Well, we sur­vived another year — and other than yet more secu­rity the­atre, the new year promises to bring alot of excit­ing devel­op­ments to the table, both from an indie devel­oper stand­point as well as from the gam­ing world at large.

From the CSO front, over the hol­i­days, one of the interns that I have work­ing on things whipped up a TON of MOLE unit indi­ca­tor icons, which are being used for the higher-level strate­gic ele­ments of the game. A ton of work still remains to get them all orga­nized and in-game, but I’m fairly pleased with what he was able to pro­duce in a fairly short period of time.

The image below is an exam­ple of a typ­i­cal MOLE over­lay on a mil­i­tary map. The icons indi­cate the posi­tion of the var­i­ous units present in the area, and may also pro­vide info regard­ing their direc­tion of move­ment and sta­tus (among other things).

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As well, over the hol­i­days I have been exper­i­ment­ing with the base-building func­tion­al­ity of the game — which con­sists of typ­i­cal RTS style selec­tion and con­struc­tion of build­ings and other ele­ments of the bases, includ­ing defen­sive perime­ters, bar­racks, com­mand / HQ ele­ments etc. This higher-level ‘meta’ game­play is going to be a major ele­ment of the web-based ver­sion of CSO, and is going to be a major focus of the first release of the game.

The low-level tac­ti­cal game­play involves much more in the way of art assets and isn’t quite as suit­able for web-deployment, but the tie-in’s between the two are going to be fairly seam­less. You will be able to man­age your unit, deploy sol­diers and (poten­tially) even resolve bat­tles from the higher-level strate­gic inter­face — this will be acces­si­ble from both the web-based client and the full down­load­able client. The low-level tac­ti­cal game will be restricted to the down­load­able client.

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Grabbed a num­ber of games from steam over the hol­i­days — they had some killer deals on — if you missed them, it’s too bad really, because you just can’t beat get­ting games for all of a cou­ple bucks. Have a nice healthy back­log of cool games that I have been want­ing to check out, should get the inspi­ra­tional juices flow­ing nicely ;}

Other than that, the hol­i­days were pretty laid back and spent with the fam­ily (as it should be) — but I’m look­ing for­ward to get­ting back to the grind stone.

More soon!

Related posts:

1. Game­play Modes, Brain­storm­ing Co-op
2. Con­tent Browser, Mod­u­lar Weapons, etc
3. Game­play progress, updates