Scripts, Factions, and Other Updates

Hey guys. A few updates on the current state of things. So this past week I took some vacation from work, family, and my YouTube channel even, and coded HARDCORE. I really thought I'd have a a demo to you at this point in the summer so I'm trying to close to gap to get there. This week was really helpful though to make progress on a handful of fronts, which I have detailed here.

1. GAME SCRIPTS

Some of you may remember that one of my last promised updates in MetalMercs before I decided to retool in Godot was campaigns (I think the game still has a rotating title mentioning adventures are coming in Fall 2025...). One of the reasons I decided to pause development of MetalMercs last year and shift to Godot is the difficulty in introducing story-driven missions. It wasn't the only reason and it wasn't impossible, but it was going to take a LOT of work to get missions to happen in the Python version of MetalMercs. So when I shifted to Godot, one of the first things I did was try to draft up my own scripting language, keeping it simple and flexible so that, from the very beginning of the port, even novices could write their own campaigns.

Now my own language did work but honestly, it was buggy, sloppy, and just confusing. And so, I've decided to pivot to Lua. For those in the know, Lua is commonly used for scripting games, appearing in games like World of Warcraft and Roblox. So we're in good company and it's widely documented and there's lots of community support. My only real qualm with Lua is that I used it in a game years ago and while it was easy to use, I'm personally not crazy about its syntax. However, I'm getting over it, and have spent a few days replacing all my existing scripts with Lua scripts instead and it's worked quite well! And now that I have Lua running, OK it is awesome to have a fully functioning programming language running missions in MetalMercs and it opens up the possibility to have very flexible and complex campaigns down the line!

2. CONTRACTS, DEPLOYMENTS, AND MISSION CHAINS

I got a lot of the core systems needed for a playable demo in a good state this week. This includes having generated contracts connect with the mission maps I showed off a few weeks ago. Having the game engine now chain players through missions, track deployment limits and honor those, and track mission outcomes. The mission setup screen is also now fully integrated with this system. Suffice to say, I'm getting to a point where the systems behind missions and contracts work, and now I just have to actually balance the contracts themselves a little and they should be good to go!

3. FACTION LOGO FACELIFTS

While I love and will always love pixel art, looking at the faction logos I had which were hand drawn pixel logos, they weren't looking as good to me these days. Especially when comparing them to faction logos from other big games, they didn't look great. As you probably see from the top of this post, I'm going to remake the faction logos in vector art. This is a much more minor update but I think the Union's draft logo came out quite well. I think I can use vector art more generally in the game to help the world feel more professional, so that's another update that you will see in the revised demo.

That's all for now. More to come soon!