Dev log ·
The first dev log: a week of closed testing
The first testers got their keys last week. Since then the squad takes its turn in any order, fights begin with a stealthy approach, the people are people instead of boxes, and the demo opens with a proper intro.
Hollow Protocol went out to its first closed testers last week. Their copies update themselves, so everything below is already in their hands. This is the dev log: what changed, roughly weekly, while the game gets built.
Your squad, your order
Turns used to walk you through the squad one operative at a time. Now you pick who acts, in any order. Choose an action, click the target, and it happens: there's no Confirm step any more. A misplaced move can be undone. When someone is finished, Done hands the turn to whoever still has something left, and Resume brings them back if you change your mind.
Aim is gone too. In its place are two shots, a quick shot and an aimed shot, and hovering over a machine now compares every shot you could take: the chance to hit, the damage, the average, and the chance of a kill.
Before the shooting starts
Every fight now opens with an approach. You move through the gatehouse while the machines patrol, and the world only moves when your squad does. Patrols show their sight cones on the floor and a radar keeps track of them, so you can pick the moment and the corner. Zoom with the wheel or a pinch, and drag to turn the camera.
The fights themselves have grown to 16 by 12 tiles, with a camera that follows the squad, a textured battlefield, and muzzle flashes that light the room.
People, not boxes
Until this week the squad was blocks on a skeleton. Now every person is a proper rigged model: the six operatives, the escort officer, and the girl and her mother (and her bear). They crouch behind cover, hold their rifles properly, sit, and cheer when a fight is won.
Operation Safe Passage
Pick Demo on the title screen and it now plays an opening before the briefing. It's pixel art at the board's own 480×270: painted scenes with the game's models rendered into them, voices, and a score written in the game's own music kit. The title screen got the same treatment, with the walker at the gate and a score of its own, and fights open on that heavy theme before the game's music takes over.
Fixed
- The game slowed down fight by fight. A panel was quietly leaving thousands of invisible pieces behind each time it redrew, about 4,500 by the third fight. That's fixed, and the automated test run now fails if it ever comes back.
- A long list of casualties bleeding out could push the squad strip off the screen. It fits now.
For testers
Press Esc → Send feedback to send a note and screenshots straight to us. F12 takes a screenshot anywhere and attaches it to your next note. After each update, What's new lists what changed.
That's week one. Next time: what the testers found.