A few years ago, I started working on my debut game RUTHLESS:1.

It's a science-fiction action-RPG, set in the near future. You control up to three Mechs in battle, which are equipped with weapons, buffs and items of your choice. Every enemy you destroy can be rebuilt and added to your roster.

Check it out here.

Last year, I was on a (poorly communicated) hiatus and decided that I want to keep the community updated by posting bi-weekly devlogs to show a bit of the development process.

Going forward, I will post these on Lemmy, along with other news regarding my game, starting today with the freshly released news of a new patch for RUTHLESS:1, which fixed a really annoying bug.

I hope you enjoy my game and my posts are welcome here.

Keep it up! It looks cool!

Thank you very much!

Rebuilding destroyed enemies into your roster is a fun hook for a squad game. Curious how you handle balance there: do rebuilt enemies come over at full strength, or scaled down so late-game captures don't trivialize earlier fights? Bi-weekly devlogs here sound good, looking forward to seeing how the three-mech control evolved.

Rebuilt Mechs come at the same level as the enemy you destroyed. Usually, your strongest mechs will be at a similar level as your enemies so this is really not much of issue. Also, the player has items and weapon upgrades available while enemies don't (this will change in higher difficulties), but since they come in large numbers, there definitely are quite a few challenging areas to come. That said, once your Mechs gained some extra levels, early areas will unavoidably become trivial, unless you go back to grind your low level mechs.

And to clarify, you don't control three Mechs at once. You build a squad of three Mechs, one of which you control at a time, but if the situation calls for it, you can switch in another one on the fly.

Linking the patch notes in the first post back is a good way to restart. Question on the rebuild loop: when a mech comes over at the enemy's level, does it keep the loadout it had in that fight, or does it arrive stripped so you still have to spend items on it? The stripped version gives each capture a cost, which might matter more once enemies start getting upgrades on higher difficulties.

Linking the patch notes in the first post back is a good way to restart

Good idea, I will do that soon

On the rebuilding: A rebuilt Mech will always be stripped of items and weapon. Items are randomized drops and higher-rarity weapons are randomly dropped from enemies, that had them equipped. I will add the possibility to craft either in a future update.