In my opinion this is both a good game and a very useful devlog, showing the development "from the inside". 
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Project UCG - An action packed twin stick shooter with RPG elements.
7 months later
- Edited
Finally, another video 
It's been a while. The project is not dead. Just life getting in the way.
Progress #12
Some of the new things:
- New mockup Player design
- New enemy, Drone added.. kamikaze style flying to kill you.
- Camera shakes
- 3-step combo with a ground power punch as 3rd hit
- When killing an enemy with a melee attack, the death of the enemy will spawn cooldown pickups
- Tweaks to the controller. Gameplay flows much better now.
- Dash now has a limiter of 2 and fills up within a few seconds.
- UI update, Dash limited displayed with two dots over the health bar
- UI update, All weapons heat meters are now displayed. The inactive secondary weapon greyed out.
- Leaderboard implemented and connected to a server database
- Tons of code re-written to be better and more organized (will help with further development as the game grows)
Tons of bugs have been hammered out. However, I still have some micro stutter issues I need to resolve. I also tested Effekseer, the ground power punch. It has a great editor to create the designs, but I feel the implementation isn't the greatest, so I will replace that and return to Godot's native particle engine.
I'm experiencing something strange. When I run the game through the editor, the game runs at solid 60fps (besides the stutter issues). However, when running a build of the game, I get very bad performance. Any idea what can cause this?
Looks great. I was wondering what happened to this project, it looks very promising.
Are you building in debug mode, cause that is always slower. You can export to Windows/Mac/Linux and make sure to uncheck the debug option. That should be full speed.
cybereality Hey man! Thanks!
I did build it without the debug mode. Strangely though, I tried the build again today with a restarted PC, and it seems to run much better. So don't know what I was experiencing when I tried it yesterday.
It looks good and promising as it has already been said, good job MikeCL. The robot is very nice.
Would you consider a beta release here in the forum ? It may help finding more bugs and get feedback before a pre-release on Steam with a lot wider audience with less aware people who are mostly players and who can write tons of negative reviews, which could be a serious hit to the mood, I especially think of "Wings of Universe" game from another member.
- Edited
JusTiCe8 Thanks man!
Yeah... I plan to play-test it with the community at different stages of development. To see what people's reactions are. I can't say when that will happen, though, as my active time developing the game fluctuates wildly (load at work, life, etc.). But if we are lucky, perhaps something before or closer to the summer. We will see. No promises as to when. But I will test it with people that are interested at some point.
19 days later
Finally, there's some sound in the game. It makes a big difference!
11 days later
Playing the game with a controller 
MikeCL Great, your game is taking shape
I'm just concern about flame thrower, does these bots are made with wood ? Paper ? Or recycled valueless dollar bills 
Just for the sake of realism, fire may damage them a little bit, or more if they have some rubber parts, otherwise, fuel would just burn until exhaustion and leave some burnt marks.
- Edited
Thanks! The mechanics are getting there.
Not sure I'm aiming for full realism. Gameplay comes first. I see what you mean, though. But looking at this example
It's a mix of materials, sure. But in general, it seems to be burning pretty well.
The flamethrower does not deal that much damage in general, but as the bots keep burning for a few seconds, they take some extra damage. So it becomes more efficient to kill the bots quickly by combining the flamethrower with the machine gun.
Everything burns given the right chemistry.
Mechs used to be a pretty common game/shooter trope/subject.
- Edited
Not sure how to take your comment. Uragun looks great, though . However, besides having mechs and being top down.. Our project will look and feel different (the only thing you've seen so far are prototype placeholder graphics and a couple of concept tests) and have other player objectives and focus.
Of course, we have taken inspiration from games we love. I would say there are other games we come closer to than Uragun if you can see past the mechs and top-down angle. And we don't only look at one game. We have several we draw inspiration from. (the first devlog talks a bit about it). I'm sure the same thing can be said about Uragun. I could compare that game with ten others and have the same comment. Not to take anything away from the Urugun devs, they seem to have done a great job. I'm tempted to try it.
The point is, There are always other projects to draw inspiration from. These days, nothing is 100% original (even if we try our hardest to be). People can always find other games and make comparisons (like the other day, someone compared our game with Brotato, which I've never seen before it was mentioned).
And who knows, since we haven't shown the final art direction yet, There might not even be mechs ( mechs are cool though 
)
a month later
So I started the process of bringing over the game to Godot 4. A bigger pain than I had imagined 
. The conversion tool did a lot of work, but some things got broken and must be reworked. Good time to do it now, though, before the project grows too big.
A workflow question to you devs out there. How do you work on iterations of meshes and animations? I'm trying to find a good way to iterate on 3D assets. I find it a bit tedious currently going back and forth between Blender and Godot as I might have some scenes organized in a particular way. I want to speed up that process. Does anyone have any good advice? Or perhaps a good paper written on the subject (preferably Godot workflow related)?
I read you can now import .blend directly to Godot but I've never tried it. Maybe you can update all your 3D assets to .blend and thus keeping your scene organization the same. I'd make backup before doing it though.
DJM Yeah, that is also pretty much my experience. Need to investigate this. I'll do some tests and research as soon as I have the project running in G4. I'll share any findings I come across.
Gowydot Interesting. I wonder how robust importing blend files are at the current stage. Is this the preferred new method for importing going forward?
Just quickly tested. The .blend importing seems to work ok for simple object with animation. The problem is it didn't import texture so I had to save texture separately and material override it. You'd also need to delete light and camera for your blend file.
Godot 4.01 rc2 / Blender 3.4
Maybe someone with experience can provide better info on the workflow. Right now though I'd probably only use this feature for simple object like blocks of buildings or something like that.
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Gowydot The .blend importing seems to work ok for simple object with animation. The problem is it didn't import texture
I mentioned problems with importing .blend files. It was the materials that were transferring badly. It's not quite clear where they're coming from. As far as I understood, the import is done through conversion to glTF.
As far as i know, anything that goes beyond a single principled BSDF can't be imported into Godot automatically. Instead you have to recreate the material inside of Godot
Found this on Reddit, tested and it seems only base color is imported correctly. I guess we have to wait for improvement.
I don't think there is any hope to have a nice importer which will do all the process for us "magically", mostly because imported assets can use many thing the game engine doesn't handle at all or differently (for instance z/y axis, pivot point, even units use in models or some materials), there is not a full match between a 3D model and the engine "picture" of it and it's way to manage things.
Unless someone made a blender plug-in which use the exact same way of doing things as Godot, we'll always have to rework the model ourselves to make it fits in Godot, or if you work with artists who knows how to do things right to make import process as painless as possible.
I remember my days dealing with models for GTR2, rFactor or Kerbal Space Program (Unity), I never rely on models and how they were done in 3D modelling program and fixing standard issues after each import (size or pivot point usually), then added material one by one to match what was expected.
And animations, skinning mesh or other advanced features add a lot more concerns and additional work !
JusTiCe8 I don't think there is any hope to have a nice importer which will do all the process for us "magically"
Totally agree. The problem with texture transfer is common to game engines and simulation software. Especially transparent materials. I wouldn't count on being able to have a good universal material converter in the foreseeable future.
Looks good, is it on Steam?
GodotBeginnerRich Thanks! It's not on Steam yet. But the plan is for it to be at some point. We will probably create a Steam page for the game once we start implementing more proper graphics (and have a proper name for the game).
a month later
The game is now running on Godot 4, finally! There are a lot of improvements to the engine, for sure! However, I'm surprised they chose to call this production ready. There seem to be quite a few bugs here and there that are engine related (that I even submitted to the GitHub issues page). Considering how unstable it is, I would still call 4.0.x to be in beta. And probably 4.1 to be what 4.0 should have been. Ah well. I'm happy I made the upgrade. Progressing with the game can continue. Let's go!
MikeCL However, I'm surprised they chose to call this production ready.
I don't think they've ever phrased it that way.
Megalomaniak
Well... They did bring the engine out of Beta, announced it, and encourage people to start using it. In my world, that's pretty much saying it's ready for primetime. What I mean is, that it should probably have stayed in beta a bit longer. Either way, I'm super stoked about the engine and can't wait for it to stabilize.
10 days later
MikeCL changed the title to Project UCG - An action packed twin stick shooter with RPG elements. .
- Edited
A less exciting update. The game now has a new working title, "Project UCG" (Untitled Combat Game). I felt we needed to change this as we don't want to cause any confusion or conflicts with 3D Realms game with the same name. Hopefully, we can keep this until we have the permanent official name.
With that. We now also have a newsletter. The game is progressing well. I hope to share more soon.
4 months later
I'm almost done creating an entirely new level system that creates levels procedurally. With this new system, we have no limit to how large a level can be. And every time you play, you will have a new experience. Great for replayability.
Here's a teaser with mockup graphics (not representing the art style).
The level creation will be smart enough to place logic for when a room is cleared of enemies, place different types of props as well as when and where to place boss enemies. The system creates a grid map for each room with a set of defined blocks/tiles. And for dynamic objects or blocks that require logic (like a door that needs to close and open .eg), it will also know where and when to place those objects/scenes in the correct place.
The basics work, but there's still some work needed to be done on the system. As well as to refactor some parts of the code to be a bit cleaner.
a month later
The new level system is now implemented in the game and is fully functional.
We pivoted to a new (technical) flow for the game. This also means many systems must be reworked with a new and better one. New procedural level system (now implemented), New weapons system, new player Upgrade system, etc.
A few steps backward, but this investment will also make the game scale much better. And the game will have a better general flow to it.
This, unfortunately, also meant that our planned "public" play session had to be postponed. But as we get the new systems in place, I hope it won't take too long until we can announce a date for testing out the game.
a month later
Finally, another update!
Showing the level system in action alongside many other smaller updates
- New procedural level system
- New Player and weapons upgrade system
- Heat based weapon system now replaced with a more traditional ammo based system
With that. For people who want to support the project, we have now also set up a Buy Me Coffee page.
Progress will of course happen here as usual, but for members, there will be more in-depth recordings as we make the game. Showing tings more behind the scenes (also things that aren't shown public yet) as we make the game. Members will also get access to early builds (other than the public play sessions we have planned)
2024 Let's go!
. Although explosions should be... bigger