HotM:Current State For Testing

What Is This Page?

This is where you can check for the latest status on what is ready and what is not ready for testing.

If you are going to be testing and you have not done your first blind test yet, then please stop reading now and come back after your first blind session!

Prologue

Everything in the prologue is done and polished, pending whatever tester feedback comes in.

The prologue is very short, and meant to just be to get you the idea of moving around units and using abilities and whatnot, and the initial combat. Making this longer, or making this have more options, would just delay players getting to the meat of the tutorial-esque parts o the game.

Chapter One

These are not labeled in-game (by design), but there are tiers in chapter one. You can think of these as firebreaks, where you have to finish everything in one tier, in any order usually, before moving on to the next tier.

Tier Zero

This is before your first projects open up, and while you still have to do things in linear order to learn the basics of building. No plans to make this any more complex or large. Being short and to the point moves you to the interesting parts, faster.

Tier One

• This is the tent elimination, microbuilders, weapons and armor, and the AGI researchers' first appearance.
• This is complete and polished, but it's going to include a new path in the coming weeks.
  • Right now you are forced to build housing for humans. There is going to be a flamethrower option, instead.
  • The idea is that very early on in the game, players get the idea that they can greatly branch how things happen. And also it's then careful not to railroad you into being too nice.

Tier Two

• This is the sheltered food and/or water, prismatic tungsten, and armor-piercing rounds.
  • This is complete insofar as what it is, but there's going to be a completely different tier two for people who choose flamethrowers instead of housing.
    • The idea of that is simply to really show off, early, how divergent things can get.
  • As far as what actually happens within this version of this tier, I think it's pretty good where it is, but let me know what you think. There's a lot of figuring-out you have to do as you probably get your butt kicked a few times, and the loop of that is I think good.
  • Oh -- actually, there is going to be another branch here. I forgot. If you want to basically do soylent green instead of getting proper food, that's going to be an option.
    • Within limits, providing some interesting choices like these in the earlier tiers is definitely a goal.

Tier Three

• Vehicles, scandium, extraction, and more vehicles.
  • This is going to be the same no matter which route you take starting in tier one.
  • I don't know that this requires any new options or branches. It's a fairly simple tier, and with a pretty specific set of goals for the player to learn.

Tier Four

• This has two giant parts, one of which is building a better brain, and the other of which is improved apartments. Also flying factories, contemplation, bulk androids, key contacts, and more.
  • Improved apartments will not be a thing if you chose flamethrower, later, but building a better brain will be the same.
  • Limitations here at the moment:
    • More contemplation options are inwork, but I have not finished them. This is where a lot of side content options start opening up. Right now you can do the apiary one, but that's the only one.
    • It's not yet possible to complete Flexible Airspace.
    • It's not yet possible to complete Fast Fist, because you can't get to intelligence class 2 yet.
    • Building a better brain is not yet something you can complete.
    • There is a large new set of background activity that should start around this time, called city conflicts, but those are not quite ready for prime-time yet.

Tier Five (Coming Soon)

• This is where you're going to be introduced to The Zodiac, and it has different routes for if you're in flamethrower or housing path.
• This also will have a variety of other side content, including continuations of paths related to optional key contacts you can meet during tier four.

The Rest of Chapter One

• My goal is to get all of this finished before June -- ideally well before then.
• I'm going to have limited time to chat because of this. This schedule is really important.
• This is going to touch on the other major features of the game, like your own cult, diseases, more genetics stuff, dinosaurs, and so on.
• In general, Tiers 1-4 of chapter one are probably 1/3 of the total content for chapter one, but they include about 90% of the systems mechanics under the hood for the game as a whole.

What Will Chapter Two Be Like?

General Loop

• Chapter two is the "real game," after going through the comparably limited (but with side jaunts and a few options) chapter one.
• Chapter two uses the same underlying systems that have been established in chapter one, but then just starts cranking out the content for them.
  • You may notice if you use the cheats menu that there are a ton of units and equipment and such that you can't get yet in chapter one. These are things that you gain access to in chapter two.
    • Side note: if you can't gain access to it through regular gameplay, and it's a unit, then it's not properly balanced yet. If it's equipment, then it's balanced.
  • For the most part, playing the game over the long haul, you just play chapter two over and over again (so to speak).
  • Chapter one is meant to have mild replayability because it is the demo, and just also to give a good impression of the game will be. But fundamentally chapter one is something you're usually meant to play once and then never again.
• A lot of the things that you unlock in chapter one is available immediately in chapter two when you're starting a fresh timeline -- but not the side stuff gotten from contemplations. You have to do those each timeline if you want them, as they tend to have branching consequences.

What Is A Project Chain?

• Chapter one simulates two intertwined project chains, more or less. Or one complicated project chain.
  • However, it has a predetermined set of things it wants to show you, so it's very tame in terms of keeping you on the rails so that it can teach you all the mechanics.
• Chapter two is going to be very different. Essentially, it is very wide, and you choose which chains you want to start on your own, and they branch a lot more on their own.
  • One way you can think of a project chain is as a decision tree with gameplay at each node, and consequences from each decision. It's a bit like flamethrower versus housing, but just... all over the place, rather than in one place.
  • Where this game differs from something like Baldur's Gate 3 is that BG3 is one giant tree, but HotM is a forest of smaller trees, with firebreaks in between them.
    • This is hard to explain, but basically the benefit is that it allows for an even more varied experience without requiring six years and a staff of hundreds. It is, after all, just me.
    • This is one of several reasons that there is no direct dialogue in the game (well, with humans anyway). It uses some psychological tricks I learned from making the AI in AI War seem alive, to keep the story feeling contiguous even when it's not entirely.
  • Overall, chapter two will eventually have about 40 starting project chains. You can think of these as being things that will take a few hours to complete at most.
    • At launch, it will be more like 10, at least as my goal.

Firebreaks

• Each of these chains terminates before it has a chance to get too long and with too many cascading consequences. This is very important, and very central to how this all works.
  • The thing that's a pain in the rear about questlines or whatever is all the branches when they get too long. So by keeping these relatively short, but with lots of options and complications, I avoid that.
• When you have finished 1-3 project chains in chapter two, you're now in a situation where you are at a new tier of project chains. Depending on the current game state, different options will be available. So in other words, just because you did project chain A in tier 1 of chapter 2, does not mean you have to do project chain A2 in tier 2. It may not even be an option, depending on the general context.
  • The city is a giant database, essentially, and so at these firebreaks -- at these shifts to new tiers -- it's able to look at the context and give you appropriate new options based on the actual game state, rather than on which project chains you previously chose.
    • This is very important, because it means that you can get to later-tier chains in a variety of ways. This is where the strategic route-planning comes in, once you know what you're doing a bit more.
• Overall, you kind of repeat this process a number of times, moving from one tier/firebreak to the next. This is the outer gameplay loop of chapter two, and it's the thing you don't get in chapter one by design.
  • How many tiers this goes deep is dependent on the specific chains you choose. Some go deeper than others. Others don't go very deep, but might take a long time on a specific tier. It's all very freeform.

Getting Your Butt Kicked

I should take a moment to mention the general flow of the project chains is not linear. If you just pick a project chain and try to blaze through it, you're going to hit a brick wall at some point. You see this already in chapter one.

When you hit a brick wall, you can either try to pull off some tactical brilliance with the tools you already have, and thus break the wall. Or you can go looking for effective tools to specifically help you. So this is another point where strategy comes in a lot, and you can see this increasingly in chapter one as it goes along.

For more details on this, there's a whole article: Game Difficulty

Goal States

• At some point, you reach an option where you can essentially declare a victory for this timeline. This is reaching a specific "goal state" for the game.
  • When there are the full 40 project chains in tier 1 of chapter two, then there should be about 60 goal states.
• I should clarify that there are levels of goal state. The first focus for me for quite a while is going to be on things leading up to level 1 goal states on.
  • Level one goal states might be something like uplifting an animal to sapience and having it become a stable minority population.
  • Level two and three goal states get more crazy, with things like making that animal become the majority population on earth, or something along those lines.
• In general, in a given timeline you can leave and come back. If you're building these timelines near each other in the End of Time, then they will bleed into each other, and you can give yourself advantages (or disadvantages) on related timelines with careful planning of where you put new timelines and what you do in them).
  • This is the second tier of strategy in the game, and this is for the players who are really playing for the long-haul.

Later Chapters?

• Chapter two is going to be my exclusive focus for a year after launch, probably.
• Chapter three will introduce a conflict in the end of time, so you'll be fighting a war out there while you're also doing things within the specific timelines.
  • Everything from chapter two is still available in chapter three, but chapter three introduces this new element.
• Chapter four is probably going to be the really long-term postgame.
  • One way or another, the conflict in the end of time is resolved, either with victory or armistice.
  • At this point, the meta goal for most players is going to be trying to collect all of the goal states in one timeline or another, and find all of the various secrets hidden about.
• If there is ever DLC, then most of it will focus on content that is for chapter two, but which of course is still valid in chapters three and four.
  • In general, the assumption is that someone could come in, play a couple of timelines in 40ish hours, and say they're satisfied and move on. So having DLC content available to them all the way through would be important. (DLC is a long way off, but it's important to plan).
  • But for people who really get into the game and spend hundreds of hours, the expanding roster of project chains at each tier, and goal states at each level, will be the main long-term draw.

Art

Overall

Generally speaking, the art and art style for the game is done. There are minor things that need tweaking for clarity or visibility or performance or what have you, but largely this has been a year in the works.

In general, with respect, there's a limit to how much feedback I'm interested in in this area, unless there's something out of place compared to the baseline rest of it.

Main Menu

The main menu is an area where I am planning to add something more detailed and evocative when I have time, but likely that won't be until sometime in June. I have most of the pieces set up for that, but putting it all together in a good composition and with the right effects and color grading will probably take the better part of a day.

The Zodiac

The Zodiac is an area where I have a lot of things set aside for it visually, but I have not fully done the art for that area yet, in game. But most of the pieces I have experimented with enough in-engine to know what the general effect will be. So this is an area where I will be interested in some feedback as it comes online, as I'll be a bit too close to it for a few days to really evaluate it.

The End Of Time

If you use the cheat codes where you can get there, the end of time is fully visually complete, and also fully functions in terms of establishing new timelines, revisiting older ones, etc.

Everything prior to the invasion starting in chapter three is essentially done here, and I won't be getting to that for probably a year. There is one todo on the bugtracker to do with older saves, but that's it.

VFX

VFX for actions and abilities are largely added as I go, although there's a debug menu where you can see dozens of unused pieces that are ready but unused-so-far. I will likely add more pieces as I go over time, as well, as frequently the pieces I prepared in advance aren't quite sufficient, in this specific area, and I need to add more.

Other

In general, when it comes to enemies, player units, vehicles, etc, all of that is already in place for hundreds of more minor units, and dozens of key units. If you mess around in the cheat menu in sandbox mode, you can see all of the player-based stuff, but for the enemy designs you would have to go back and look in order screencaps on discord from my work area -- I have lines of a bout 50 full-color enemy units, and then about 970ish silhouette style enemy units. Those are being loaded into RAM when you open the game, but they're not actually something you can spawn in the game yet. I'll add them as I need them.

Sound

Music

The main menu theme is in, but the rest of the music for the game is still in-work.

In general, it's going to play music for a short while after emotional high or low points, and then otherwise lean on ambient sounds. This is I suppose the Half Life 2 approach, but with more music than that. But still a lot less than would be required to loop constantly in the background as an endless playlist. There's something a bit more poignant in music that shows up for major events, anyway.

Ambient Sound

The ambient soundscape is done, although at some point I may start adding in more variance based on what biome you are in. I think that's pretty overkill for now, though, as it already varies by camera height, and weather.

Sound Design

Everything that's already in the game is done sound-wise. If it doesn't have sound, then I meant for it not to, or forgot. If you're not sure which, feel free to surface it as an issue.

Similar to the VFX, you can see a list with thousands of sounds in banks that are only sometimes used. Those have been prepped for me to use on future things, and I also tend to keep adding to those over time.