Enemies
Enemies have had a revamp this month as they were not acting with any logic in certain situations.
The first situation was primarily when an enemy saw a target, it would fire at them once they got in range and continue firing at them while the target stayed in range. The enemies did not take in consideration when the target went behind something solid (like a van) and just continued firing.
This was a really bad experience as it could lead to players being trapped behind an object with continues fire and no chance of escape. This is now fixed with a simple check and enemies will only fire at targets if they are in range and nothing is blocking their shot.
Another change we made to enemies was to make them return to their starting position if they saw a non-player target. This was an issue in bigger levels, such as the forest. Enemies might see a zombie, go after them, kill them, and start patrolling the new area where they killed the zombie. This led to situation where the player could not find all targets within a certain time sometimes and led to the horde coming in and killing them.
Last Chance
Players now have last chance enabled. Last chance ensures that the player can never be one-shot killed, and they always get 1hp back once their health reaches 0. This gives players an extra chance to survive combat, and if they do it, it makes them feel really good to see that they barely survived.
This feature is only for singleplayer game modes as it will be abused in versus game modes and will lead to more bad experiences than good experiences for all players involved.
Singleplayer Game Mode
Singleplayer game mode is (mostly) complete. Early testers can play it from beginning to end now. The only thing missing is the singleplayer shop, where players can trade in their fuel cans for stronger weapons.
Most of the month was spent on finishing the last two regions (Gas Station and House) and the final level. Gas Station and House have been worked on to some extent in the past few months and needed some final tweaking to make it feel good.
The final level is where the player reaches the Last Settlement and finds what they have been looking for. It is the largest level that has been created for the game and it can fit over 4 normal singleplayer levels in them. Even though the level has been tested thoroughly, we know some early testers will find bugs in there.
Summary
TACTICAL BANDITS is on track for development to be completed before the end of this year. With singleplayer mode mostly done, we can return back to tweak the final 5 challenges. They were not released as planned mainly because of the feedback and issues found in the first 5 challenges, but they will be all released next month.
We were not too happy with the progress made this month even though we got mostly everything done that we had planned. The biggest thing left to balance in the game is its meta system, which is how players make progress overall in the game. This will be strongly linked with the unlock system. The current one we have been testing internally does not feel like it gives enough sense of progress to players, so we will be either reworking that to make it feel better. If we can't make it feel better, we will test out a different system that we had planned but decided to not try out. Hopefully next month the uodate ends on a much more positive note.