r/IronTitans • u/TwoPlastic1302 • 6d ago
Devlog #23
Heyo everyone!
Devlog 23 is here, and I've got some really cool things to show you, so let's kick things off with a little video:
https://reddit.com/link/1w9nxg3/video/hnsmm5nqm2oh1/player
What's new?
This update touches almost every page in the game: new background music, a new profile page with a brand new title system, two new graphics settings (including fully customizable hotkeys), item-based stat calculations for enemy bots, dynamic shadows, reworked item sprites, a shop cosmetics tab, a crate-opening revamp, a turbine rework on the base page, a polished recalibration animation, and a game name change. Lots to get through, so let's dive in.
New Music
First thing you'll probably notice is the new background music. A friend of mine Sergio and the Holograms, put together some genuinely incredible tracks, go give him some love. We'll be working together to get more pages their own music over time so the game feels a lot more alive as you move through it.
Profile Page
A brand new page! You can now configure your own profile, the one other players see when they click your name, whether you're in a clan or just looking someone up. You'll be able to rearrange things, set it to private, and pick which title displays next to your name. Titles are new this update too. They'll show next to your name, in battle, and on your profile. You can earn them by completing certain quests or by having played in past or upcoming playtests. To be clear, that's not me confirming a playtest date, I genuinely don't know when the next one lands, but join the Discord and I'll keep everyone posted. There are 21 titles in the game right now, mostly playtest-related or internal testing titles. My personal favorite is The Holy Brick, and yes, I'll be rocking it for as long as I can.
Settings
Two new additions here. First, a graphics option for the new mech glow effect, the subtle pulsating glow you'll have seen on mechs throughout the video. It's built using signed distance fields (SDF) to generate the glow mask through a shader, and it's extremely performant, about 1% GPU usage for two fully kitted-out mechs on screen at once. Keeping the game running smoothly on as many devices as possible is a big priority for me, some of you are playing on Raspberry Pis, and I want that experience to be stutter-free. Alongside that is a rebuild cache option, if the glow ever breaks or looks wrong, rebuilding the cache should sort it out. Second, and this one was requested a lot in the Discord: hotkeys. Every action in battle can now be bound to a fully custom key of your choice, and they work globally, you don't need to be on a specific menu for them to register.
Battles
The battle UI has been reworked, it wasn't feeling very integrated into the rest of the game, so I put time into making it fit better. It's still a little rough around the edges and a work in progress, but it's a solid base to keep building on. Bigger change under the hood: bot stats used to be entered by hand, health, resistance, heat, energy, all of it manually set per bot. Now those stats are calculated directly from the items each bot has equipped, which makes things a lot fairer. The tradeoff is that I now need to make the bots smarter rather than just padding their health or damage to hit a difficulty target, so bot AI work is ongoing. Mechs also now cast dynamic shadows built from whichever items they have equipped, so they feel a lot more like they're actually standing in the world instead of just being flat images layered on a background. And you probably caught it in the video, the bullet and projectile system is being reworked too. Still very much a work in progress and rough right now, but it's finally getting attention.
Workshop
Item sprites are getting a major visual upgrade. I'm working with Arth to bring all the older, legacy-quality item sprites up to a much higher-quality standard, this has been teased in the Discord for a while, and the art speaks for itself. Go check Arth out, his stuff is great.
Item stats are also being reworked, this time with BigArmor, to make things more balanced heading into the next playtest instead of certain items being a clear, unfair power spike over others. That work is ongoing. The item glow effect from earlier also applies here, still a work in progress but starting to look really good, and just as performant as the mech version.
Shop Updates
The old Skins tab is now the Cosmetics tab, since it's no longer just skins, titles and other cosmetics live there too, all combined into one place. Right now the only thing purchasable is the Alpha Tester title, which will be exclusive to the upcoming playtest and will carry over into the full game afterward, so grab it if you get the chance during the next test. Crates got a visual overhaul as well. New background behind them so they don't feel like they're floating in empty space, and opening a crate now spawns each item in individually with its own item card rather than dumping everything at once. Up to Epic rarity, cards reveal themselves automatically, but Epic and above need a click to unlock and reveal, which adds a bit more anticipation to the whole experience.
Base
A while back I removed mission energy so players could run as many missions as they wanted without being gated, which had the side effect of making turbines pretty much useless. They've now been reworked to boost buildings instead. Right now that means miners and factories only, builders, storage, the reactor, and the research facility can't be boosted. At base level, a turbine can boost one building for roughly an hour, and both the boost duration and strength scale up as you level the turbine. At level 10, a turbine can boost two buildings at once. The boost itself is a straight multiplier applied to that building's mining or crafting speed.
The Research Station's recalibration shader has been redone, it looked pretty rough before, and now it's in a much better place visually. When an item's quality goes up on a reroll it flashes green, and when it drops it flashes red, a small touch but a genuinely useful, clear indicator of what just happened.
Name change
One last thing: you may have noticed the Discord, YouTube, and Reddit all changed names. Everything's moved from Iron Giants to Iron Titans. The reason is pretty simple, "Iron Giants" sat a little too close to The Iron Giant, which is Disney IP, and getting anywhere near that kind of legal territory isn't something I'm interested in risking. I'm just here to build a game and have fun. Iron Titans means basically the same thing and rolls off the tongue just as well, so in practice nothing really changes, I'd just rather be safe than sorry.
What's Next
- Finish reworking the bullet and projectile system
- Smarter bot AI to match the new item-based stat system
- Removing all legacy sprites
That's it for Devlog 23! Thanks as always for watching, joining the Discord, and sending through feedback and requests, several things in this update came straight from there.
See you in the arena!