUI which you can see below. It has five major elements:
the picture in picture which gives you an idea of what is going on outside the ship that you are currently boarding
the objectives tracker which lists what objectives your marines must accomplish
the mini-map which gives information about your immediate surroundings
the action panel which contains the ability buttons and the maneuver wheel
the squad panel which lists your squads and individual soldiers as well as their status
The first three elements should be familiar from other games so we will skip over these and instead focus on the last two: the action panel and the squad panel.
The action panel contains ability buttons, the "maneuver wheel" and go codes. Each ability button icon corresponds to equipment or skills for your selected squad and so is based on the experience of your marines or the equipment you issued them with before they boarded the assault transport. Examples of abilities include grenade throw, snipe, suppressive fire, first aid and hack.
Moving on we have the "go codes". If you place out multiple waypoint orders (see below) for a squad, you can use “go codes” to inject artificial pauses, causing a halt for that squad. This could be useful when maneuvering several squads and you want squad A to reach a waypoint and then wait for squad B to get into position before moving to the next waypoint. Our goal here is to make the planning and syncing the squad maneuvers as easy to manage as possible.
Next up we have the maneuver wheel. It includes an outer ring with three initiative stances: reactive, balanced & aggressive. The initiative stance allows you to set how much speed and risk your marines should take when performing the orders that you give them. Should your marines move slowly and use cover, or sprint and move quicker but exposing themselves more to enemy fire? Inside the maneuver wheel you will find a total of seven waypoint order buttons. You can click a waypoint order and then place it in the main view to issue an order to your selected squad. So far, so good. Where things get a bit more tricky... uhm … interesting is that an order is modified by the current initiative stance. Let us take an example in the form of the "move to” waypoint type (three arrows pointing up):
reactive stance: move to
balanced stance: attack
aggressive stance: assault
If you think about it, most real-time strategy games already have these commands. The combination of an initiative stance and a waypoint order result in a specific movement pattern (formation) and pacing (slow/fast) for your selected squad. This is what we call a battle drill, which is a military term that defines specific formations and maneuvers. Our battle drills are based on the ones used in close quarter combat but we are modifying them to work for our purposes.
With three initiative stances and seven waypoint order types this gives potentially 21 battle drills. Another way to look at battle drills is to think of it as choreography and how to show unit behaviour.
You may think that 21 battle drills is a lot but keep in mind that at the start of The Mandate you will only have rookie squads and these only have access to the first initiative stance: reactive. In addition they have access to only a couple of the waypoint order types but as your squads gain experience they unlock new initiative stances and waypoint order types and by extension new battle drills. Alternatively, you really only have a total of seven waypoint order types, but you on top decide to be defensive, neutral or aggressive.
For boarding operations we model both suppression (your marines being shot at and pinned, slowing them down) as well as morale. Suppression is tracked on a squad basis and is embedded into the maneuver wheel (red colour). Suppression is a counter to initiative and as you take more suppression, your squads may not be able to operate as fast or swiftly as before. In game terms this means that an initiative stance becomes unavailable due to suppression. As squads take more suppression this may affect morale. Morale is tracked per marine and unless your squad leader is able to rally marines, they may start to panic, run away or go berserk.
Now that we have gone over the major elements of the action panel it makes sense to turn our attention to the squad panel which is situated at the bottom center of the screen. The squad panel gives important information about the squads under your command including how many marines are in each squad, whether they have taken casualties or something urgent requires your attention. Hostile contacts in the form of enemy squads will also be listed in the squad view.
Your units can be controlled in one of two modes: squad mode or individual mode. In squad mode you give orders to your squad as a whole by using a combination of initiative stance and waypoint order type which will execute a specific battle drill. In addition you can toggle on/off individual abilities to allow/disallow your squad from using these. For example you may want to disable the use of grenades if the squad is moving through a volatile area or there is a lot of expensive equipment nearby that you wish to preserve and not accidentally damage.
In the example above we have selected squad Alpha and picked the “move to” waypoint type. Since our squad is in the balanced initiative stance, squad Alpha will attempt to execute the “attack” battle drill.
The other mode, individual mode, can be activated by selecting a marine within one squad. This allows you to activate his/her abilities directly as well as specify where he or she should move. So ability buttons function slightly differently in squad mode and individual mode.
In the example above we have selected squad Alpha and then Asbury who is the squad leader. We are currently checking the range of Asbury’s rally ability to see if it can reach Nahasa and Haywood in order to rally them. Nahasa is the leader of fireteam #2 in the squad and her morale is wavering. Haywood and Kennie were bunk buddies, and Haywood who is also the squad combat medic panicked upon seeing his best friend killed in front of him.
Well there you have it, our goals with the boarding combat and quite a bit of details about how exactly your marines and squads will operate. We hope this overview of the boarding operations was an interesting read and gave you some new insight about The Mandate.
PS! Whereas the GUI is tweaked in Photoshop the corridors and associated art assets that you see are taken from our prototype
Cheers,
Your friends at Perihelion Interactive
Left, Left, Left, Right, Left
almost 9 years ago
– Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 04:04:51 PM
Hello backers,
The previous update outlined a schedule for the next few updates and today would have been about space combat (update #43). However, we decided to wait a bit with that update and instead dig a bit deeper into the boarding operations. Update #44 which will talk about progress/schedule is on track for the second half of November and the space combat update may arrive either before or after that one.
For this update we will start by talking about character progression, skills and traits. Next we will cover veterancy and how this is important and affects the performance of your marines and pilots in particular. As part of this we will also revisit the battle drills and formations.
But first things first, let’s start with character progression, skills and traits. Since The Mandate will let you acquire quite a few characters we think it is critical to keep the number of stats at a manageable level. Our approach uses the following elements:
Character traits instead of character attributes
Skill reuse
Minor and major characters
Clear and simple rules for progression
First off, we are skipping traditional character attributes like Strength, Dexterity, Charisma etc. Instead we have character traits which can be one of several types. Character traits may be inherent to a character and gradually revealed as part of character progression or the result of an experience the character has undergone during play. An example of the latter would be a marine who is the sole survivor in his eight man squad after a particularly bloody boarding operation. He could gain beneficial traits like “Lone Wolf” or “To the End” or alternatively a detrimental condition like “PTSD”.
Skill-related traits can be beneficial or detrimental. For example a particular character may have the trait “Stargazer” from spending his or her childhood looking at stars. That character may be a good candidate to transfer into the astrogation service branch due to a skill bonus to the astrogation skills.
Finally, we have traits and anti-traits that model interpersonal relationships. If you put a character with the trait “Brave” in the same marine squad as a character with the trait “Cowardly”, there will be an effect (and you hopefully know the cause). Ultimately, as captain you decide the progression for each character and their individual traits may or may not fit with your overall plan or needs. In the case of “PTSD” and similar we aim to provide you with a set of tools to allow you to respond and treat or cure such conditions.
It's worth noting that traits that have an effect on character progression are revealed before any important character progression decisions are made. We do not want scenarios where negative traits show up only after you have chosen the characters progression path.
Also, we are trying to reuse skills as much as possible where this makes sense and can be justified from a gameplay point of view. New characters start out as enlisted which provides them with two skills: Basic weapons and Console Operations. As long as a character levels up as an enlisted, he or she will become more proficient in those two skills.
If you decide to switch a character from the enlisted path to a specialist path, new skills will be acquired. Each of the six service branches have one basic skill and two advanced skills. A specialist must get to a certain proficiency in the basic skill before he or she can start to learn the advanced skill. The exception here is the Security branch (pilots and marines) which reuse basic skills from other service branches for its marine and pilot specialists. For example a marine who later specializes as a combat engineer would learn the engineering basic skill. A marine who specializes as a combat medic would learn the medical basic skill.
That being said you would not want to put a specialist engineer to perform breaching operations (which is what the combat engineer is good at) and you would not want to use a combat engineer to run the powerplant (which is what the specialist engineer is good at).
In The Mandate we want you to have a core team of trusted individuals as well as ancillary characters. This is similar to the TV shows that we are inspired by. So when we talk about your crew we are really talking about minor and major characters. Your minor characters make up roughly 80% of your crew, your enlisted, specialists and warrant officers. Your major characters make up the remaining 20% and include all your commissioned officers. These are your future captains, starbase commanders and bridge officers. As you level up your crew you may turn minor characters into major characters. There are a few key differences between minor and major characters worth noting:
For minor characters you set their focus and decide on career choices every six levels
For major characters you get skill points to assign each level
Major characters unlock additional skills that you can invest points into like diplomacy, logistics, command etc
Major characters can gain additional traits
Lastly, we have some ground rules for how a character can progress and get promoted:
A character can stay as enlisted to eventually become a senior enlisted or non-commissioned officer. Alternatively the enlisted may join a service branch as a career choice rather than staying as an enlisted
Once a character joins a service branch (s)he cannot switch to another service branch or go back to being an enlisted
A specialist may focus on specializing in advanced skills or become a warrant officer (from level 12)
A warrant officer may focus on advanced skills inside his/her service branch or become a better warrant officer
At level 30 a warrant officer can attend the war academy and attempt to become a commissioned officer. Not all warrant officers are suited to become commissioned officers, however
Sub-alterns [ensign, cornet etc] cannot be trained but must be recruited from factions. This is also where we add in backer-designed officers
Armed with this understanding of how skills, traits and character progression work, we can now explain roles like Fire team leader, Squad leader and Platoon leader (and their pilot equivalents). All three roles require the Leadership skill and their requirements are 3, 6 and 9 (out of 10), respectively. Leadership is a skill that warrant officer and senior enlisted can learn.
Skills not only enable new roles for your character but also affect the efficiency of your crew and marines in particular. We use the term “Veterancy” to describe the efficiency and skill of your marines. Broadly speaking Veterancy has four distinct tiers: Rookie, Trained, Veteran and Elite. During boarding operations Veterancy affects weapon posture, individual morale, reaction time and accuracy.
By weapon posture we mean how a character will hold his or her weapon. For example, Rookies will take longer to aim and fire their weapons than Trained, Veteran or Elite marines. You will be able to see the weapon posture of both your own and that of the enemy during boarding operations, giving you visual clues as to the threat level posed by enemy marines.
Battle Drills have also been regrouped so instead of having over twenty Battle Drills, we now only have seven. How did we achieve this without dumbing things down? Well, we have tied Battle Drills to veterancy & formations. So for example when you issue a “Search & Destroy” Battle Drill, the fire team or squad will pick the formation that matches with its veterancy level.
To make sure each Battle Drill will be useful, we planned out the choreography for each one and made tweaks. We also looked at how the specialist marines, fire team and squad leader roles would fit with the Battle Drills. Beyond the basic “Move” Battle Drill, you have access to the following Battle Drills:
Search & Destroy
Defend
Disengage
Support (requires fire team leader)
Assault (requires fire team leader)
Breach & Clear (requires squad leader and marine specialists)
Ambush (requires squad leader and marine specialists)
As your marines level up you will be able to specialize them to become combat engineers, combat medics and so forth. By assigning your marines intelligently between your fire teams and squads, you can create units that are optimized for carrying out one or more of the Battle Drills. For example a fire team with one marksman, two combat support and one fire team leader could work well with the Support Battle Drill.
There are two more things we need to point out. First, the Battle Drills are semi-accurate with respect to real-life close quarter combat. Our latest design changes have improved the military realism without complicating gameplay. One backer (with a military background) has been particularly helpful to us developers, so: Tally-ho, sir! Secondly, the recent changes also map surprisingly well to how we will handle air/space drills for fighters and bombers in space combat but more on that in a future update.
We will round off with a short video that shows a four-man fire team executing the “Search & Destroy” Battle drill aboard a spaceship. As the fire team maneuvers we are switching between four levels of veterancy (rookie, trained, veteran, elite). Since Battle Drills are tied to veterancy and execute a specific formation, you will notice a formation change. For example the veteran and elite formations makes your marines less susceptible to surprise or flanking and also allows more marines to engage an enemy from the front or when turning around a corner. If you look closely you will also see that individual marines switch their weapon posture as their veterancy changes. This will allow them to be more effective and open fire quicker.
Keep in mind that the animations in the video above are by no means final. Our focus is to first produce a basic version of all animations and then later polish to increase quality. Beyond that if you have any comments or suggestions feel free to give us a shout via the forums , here on Kickstarter or otherwise as it ultimately helps us make a better, more entertaining game.
We would like to give a shout out to a couple of Kickstarter games which have similar gameplay modes or have inspired certain mechanics in The Mandate.
First up is Wasteland 2 which is a post-apocalyptic party-based RPG with turn-based combat. We did a quick tally and so far our devs have accumulated over 150 hours in the game. If your game tastes are similar to ours, then you may want to check it out. Just keep in mind that the game is hard so consider which difficulty option to pick for your first playthrough.
Next is Jagged Alliance: Flashback where you must lead a band of mercenaries to help rid an island of its corrupt leader. JAF mixes turn based tactics, squad management and crazy mercenary personalities (not unlike our traits system)
Finally, we have “More of M.O.R.E.”, which aims to upgrade the visuals for the previously funded M.O.R.E., a turn-based 4X game in the tradition of Master of Orion. If you like 4x games and missed out on the first campaign then this a chance to check them out!
Your friends at Perihelion Interactive
Know Your Enemy
almost 9 years ago
– Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 04:04:18 PM
Hi backers,
Time for another update and today we are going to go delve more into detail about space combat.
First of all we thought it would be cool to start with a trip down memory lane. Our space combat has gone through several iterations where we have experimented with different control schemes and evaluated the relationship between the ship and your crew. In each successive iteration we have shifted focus and put more emphasis on the crew as well as your officers.
Prototype 1 above was a from a very early iteration from before the Kickstarter campaign. The focus was to get all the features and functionality into one screen. It is rather chaotic and the user interface itself is also noisy. Observe for example that the power management controls in the bottom left include a triangle to allocate power to shields, weapons and engines. This triangle itself was resting on top of a reactor cylinder which would raise or lower as you modify the total power output from the reactor. Sort of like a control rod in a nuclear reactor.
Prototype 2 switched to a more sleek and elegant look as we shifted away from the player directly aiming his/her weapons and put more emphasis on representing the crew. Finally the third iteration is very close to the current state of affairs. Most of the functionality from the first prototype is still there, but we have laid out the controls in a more structured manner. A big change from prototype 2 to prototype 3 is the introduction of the maneuver wheel bottom left.
Returning to the present day one challenge for us has been that the experience we want to deliver in space combat is similar to some TV shows and series but have yet to be replicated well in other games. We have studied a lot of games and discussed pros and cons of different approaches. This has necessitated a lot of trial and error on our part. While you will undoubtedly recognize certain elements from other games, we find it difficult to describe the space combat in The Mandate as “Game X meets Game Y”.
Before moving on it would make sense to discuss a bit more in detail what type of experience we are trying to deliver. Slow and majestic are two keywords for us. We wanted to achieve a certain sense of scale and grandeur as these hulking behemoths travel through space and at the same time contrast these with the agile light craft that zip past or marines that conduct boarding operations and kick in doors. Capital ship to ship space combat -especially between equally matched adversaries- should allow you time to think and plan your next moves without having to pause the game. This means the rate of fire and the lethality of each weapon type must support this. For example a rapid-fire CIWS (close-in-weapon-system) would be effective against light craft but ineffective against the armour plating of a capital ship. A heavy torpedo on the other hand could do serious damage to a capital ship but the downside is low speed, limited ammo, long reload time, the need to manually guide the torpedo etc.
Secondly, we wanted space combat to be intuitive and fun from the start without requiring a lengthy tutorial. Yet we want to offer depth of gameplay as well as provide ample challenges during early, mid and late game. Your initial frigate will have a small complement of crew and only a handful of rooms and systems that you need to worry about. We also provide various templates that limit repetitive tasks and allow you to delegate certain ship functions to your officers so you can focus your attention where it is most needed (for example to manage your marines in a boarding operation). As you expand your fleet, train your crew and research new technologies, you will gradually unlock new options which may change your strategy.
Thirdly, we want the experience to be tactile and for many operations you will click on and interact directly with your ship. Feedback on the status of your ship will be conveyed visually in what we hope is a less “gamey” approach. We are steering away from hitpoint bars as much as possible and going more in the direction of location-based damage modelling. This applies to both shields, armour and the internals of your ship. This has the added benefit of allowing us to “connect” the crew that reside inside your ship with the ship itself and have consequences for both ship and crew as a result of battle damage.
We have spent a lot of time to streamline both the GUI and the player feedback loop both for boarding combat and space combat to ensure that if you understand either game mode then the other game mode should follow naturally. As you can see above both the space combat and boarding combat have metaphors and key design elements that are reused across both game modes.
So what is the process for initiating space combat? Well, when not in combat you will travel between star systems in the Adventure Mode. Here you can zoom in or out, dock with friendly space stations, contact factions, obtain quests etc. The objects in the Adventure Mode are not just pretty window dressing but have some game function. There will be merchant convoys, derelict ships to explore, escape pods to scan, planetary bodies to visit etc. Basically if you played Sid Meier’s Pirates! or Mount&Blade then you should have a basic idea of what the Adventure Mode is all about.
Once a hostile fleet is in close proximity to your fleet it may decide to attack you or you may decide to attack it. The environment that you are in will impact the upcoming space battle. For example - if you were attacked by pirates in the vicinity of an asteroid field then this asteroid field will be present in the space battle and may be used to gain an advantage.
The space combat may start at either visual or beyond visual range depending on how close you were to the hostile fleet in Adventure Mode. In both cases you will start in the Battle Orchestrator with your own forces and you may or may not know the strength and disposition of the enemy forces. Your scanner tech level and the experience of your astrogation officers may also influence this. In case you are not familiar with the Battle Orchestrator you can view the video below which was made available earlier this year.
After you have laid your plans in the Battle Orchestrator and unpaused the game, you will be able to use the environment around you to mask your EMS (electromagnetic signature). This will make it more difficult for enemy ships to detect, identify and scan your ship. Alternatively the environment (asteroid field in our example) could make your scanning process take longer and be less precise. You may also tweak the power allocation and turn off certain power-hungry systems to minimize your EMS output.
At beyond visual range you will have to rely on long range scanners and perhaps you will launch light craft to perform a recon mission. If your ships have long range weapons you can use these to deliver a powerful blow before entering visual range.
Information warfare is crucial in space combat and whichever side gains the upper hand here will have an advantage which could tip the scales and change the outcome of the space combat. On the one hand you want to minimize the intelligence that the enemy has about your exact armament and capabilities. You may wish to wait with deploying or delay firing your weapons to limit the enemy’s chance to respond with a suitable counter (until it is too late). We are taking a bit of inspiration here from the Age of Sail where the gunports on the tall ships were closed until they readied for action. What exactly is behind the gunports or in our case the turret slots of an enemy ship?
For answers we can turn to the Astrogation service branch. They have specialists and consoles that can help us identify contacts (to decide if they are friend or foe) as well as scan hostile contacts in more detail. This may reveal additional information about the room types and weapons carried by the hostile contact. In addition we may also discover additional places where our marines could later breach the hull if we decide to launch a boarding operation. While we are scanning the hostile contact they may respond in kind by either scanning us or trying to jam and interfere with our scanning.
With this new information we can tell our crew in the Weapons service branch to perform sub-system targeting against specific targets. Provided you have precision weapons installed and skilled Weapons specialists then you may damage or destroy key rooms and weapons on the enemy ship to cripple it. In our example we could either target each individual weapon and gradually destroy them or we could target Gunnery Bay 4. By destroying Gunnery Bay 4 we would effectively disable all weapons controlled from that room, allowing us to later board the ship and capture these weapons intact.
It is important to note that Sub-system targeting is an advanced concept and not something we expect players to do early in the game. Rather it comes into play a bit later and adds interesting opportunities during the mid and late game stages.
Speaking of opportunities we do want to offer a lot of customization options, not just vertical progression (getting bigger ships) but also horizontal progression (change focus). We have iterated on the ship section types which we presented during the Kickstarter. A major change is that each section now allows either a crew upgrade or a system upgrade from the standard hull. This should allow you to experiment and create some interesting ship designs. The ship section types are as follows:
The Crew Bow upgrade allows more crew on board your ship. The Hangar upgrade converts crew berths to pilot berths and installs hangar bays as well as other rooms necessary for your pilots to perform at their best. The Marine upgrade converts crew berths to marine berths and installs additional armouries onboard your ship to allow you to equip additional marines in full battle gear.
The Guided Weapons upgrade will let you install specific long range weapons like torpedoes, missiles etc. The Heavy Weapons upgrade adds extra turret slots so you can fire a more powerful broadside. Finally, the Systems/Aux allows you to upgrade your power output, scanning range etc.
The Hangar ship section in particular is interesting since without it your ship will not be able to launch or retrieve fighters or bombers. These can be either 1-seaters or 2-seaters. Fighters are good for dealing with other fighters and also for taking out enemy bombers. Bombers are good for dealing with enemy capital ship since they can carry anti-ship weapons. The light craft are organized in a similar fashion to the marines.
Flights and squadrons can only contain either fighters or bombers. A wing can contain up to three squadrons and each wing can either be a pure fighter / bomber wing or perhaps a composite wing where each squadron can be either a fighter or bomber squadron. This is useful when you want to launch attacks with bombers and you need to screen them from enemy fighters. Similarly a group can contain up to three wings, and each wing can contain a mix of fighter or bomber squadrons.
From the previous Kickstarter update you may remember that we also outlined how pilots could specialize to become a Recon Operator or a Weapons Operator. To really take advantage of their skills, you need to put these pilots in the co-pilot seat in a 2-seater. That means they have a regular pilot (or Ace Pilot) to fly the light craft while they can focus on either scanning or executing an anti-ship strike.
Now, we could talk at length about air drills and how they are both similar and different from the battle drills in boarding combat, but this update is already very long so we will save that for another time.
We are going to round off this update with a video from Garret (art director), Greg (env artist) and Vegard (tech art director). They will tell us a bit more about ship art direction, the ship construction process and also demonstrate the sub-system targeting in practice.
Cheers,
Your friends at Perihelion Interactive
Only a cat of a different coat
almost 9 years ago
– Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 04:03:50 PM
Hey backers,
In this update we are going to cover several topics. First we are going to touch a bit on player customization options, specifically Coat of Arms. Next we will discuss the backer design pledges and what each backer who pledged to a specific tier is expected to design for inclusion in the game. Finally, we will also give you a short production update.
Ok, so what exactly is a coat of arms? It was a design worn by medieval knights on their shield or coat. The purpose was both to protect and identify the wearer in battle. Historically the coat of arms included many different elements to uniquely describe and identify them as you can see in the picture above.
Both Garret (Art Director) and Vegard (Technical Art Director) have been exploring heraldry and armoury books recently and now we want to share with you the first fruits of this labour: In The Mandate you will get to create the personal coat of arms for your captain character! Your coat of arms will be displayed both outside and inside your capital ships; on your light craft and on your marines.
Initially your ability to customize the coat of arms will be limited to the shield itself. However, based on your actions during the game (which factions you join, which knighthoods you unlock, your noble rank etc) you may unlock upgrades for your personal coat of arms (like the ability to select a mantle or wreath) as well as additional options (new faction specific motifs). In this way the coat of arms is both a visual chronicle of your journey and a unique identifier when joining a cooperative game. As a side-note whenever your christen a new capital ship you will also have the option to assign it a custom ship’s crest to uniquely identify it. Marines and light craft assigned to that ship will display the ship’s crest in additional to your personal coat of arms.
Above you can see a video that shows an early version of the coat of arms designer. It uses procedural textures and gives quite a bit of control over how the shield will look. The selection of motifs are quite limited for now but the final version will include both more motifs and allow you to pick signifiers, wreath, motto etc. The “random” button already produces some very interesting shield designs.
To test the coat of arms designer yourself CLICK HERE!
We decided to make this early version available for testing and feedback similar to the interactive demos we had online for our Kickstarter campaign. Keep in mind that this version runs via the Unity Web Player as it allows us to upgrade to latest version if we do fixes or improvements. If you have problems running it in a particular browser then we recommend you test with another browser instead. We have tested with the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome.
The coat of arms designer is actually relevant for our next topic which is backer design pledges. As you know from our previous update we aim to finalize these during February but we may slide a bit into March. In the mean time we wanted to give you an overview of what exactly you get to design for each pledge tier.
In the table above you can see what each pledge tier includes. You can also see the approximate number of pledges for each tier. For example the “Design an Officer” allows you to write the backstory, allocate skill points and pick personal traits. The Officer will be a mid-level subaltern character and the backstory will be accessible from inside the game. This character may be recruited later by the player if the faction allegiance of both player and character are compatible.
The “Design a Captain” has many of the same design elements as the previous pledge but adds a few new ones: “Character visualization” and “Personal Coat of Arms”. The former will allow you to specify the visual look of the captain using a standalone version of our character creation editor whereas the latter enables you to use a feature-complete version of the coat of arms designer. Also the backstory for the captain will be included in the Great Captain Doc (which will include up to 400 captains and be around 700-800 pages long!).
For most of the tier designs we are implementing a point-buy system where you get a pool of points which can be allocated to different areas. An example of this is the $500 pledge tier “design a ship encounter”. This pledge tier actually includes several designs and you can see advanced (but not final) versions of these templates below. Keep in mind that it is not completely final yet but probably 80% complete.
Our writers are busy working on the back-story for factions, sub-factions and major characters (faction leaders etc). Who exactly are the Explorer’s Society and the Unknown Legion? How are they related to the Duchy of Penrose? We expect to release more background info and lore starting in early April. This should be both an entertaining read to help immerse yourself in the universe or if you pledged for a design tier it can give you a starting point for your custom design.
Hopefully this has given you a good overview of what to expect from the design tier that you have pledged to. We will continue to work on and flesh out the templates so they are easy to understand and gives you a lot of flexibility when designing your character, weapon, starbase or cyber-parrot!
Finally, we wanted to give you a production update. Right after Christmas vacations we began the search for additional talent. We also had a few developers on stand-by who were ready to jump onboard as soon as our contract with Eurovideo was signed. The development team is growing rapidly from 12 before Christmas and we expect to be at full strength (around 30) by the end of March. The team is quite diverse and includes members from ten different nationalities and our combined development experience now includes over 100 years of AAA development experience. This helps reduce risk and allows us to iterate and polish on both visuals, story and gameplay.
Due to the team growing we are also spending time to reorganize our internal documentation and bringing it up to date. We have a lot of knowledge in our head that needs to either be put in writing or the previously written version was out of date. For example both art direction (style guide, signature colours, designs), technical art guidelines (how do we actually build a ship from A to Z, what restrictions apply to the bipedal animation rig) as well as story and game design documents are being reviewed and fixed.
The impact of new team members should be quite obvious by the time the next Kickstarter update is ready to roll out. We expect to have a healthy mix of environment art, character art and animations to share with you. Next update we also want to talk about battle drills and adaptive formations. However, we are currently waiting on a third party to deliver crucial code to get everything working together (we want to avoid hacking something together just for demo purposes as that is wasted effort). If we have something good then we will show it. Alternatively we may split the next update in two. Time will tell.
We will round off this update with a concept of an Osmani space station. The scale object (ship) on the left is a Black Eagle heavy cruiser (the same model we showed in drydock a few updates back).
Cheers,
Your friends at Perihelion Interactive
Roll Call on the Observation Deck
almost 9 years ago
– Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 04:03:31 PM
Hey backers,
In this update we are going to cover the game flow, show how we are building star bases, discuss ship deck plans (both frigate and destroyer) and last but not least talk about the backer pledge templates.
IMPORTANT: On the 31st of March 2015 we will lock down the ability to pledge for or upgrade to backer design tiers. This will be your final chance to upgrade existing pledges or purchase new ones. See the end of this update for further details.
As you know we are in the process of growing the development team. To introduce our new developers to the world of The Mandate we created a “game flow” overview to give a visual concept of what the game is about and how the different game modes are interconnected.
We think this diagram does a good job of explaining the different game modes and how they come together. Of course this diagram is a bit abstract so it can help to have a more graphical version which shows a thumbnail picture of what each game mode will look like.
As you can see - the battle orchestrator is the glue that holds the entire game together. As an example: When you are looking at the miniature galaxy map from afar, this is the battle orchestrator in action; you can see the edges of the table in the background. When you are in this mode, you are really looking at a representation of the galaxy projected onto the battle orchestrator table as opposed to the galaxy itself (which would require something like a "God view" and we didn't feel it would be appropriate). The battle orchestrator representation displays everything slightly out of scale to more easily be interpreted.
When you zoom in on specific objects such as planets or space stations, the battle orchestrator is working at a closer zoom level and will display more information and a more accurate rendition of the object. You may remember our video from last year which showed exactly this kind of seamless transition between the battle orchestrator and space combat.
Last update we gave you a sneak peak at the Osmani star base. In The Mandate, each major faction will have a unique star base design and ship designs that mirror the traits of that faction. This will make it easy to recognize exactly who controls a star base. We are going with a modular approach for the star bases which is similar to how we tackle space ships; Star bases will have one major module and several minor modules that connect to the major module. This allows us to create a lot of visual variety from relatively few pieces. In terms of scale, the star bases will be anywhere from 2 km to 8 km long. Some factions will have symmetrical designs whereas other factions will have asymmetrical designs. The shape of the star base also varies, from cylindrical to toroidal.
The production of star bases is still very much work in progress but we thought we would show you a bit more; this time, the Arkwright star base. Let’s first start with some notes from our Art Bible about the Arkwright star base:
“The Arkwright SS should look hardy and metallic. Imagine this station floating in the rings of a gas giant with the constant potential for collision with asteroids. This station and it's parts should look tough enough to withstand such collisions.
Key aesthetic features for the Arkwright star base:
There should copious dust or fog around the station. Drones should be collecting and ferrying rocks back to the station
This station should always have one module devoted to melting and crushing rocks. Like the jaws of a hungry molten rock monster
Each station should have at least one port area for ship repair and trade
Each module will need to look like it does something
When submitting a design, each one should be labeled with its function and how it connects to the rest of the station parts
This station should not look pretty and is not designed for looks. It should be boxy with cross-beams and struts because an engineer at one point did the math and said “We need something here for stability”.
So what does it look like?
This is a concept piece to set the art direction for the station. Next up we have a blockout which shows the modular pieces arranged next to each other.
By combining the modular pieces we can create different star base configurations. Below is a configuration that closely follows the initial concept above but we could also have a smaller or bigger base as well.
Next up we want to talk about deck plans. Last year we shared some preliminary deck plans for a basic frigate. We have since iterated on these deck plans to find the right balance in terms of which rooms will be represented inside the ship, what function they will have and how they are linked to crew skills and consoles.
After calculating the deck plans all the way from frigate up to battleship it soon became apparent that scaling the ships proportionally would result in a boarding operation on a frigate being fairly straightforward while boarding a battleship could take a very long time. Two solutions we came up with to tackle this was a) to reduce the overall space available as the ship gets bigger and b) to make the rooms for bigger ships bigger in size.
In terms of available space a frigate uses approximately 90% of the available interior space. For a battleship we are around 60%; this can be explained via bulkheads and additional armour that takes up additional space. Keep in mind that the frigate is 200 m long and the battleship is 800 m long. The frigate has one full deck and the battleship has three full decks (in addition to cargo hold, bridge deck and observation deck). So there is still a lot more real estate available on the battleship.
For room sizes we had originally planned each room to be 10x10 meters. However, after doing pathfinding and boarding tests we saw that we had to change this to 15x15 meters. This is what we call a “small” room, and it is used for frigates and destroyers. For cruisers we switch to 25x25 meters, or “medium” rooms. Finally, for battlecruisers and battleships we switch to 35x35, or “large” rooms. Each of these room types also has a “double” version, e.g. 15x15 has 15x30 etc for specific room types (hangar, mess hall, gym etc).
The deck plans you will see below are one way of configuring them. We are building content design tools inside Unity which allows us (and later modders) to create new deck plans. The deck plans are created on a per-ship-section-basis. For example a frigate with a midship hangar section can have a different interior layout than a frigate with a standard midship section. Furthermore, we can easily extend this approach to also differentiate between factions i.e. an Osmani frigate could have a different layout than an Arkwright frigate. The tools are powerful so for us it is more a question of time and game balance constraints.
One more thing before we show the actual deck plans: The basic grid/cell size is 5 m which is the area that would be occupied by a 4-man fire team or single-wide door. This is our basic scale of measurement if you will. So here is the updated frigate deck plan:
We also wanted to share a preliminary deck plan for the destroyer. With twice the length of the frigate there is more space to work with. The destroyer comes equipped with heavy batteries and mounts an extra offensive battery. The destroyer also has more redundancy so in case one room is knocked out during combat, this can be less critical than on a frigate.
There are a lot of details we could go into for the deck plans, room types, crew positions, ranks etc. For example how we have rearranged and classified the “weapons” service branch rooms into “offensive batteries”, “defensive batteries” and “heavy batteries”. We could also talk about what upgrades would be required on a frigate to allow it to match or exceed the firepower of a standard destroyer (hint: ship section upgrades + tier quality). But we will save this for another update. In the mean time - feel free to study the deck plans and post your comments either on Kickstarter or over on the backer forums on the community site.
Moving on, as a follow-up to last update, we have now posted the pledge tier design templates for the various tiers. CLICK HERE to read the templates and to understand exactly what you are expected to deliver.
After you have checked your pledge tier then the next logical step is to login to the forums on the community site and visit the pledge forum called Pledge Tiers Design Discussion. This forum is only visible to registered backers and contains one sub-forum per backer design tier. In each sub-forum you will find sticky posts that outline the process, rules and guidelines that you should follow when doing your designs. All registered backers can read everything in this forum but only backers who pledged for a specific tier can post in that respective sub-forum.
Our train of thought is that you should be able to give and receive peer review feedback from other backers who are working on the same designs as yourself (If you wish to provide feedback in a pledge tier outside your own then feel free to send a private message to a backer. However, remember to be civil, respectful and constructive).
If you have lore questions then the volunteer scribes will help you out and if you run into any other problems then our volunteer moderators will also be there to help you.
IMPORTANT: On the 31st of March 2015 we will lock down the ability to pledge for design tiers. This will be your final chance to purchase or upgrade existing pledges.
During April we will contact everybody who pledged to a specific tier and provide a link to which sub-forum on the community site they should use for posting their designs for peer feedback. During April and early May we will launch lore updates for the major factions as well as important NPC characters. This means that you will soon have a lot more lore and backstory which you can use as hooks for your own backer designs.
If you have an existing pledge and wish to upgrade it before the 31st of March, then the easiest way is to:
you can pick the desired amount to donate and then send us a message via Kickstarter with your transaction ID and also tell us which pledge you wish to upgrade to
we will handle the rest
For the next update we plan to do a “meet the team” segment. And as a brief intro to this we wanted to share a video from Francisco “Kiko” Buyo who is our senior animator. Here is a video that outlines his work process as well as a few example animations that he did recently. We are working hard on gameplay examples and Kiko's animations tie-in with these... More to come soon!
