Metal Mercs

Under Construction: Mission Setup

Added 2025-07-09 21:03:39 +0000 UTC

This past week I've been working on improving the UIs and menus. Many of them have been technically functional up to now so I could test the new game but they were up to "developer" standards, meaning many were barebones and didn't work intuitively. I'll admit it's been slower going with the UI than I had hoped (it's crazy how time consuming UI is), but we're slowly getting there. I have the mech assignment side of mission setup working really well and now just need to adapt that code for pilot assignments.

One element I think will be a welcome improvement is that weapons are now iconified. It may become more obvious once you guys get to play the new version but weapon icons have a color and a main icon to indicate broad type, then a small sub-icon on the left to indicate variant. So a green backed star for instance means laser, and it can have 1, 2, or 3 pips on the right side indicating light, medium, or heavy respectively. Weapons also have a color band on the left to indicate tech level (in the current MetalMercs there are only tech levels 1 and 2 but more are planned). Previously this was all conveyed with text like "MLaser I" or "LLaser II". I think the old way was fine but the new icons are certainly more compact and once you get used to them, I think faster to take in than text.

Other things are still a bit rough around the edges (like the mech preview tab in the bottom right is a mix-up of old and new styles and isn't finished yet at all), but we're getting there! More updates to come soon