This article was originally posted on the Joy Machine blog maybe check it out too (it also has a table of contents because this really is poorly organized wordspew)!

I wanted to cover a variety of Steel Hunters updates across the board so this piece is covering a lot of ground on a variety of areas; prepare for a large-cone blast of wordspew.

Completely Wonderful Recent Happenings

To kick off this topical and tonal hurricane of a Steel Hunters update, lets start with the two biggest morale boosts in months:

Steel Hunters and I Are in PC Gamer

I’ve worked with Xalavier on another piece for PC Gamer in the past, but seeing the game in a big area in the spread was just joyous.

I’ve had work on games while I was at Stardock Entertainment and when working briefly on Crowfall… but seeing something I’m directly responsible for like this is just, well, pretty profoundly meaningful to me.

An iOS-Created Slideshow of Steel Hunters’ Progression

During my sprints it can be hard to calm down and get to sleep, so I tend to play with iOS image and video apps.

This time: a simple, mostly-chronological, progression of Steel Hunters from its tech art/vfx sandbox playground two years ago up to a few weeks ago.

It’s goofy, sure, but it’s such a strong reminder that progress (tremendous progress that I couldn’t have ever fully predicted) is being made. Even when it feels like I’m crawling to the “finish line”. As follows:

<iframe title="Steel Hunters — One Guy's Journey Thus Far" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/YnQJdPX1KFY?rel=0&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamedeveloper.com" height="100%" width="100%" data-testid="iframe" loading="lazy" scrolling="auto" class="optanon-category-C0004 ot-vscat-C0004 " data-gtm-yt-inspected-91172384_163="true" id="492140941" data-gtm-yt-inspected-91172384_165="true" data-gtm-yt-inspected-113="true"></iframe>

I still wish I could have used “Carry On Wayward Son” for the background track.

Joy Machine, Steel Hunters, and the Whole Money Thing

So far, Steel Hunters has been an enormous personal investment (and clearly not financially), but it’s one I’m making because I believe it demonstrates a sort of quality and style of game design that can make for a really great game experience. But, also, because the game entire production is based on:

But it Needs the Funding to Get There

So far, I’ve been the only person working on Steel Hunters; and that’s been, to say the very, very least: rough. I’m doing this because I have enough confidence in the quality of the initial publisher demo (which hopefully can be successfully conveyed in the short initial public trailer). And, aside from that, I’ve never had more fun working on a project and been this certain about how great and varied an experience it can be (whether played single-player or, especially, with up to three other players).

I’ve also constantly targeted a level of quality for a “prototype” (probably more akin to a green light demo at this point) that is representative of the game while, at the same time, based on production-ready and quality code and design that it can immediately “hit the ground running” with more people involved. It’d be fairly impossible to make the full game by myself, much less hit the intended play experience without some excellent team members who specialize in areas I can only skate by on.

I specifically wanted to position Steel Hunters as a AA-quality game and aim for as low a budget necessary as possible because I want really want to demonstrate that even a fast-paced third-person shooter (with heavily customizable ways for players to play how they want) can be made without a AAA budget. And all of this would be possible for the list of reasons I mentioned earlier.

I actually had some early (too early) negotiations with some publishers over a year ago that, I think, could have actually become a deal… But I wasn’t psyched with their view of what the game needed (especially given the drastically inflated cost associated with those needs), so I eventually decided to just be patient and spend as much time on whatever I can develop in an attempt to show off a game that resonated with a publisher that really gets the goals we (my COO and I) have.

The Public Trailer and Publisher Demo

NOW, all that said, the first trailer is — for real this time — not too far off. Not imminent, but very much in sight. Realistically, I could make a few days’ worth of changes and script a handful of sequences and it’d be pretty solid, but I’ve always wanted the trailer to be solely comprised of unscripted, in-game footage — even if it’s only the highlight reel from the sum total of footage taken. When I initially wanted to release a trailer (a year ago), I realized doing that would be falling into the trap of so many other projects: a trailer that is good but nowhere near representative of the game’s actual current state.

And, really, the trailer is a larger risk because it can’t be as carefully storyboards and scripted to really make the most of its fairly short duration (~1:15m). But, it’d be silly to talk a big game about “how games should be developed and marketed” if I didn’t even follow the same principles myself.
But the trailer has a lot going for it: we integrated a character, of sorts, to convey the intended dry and dark humor I want to infuse the game with while the gameplay itself just shows a lot of mechs and explosions and so forth (to be voiced by a VO actress, Tamara Ryan, whose rough recordings matched the tone and cadence of the character on even an initial dry run). I also was able to get help from one of my favorite bands, The Felix Culpa, to provide the background music for the whole thing. So… I’m optimistic.

The publisher demo is intended to follow on the heels of the trailer. I wanted the two to be simultaneously available, but the prep for the two deliverables is so different that it was just unrealistic

Steel Hunters Happenings

I just cut everything I wrote (which was probably a page and a half or two) because, really, I’ve already talked enough about how intense and rough the development of this project has been. And I’ve learned a lot of great lessons I’d love to relay at some point, but that’s for another post. So, here are the neat things going on:

A Completely Different Take on the Environment

I wasn’t planning on changing the landscape all that much from its second iteration, but one day I wanted to aim for smoother, more sand-swept landscape with less rigid mesas, some small dunes/waves, and smoother, more open spaces. The prior iterations were nowhere near open enough to ever construct a believable space for where a city may have once been.

So as to not labor on the whole process too much in an overview article, here’s what iteration two looked like:

And here’s the lighting-only and end result of the current third/final iteration of the landscape (I didn’t do exact before/afters, so the lighting-only image has meshes from the second-iteration landscape, which I was using for a scale reference):

On the plus side: anyone with World Machine and GeoGlyph 2.0 can check out the two-pass (one of the biggest mistakes in the second iteration) node graph that generated it on the Joy Machine GitHub Repo.

With More Stuff

Here’s a more recent screen shot of the progress on the landscape. Of note is that it’s been a lot of high-level building/mesh layout work to establish the rough feel of each of the map’s disparate areas. You may notice that there’s still a fairly large space that hasn’t been filled out quite yet, but I just figured out what that was going to be a day or two ago:

The current aesthetic for the “AI” buildings (the very out-of-place clean, new, and shiny buildings) is very much a work-in-progress.

The Pieces Are Coming Together

For a more grounded perspective, though, here’s the same camera composition some of you have come to know and love (or at least expect):

Gameplay

I have, much to the detriment of my own stress levels and completely-unfulfilled desired time doing design/vfx work, spent about 90% of my time over the last three months working exclusively on gameplay and backend code. So much C++. So much. But a run-down of the major systems currently in-place and just in need of tweaking to feel and function better: