First major Update 2.0 is Live.
This updates brings a variety of fixes, additions, and major reworks. Based on feedback I have received this far from some amazing players.
- New User options including a mouse sensitivity slider
- A Total rework to the tutorial.
The old text wall of buttons / mechanics / skills has been replaced with an interactive tutorial that engages the player, and forces them to use mechanics and skills to make there way through the tutorial. It was to easy for Players to start the first level and not have retained everything thrown at them in the text wall tutorial, this should no longer be the case and players should now be more ready to take on World 1 after the tutorial.
Also added a skip for the opening story setup, if anyone who has played through the game wants to start a new game to see the new tutorial you can skip the opening cut scenes by pressing pause menu (default ESC key) and selecting yes to skip.
- Total Rework to the Inventory System
My inventory although functional was way to stats to your face heavy. In total there were 70 different text stats displayed all at once.
I have remade the UI into a much more compact system that simply shows which slots are empty and which have weapons, and if that weapon is a primary or a secondary.
Upon selecting a weapon from your inventory you are presented with a comparison window which is color coded to quickly allow the player to decide if this weapon is an upgrade and should be equipped or if its not and should be scrapped for gold.
Overall this new Inventory is designed to make inventory management easy and quick and let you get back to murdering quickly without sacrificing on upgrades.
- Other menus such as the Gun Perks and Passive skills have had minor tweaks and fixing of anchor points that were out of line but have not been majorly overhauled yet. Although they are much simpler and less of an issue than the Inventory was, but I would love to make them more graphical one day.
Few small fixes
- Some sounds were considered music and some music was considered SFX this has been fixed.
- Tweaked the impulse values in world 2 boost platform area.
- Removed destructible blocks that were covering FPBs in level 1 that gave issues to people trying to navigate through level 1.
- Minor light tweaks on level 1 and 3 that were over exposed in some areas.
- Reduced the length of the marble maze in level 2 as it was a bit to tough for a lot of people.
- Re balanced some mobs in the earlier stages of the game, they should scale better with you as you level now.
- Added a few extra fire pits / edible bush's in world 3 to make it feel less rushed
- Added a re-spawn point int he platforming section of world 4. Well its not a re-spawn but if you fall in the final sections (the hardest bits) way above the level instead of falling all the way back to the beginning, you will instead teleport to the top of the elevator and can re-try the final sections.
- Tweaked shadows and reflections on World 5 to better reflect the environment I was trying to create (another pass of this to come)
- Added an edge check on World 6 to fix a random issue that could arise depending on what choices the player makes.
There is a few small tweaks that aren't worth mentioning as it would make the thread to long such as moving several mesh's positions / changing some mob patrols and attack patterns / sound attenuation settings / and 1000's of lines of code were revisited and cleaned and rewritten to better optimize the game.
This marks a big milestone for me as a developer and it's only the beginning. My next 3.0 update will focus on re-making the entire level 1 and portions of level 2. This game is my first game and I grew so much over the course of making it. Everyone who plays through my entire game says the same thing, "You can physically see you getting better as a developer as you progress through the game. Later levels are so much better made and coded with better game mechanics".
This is a very true statement that I agree with. Over the course of working on this game 14 hours a day 7 days a week for a year I grew as a dev in huge ways. Which is great, but sadly it means my first level which is arguably the most important level as its the first impression you make to players, is my weakest level and not the best representation of what I am capable of. So my next update will aim to address this.
I of course will be on hand to fix any new issues that arise or small tweaks based on feedback while working towards a 3.0 build. Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy the game.