- Viva la Vroom - 7 October 2022
Something you never hear about in game development is the challenge of capturing footage for a trailer or some amount of publicity. Few games, particularly those with any kind of randomness or procedural generation, look 100% perfect at every moment during development. Even if there aren't bugs, you're trying to take a slice of time, a single image, where the game shines as what you envision it to be. It can take weeks and weeks and at the end of the process you feel a strange mixture of pride in what you have created and despair over all the things you have left to do. So over August and September as I've been catching snippets for use in the Seattle Indies Expo, I got a face full of the driving experience at times when I wanted to feel the Drive Magic. However, as you drive and shoot there are stalls (put in there intentionally) as the game resolves projectiles and impacts. That sort…
- New stuff: Citadel Content and Sector Renown - 31 July 2022
Some great new updates to Auto Fire this month. The UI got another level up with some improved screens and a more lived-in look. You can now go to the citadel and help those people out, building renown with that city. Citadels are a little more solid in their representation also, with one of only a few corporations keeping control of the populace across the country. Finally, the visuals took an uptick with better lighting, new desert terrain visuals and cleaned up foliage. Excited to be preparing for revealing to players this fall! Content: Sectors now have a renown level that gates new sector quests. Tutorial also now uses renown sector quests. Cleared up the skull rating and show it on the challenge tablet app. Cleaned up factions signficantly. At campaign generation there are only four corporate factions, two military factions, one citizen and one duellist faction. Set up each sector…
- Big UI Update! - 26 June 2022
I know iit's been a long time coming, but Auto Fire is back in action and cranking out the updates and improvements! There has been a major UI revision for just about all of the supporting screens and menus. Consumable gear was added so you can manually heal up in the field if you have the right items. There is a significant and growing tutorial that pops up how to play the game as situations present themselves. (And yes, you can turn them off in the settings!) More is in the works, including the long-promised arenas, the future looks shiny and chrome this year! Gameplay/Combat Some garages and repair outlets have a limited amount of gas or ordnance they can sell you. Consumable gear was created that can repair your internals, drop mines or smokescreens, or basically enact any normal equipment's function. You can also target yourself on specific sides for armor repair gear, and the UI r…
- SIX Tactical Showcase - 6 December 2021
I know we've been dark for quite a while... as distractions have started to slow down towards winter, things are starting to roll more effectively again. This past summer, I made a video for the Seattle Indies Expo, who was doing a feature on local tactical games. The intent here was to show off the game with a bit of “talk from the developer” rather than a fancy trailer. Back then I didn't want to steal their thunder and post it separately, but it's a good snapshot that shows some things you haven't seen before. Have at it!
- Talkin' 'bout My Generation - 18 February 2021
Something that is really enjoyable to me, believe it or not, is refining ways to generate cool maps. To see the result of a mad pile of code and some assets turn into something you can play can be a bit addicting. I’ve certainly got a lot to do for entirely new content, but since I was working on creating new types of maps, it was worthwhile to look back at how I was generating outposts. Auto Fire uses a few different generators: one for rolling terrain, one for piecing together city blocks, one for populating hand-crafted levels... Originally I had been using the straight terrain generator that I use for battlefields and the overworld maps... a method of laying out blobs of varying terrains using Voronoi regions. If you're unfamiliar those may sound froo-froo-fancy but for grids they are almost embarrassingly simple: Throw a bunch of spots down on the map that have a particular terrain…
- Back in Black - 14 February 2021
Whoa. Things have been quiet here for the entirety of 2020. Maybe we could call it intentional? Auto Fire has made great progress, but the updates posted to the web just never made their way here, and that's criminal. In the light of 2021 we apologize, and appreciate you sticking with us. Auto Fire has made significant strides, and there's a lot to talk about! Less Suffering, More Superstars Something that seeps from of the cracks of Auto Fire's early footage is the standard desert post-apocalypse Mad Max thing. That dust-n-misery vibe is actually not quite accurate. Yes, there are deserts, and yes there was an apocalypse... of sorts. However, most of humanity is holed up in high-tech walled cities, protected from the dangerous world outside, and they are... bored. Drivers are their heroes. The life of a driver is both a fight for your life and a hustle for followers... and the new UI h…
- Dev streamin' and more new stuff - 30 October 2019
There have been improvements to Auto Fire both big and small! There was a list as long as my arm of bugs and nitpicks that I discovered when showing off the game at the Roguelike Celebration. Quality of life improvements are always crowd-pleasers, and they happen to also be me-pleasers since I’m playing the game everyday. More importantly, I started setting an eye to a longer play arc than I have now. That includes laying the foundation for loot, health and damage that’s defined by a progression arc. This means that I can balance numbers globally, as well as more easily drop in enemies and items to the game and have the system distribute them more easily. This wouldn't affect your experiences that much just yet (aside from some new items dropping!) but I’m looking forward to bulking up the content soon. Finally, I've been having fun streaming Auto Fire development every week, and it's g…
- October Update! - 10 October 2019
Since the Seattle Indies Expo at the start of September, I've been hard at work on the core systems of Auto Fire. This has been in anticipation of showing the game again, this time at the Roguelike Celebration in San Francisco this past weekend. These folks are all about player choice, so I wanted to make sure I was able to show off different playstyles, and show that the player's choice of car really matters. That's already the case with the weapon and equipment loadout slots on each chassis, but now there are special abilities baked right in. Speed PerksThe first vehicular ability is the speed perk, which activates a passive ability whenever you are driving at 60 MPH or over. These were created for each of the three base cars for different effects: Ram Blast: The Stallion has a speed perk that triggers an explosion whenever it collides at high speed. Hyperfocus: The driver of a Panthe…
- Slo-mo Auto Ballet - 14 September 2019
Thanks to regular pushing from a friend, I finally got around to giving Auto Fire a bit of new flair! One of the challenges of the game for many new players is that they didn't always grok how time progressed: That is, the fact that time is always paused when the game is waiting for your next move. Now with some time manipulation, that fact is a bit clearer... and cooler.
- See Auto Fire at the Seattle Indies Expo right next to PAX! - 1 September 2019
On PAX Sunday (September 1), there is an special event just down the street from the Convention Center… The Seattle Indies Expo 2019. In this magical place you will find a great selection of local developers showing their newest stuff and I’m super-excited to say that Auto Fire was selected to be among the games featured! https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F35717062%2Fdb50c1fa3d2c180a42747f54c4cdaa599561bac2.jpg The Seattle Indies group is a vibrant community that supports the work of game creators across the Pacific Northwest. It’s a pretty amazing group, and it’s exciting to see such strong support for game development in the Seattle area. The SIX is separate from PAX and free of charge, so it’s a great chance to slip in and see games that you won’t find anywhere else. I’ll be there demoing from noon to 9PM with the most polished auto combat yet. Some rad…
- New art from an exciting guest artist! - 29 August 2019
Hey all! I just wanted to take a moment to crow about Auto Fire's new title image, which was commissioned from legendary car combat illustrator Denis Loubet! https://cdn.steampulse.org/steam/asset?u=https%3A%2F%2Fsteamcdn-a.akamaihd.net%2Fsteamcommunity%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fclans%2F35717062%2F806f44444ae7e921c62556e430d0c55aafc1f193.png This is super-exciting and my inner 1984 kid is absolutely nerding the hell out right now. Denis has created art for a lot of my favorite things from that decade from Car Wars and Autoduel to Ultima and Champions. He did almost all the art for the original Car Wars pocket box, and created so many iconic works from that world. I feel like he was pretty instrumental in establishing what I thought was key to the Car Wars universe: The people and culture around the cars being as important as the cars themselves. It's something that I think has been lost a bit and would love to be able to bring back. Crash City GURPS…
