June Developer Update

Hey everyone, this last update took me a while to upload as i wanted to have a few more things ready to show off, we've made a lot of progress in the art deparment over this month and i'm excited to show off what's coming for update 1.16+ as well as the soon to be re-released Campaign Demo.

Let's break down what we've been working on over the last month or so.

Balance Update 1.16

Despite Blizzard's upload restrictions our balance team has continued to work on patch 1.16 as well as an alternative to set up a Private Test Realm for a limited number of users which allowed them to host the last SEL Masters showmatch.

Thanks to the work of HyperONE we were able to test out balance patch 1.16 and gather data in order to make the next set of changes before the first public iteration of this PTR

With this PTR we've introducing several new models including the previously shown Academy, Gateway and Pylon models, you can read more about these models and the PTR over here
https://scevo.net/posts/evo-update-1_16-ptr#new-models

New Art

We've continued to complete the models made by Leaf_It, Altjunior and Rob as our bases start to actually feel closer to BroodWar than SC2.

As previously mentioned we've been working on the Refinery, this model is at least for now scheduled for 1.16.X as the only thing pending on it are the Death model and its variations

The Engineering Bay is also scheduled for the next patch, though the death model has been on hold while we complete other models

The Zerg Larva has now also been added, ready for the 1.16 PTR

Next is a model we're incredibly excited to add and its the Barracks

Although we've got a lot of work pending on it from rigging all the way to death models this model is set to come out soon along with the Campaign Demo

AltJunior has been hard at work as well as he's now finished the Robotics Facility, these two are already in the works and we'll hopefully report their completion next month.

For a while we've wanted to overhaul several of our models as we did earlier this year with the Siege Tank, adding several new Death variations, improving animations and making Ragdolls for them, this time it was the Overlord's turn as well as the Drone.

We've attached videos of the new Overlord Death models, Drone Ragdolls and Spawning Pool Physics interactions.

We'll continue to improve our existing models in order to bring them to a 100% completed state including those made by blizzard that we still use.

Next is something that i'm excited to announce and it is the addition of a new collaborator that has been helping us out with some new icons, a community member and long time Donor BoxOfRandomness, he's joining us as a 2d Artist with a focus on game icons.

You can see some of his work right here and is already available on the 1.16 PTR.

Sidequests

Sidequests is what i've been referring to as me obsessing over a particular thing that ends up delaying one thing in exchange for another, its happened several times over and is whats gotten us several new models.

This month however i had another sidequest that i had to tackle before diving deep into one of the items of our roadmap: The Melee AI.

Despite this one being a relatively unnecessary change due to the upload restrictions i wanted to give players something to try out the game on their own until the campaign can be released and the Ladder is also stuck in development for this same reason.

Due to this i started experimenting with adjusting the AI builds in a more conscious manner that results in the AI stalling a lot less due to time, action queue limitations, resources and several other factors that cause AI builds to stall, resulting in a poor AI experience or low AI difficulty.

While exploring my options i landed on creating a table that would help me keep a count of costs, supplies, help me track requirements and better spread the used resources vs supplies when compared to the StarCraft 2 AI, it all started with an excel sheet and ended up developing into an entire build order/code generation application.

This ultimately led to the:

Evo Build Master

The Build Master is an internal tool created with the purpose of helping expedite the process of AI creation and allowing even a beginner user to create new AI builds every step of the way.

This tool simplifies the entire process all the while placing hand guards every step of the way to make debugging easier, iterate and even keep a record of older builds created.

At this point this tool is still relatively clunky and is only for internal use but i'd hope to at some point release it publicly for other projects that would like to create their own custom AI.

This is all to say that we're working actively on re-balancing and reworking the AI builds that were previously poorly made.

Our first step on this initiative is to address each race individually, test out the AI builds and deploy them over time after some testing.

A follow up post is coming soon where we'll go over the AMA/Dev Stream we had earlier last month as well as some Campaign News.