Dark Horizons: Mechanized Corps (Classic) News

WOW! What a great time we had showing off DHMC at PAX East in Boston. It was great to meet so many Mech fans out there and even a few of you that either own our current game or have played one of our previous Mech games.

At PAX East, we showed off out latest demo that runs on the new game engine and updates we have been working on for the last year and a half. Our main goal was to show off our accomplishments to date with the new build, and garner more feedback on the direction of the game. We also wanted to get a better idea of where we were with the demo build so we could start gearing up for our first BETA release!



Based on feedback and play testing, our next goal is to spend the next 3 to 4 weeks polishing up some items and doing some additional optimizations. This should put us in a good place to launch a build on the BETA channel around the end of this month or first week of April.



We will make another announcement in a couple weeks of what all the BETA will entail, but you can expect it to be a limited play set with a first pass on the new Mech hangar, a single player mission or two, a basic first past tutorial and be available for PC, Mac and Linux.

Again we really want to thank everyone who came out to PAX East and tried out the game. We met a lot of awesome Mech fans that gave us some great feedback!



For more news follow us on twitter @mgtgames (twitter.com/mgtgames)

To join the conversation hit the forums:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/266470/discussions

To keep up to date join the official game group:
http://steamcommunity.com/games/dhmc

WOW! What a great time we had showing off DHMC at PAX East in Boston. It was great to meet so many Mech fans out there and even a few of you that either own our current game or have played one of our previous Mech games.

At PAX East, we showed off out latest demo that runs on the new game engine and updates we have been working on for the last year and a half. Our main goal was to show off our accomplishments to date with the new build, and garner more feedback on the direction of the game. We also wanted to get a better idea of where we were with the demo build so we could start gearing up for our first BETA release!



Based on feedback and play testing, our next goal is to spend the next 3 to 4 weeks polishing up some items and doing some additional optimizations. This should put us in a good place to launch a build on the BETA channel around the end of this month or first week of April.



We will make another announcement in a couple weeks of what all the BETA will entail, but you can expect it to be a limited play set with a first pass on the new Mech hangar, a single player mission or two, a basic first past tutorial and be available for PC, Mac and Linux.

Again we really want to thank everyone who came out to PAX East and tried out the game. We met a lot of awesome Mech fans that gave us some great feedback!



For more news follow us on twitter @mgtgames (twitter.com/mgtgames)

To join the conversation hit the forums:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/266470/discussions

To keep up to date join the official game group:
http://steamcommunity.com/games/dhmc

Hey Everyone,

We know things have been a bit quiet around here as of late, but rest assured that we are working hard on the new version of the game that is a total rebuild from the ground up.

These past few weeks we have been working on several aspects on the new version with the goal of bringing it to open Beta by March to coincide with us packing things up and showing the game off at PAX East in Boston the weekend of March 11th 2017.

Things we want in place before then that we are working on:

- UI overhaul to make things more user friendly and visually updated. At minimum for Beta we want to implement our new design for the Hangar to make things easier to customize mechs.

- First time user experience improvements including a new pilot training program (tutorial)

- Optimizations! Right now our FPS for the internal version is not where it needs to be for players to host multiplayer games, but we are working on this.

- AI improvements, having bots to play with and against are an important part of what we do! AI won't be perfect in the initial Beta release, but we want them to work as well as possible in the time frame.

- For Beta we want to have a hand full of single player missions available plus a front line skirmish mode multiplayer mission.

If you have not been following us over the past several months then you might not know what we have been up to. We have taken the past year or so and have worked on rebuilding the game form the ground up in an update game engine (The live game uses the old Torque 3D engine...). We have all of the ground work in place to start polishing things off and adding fun game play elements. With the new version you can expect vastly improved visuals including revamped weapon models, new Mech shaders, effects, environments and much more. We also hope to build out a much deeper game play experience as this year goes on.

As always, thank you for your support!

Hey Everyone,

We know things have been a bit quiet around here as of late, but rest assured that we are working hard on the new version of the game that is a total rebuild from the ground up.

These past few weeks we have been working on several aspects on the new version with the goal of bringing it to open Beta by March to coincide with us packing things up and showing the game off at PAX East in Boston the weekend of March 11th 2017.

Things we want in place before then that we are working on:

- UI overhaul to make things more user friendly and visually updated. At minimum for Beta we want to implement our new design for the Hangar to make things easier to customize mechs.

- First time user experience improvements including a new pilot training program (tutorial)

- Optimizations! Right now our FPS for the internal version is not where it needs to be for players to host multiplayer games, but we are working on this.

- AI improvements, having bots to play with and against are an important part of what we do! AI won't be perfect in the initial Beta release, but we want them to work as well as possible in the time frame.

- For Beta we want to have a hand full of single player missions available plus a front line skirmish mode multiplayer mission.

If you have not been following us over the past several months then you might not know what we have been up to. We have taken the past year or so and have worked on rebuilding the game form the ground up in an update game engine (The live game uses the old Torque 3D engine...). We have all of the ground work in place to start polishing things off and adding fun game play elements. With the new version you can expect vastly improved visuals including revamped weapon models, new Mech shaders, effects, environments and much more. We also hope to build out a much deeper game play experience as this year goes on.

As always, thank you for your support!

The weekend of October 29th we had a great opportunity to partake in the local game development exposition TheGDEX at COSI in Columbus, Ohio. For us, it was an chance to get a lot more people in front of our new version of Dark Horizons : Mechanized Corps (DHMC) for some play testing. Shows like this really gives us a great insight into where we are with the product and how well it plays for players experienced with the geand newcomers a like.



Many of the attendees that we spoke to had remembered playing a lot of the old school Mech games of the past, and were excited to see a new entry in the genre. Even speaking to the younger crowd that have not had a chance to play a Mech game before, the impression that we have come back with is that they are pretty excited about our game and what we were trying to do. Feeling their enthusiasm is refreshing to hear and really gives a sense that, yes there is still a market for mech combat simulators.

It should be noted that the version of the game we demo’d at TheGDEX was an early Alpha build that contains several new features and enhancements and is not the same version that is currently live on Steam Early Access. As many of you know from our past posts, we have been revamping the entire game (art and code) to bring the visual quality up to where we expect today’s games to be, and to add in some cool gameplay ideas and features. Our hope with demoing at TheGDEX was to get a feel for where we are with the new version, start laying the groundwork for planning on a BETA release on Steam to let those of you who already own the live game a chance to help us play test and be more involved with the process.



Overall we thought the feedback that we received was phenomenal. The biggest compliments that we received were with the new art and environments that we had available to play (we had 3 new levels in this build for TheGDEX). People also loved many of the features that we already have in the live version that is currently up on Steam right now, such as Mech customization and opportunities for strategic gameplay. Overall though to our team, the biggest and most telling set of feedback that we got was that people had fun playing the game, despite many features not being fully implemented yet.



So where do we go from here? Now that we have a solid pool of feedback, we are back in the office and getting back to work so that we can get a BETA release on Steam in the near future. We have a long list of bugs we compiled during the show and have already fixed the major ones we ran into. The goal for BETA 1 is to ensure that the game is at a similar state from a functionality standpoint as the current live version on Steam. Then we can begin optimizing, fixing issues found in BETA, and begin implementing many new features that we want to put in the game, including implementing a tutorial system to help players that are new to the Mech genre get into the game and succeeding faster.

Internally we are aiming to release a BETA version of this new overhaul to the game onto Steam in January 2017! So keep an eye out for some additional information as we get closer to the end of the year.

As always our team would like to thank each of you for continuing to support us and being patient while we go through this long process of updating and enhancing DHMC (much of which requires some core system and engine upgrades) . We hope that o you will be proud and excited for the work we have put into it and will understand the amount of work and effort that we have done over the past number of months. It is always a challenge for a small team to put together a game of this magnitude and we couldn’t do so without your help.

Thanks from the Max Gaming crew!

For more news follow us on twitter @mgtgames (twitter.com/mgtgames)

To join the conversation hit the forums:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/266470/discussions

To keep up to date join the official game group:
http://steamcommunity.com/games/dhmc