When the FRAGGED playable build went live on June 10, we told you the next stretch was the part we cared about most: a full element-by-element polish pass. Here's how that started - not with art, but with homework.
FRAGGED is a Gun Bros rebirth, and before touching a single pixel we forced ourselves to answer a question honestly: why did the original actually work? So we wrote a proper dossier on it - the dual-stick adrenaline loop, the "one more wave" pull of visible weapon power, the specific dopamine of a horde thinning under your fire. Not nostalgia. A spec for what has to survive the rebuild.
Then we opened Phase A - the core-game revamp - and re-sequenced the whole master plan to sit behind it. No point polishing a loop that isn't right yet. What landed in the first days:
- Camera, orientation & framing. The old camera fought you on a phone. New pass reframes the action for a vertical dual-stick screen so you can actually read the space you're shooting into.
- Maps & biomes with elevation. Map archetypes now come with multi-tier elevation instead of one flat plane - cover, sightlines, and chokepoints that make a planet feel like a place.
- A render-tech decision, benchmarked. We didn't guess. We built a benchmark harness, ran it, and committed to WebGL post-processing (Option B) with the numbers to back it - not a vibe.
- A real animation state machine. This is the big one. An
AnimClipstate machine with an 8-frame run cycle plus idle and fire states, and an animation-event seam so gameplay can hang hit-frames and footsteps off the animation instead of faking them.
None of this is the fun screenshot yet. It's the foundation the fun sits on. Next devlog is where it starts to feel different.
The Boomite still isn't going to mine itself. We're just making sure the scrapping looks as good as it plays.