Hi everyone,
There have been two main focal points this month.
The first is continuing the gamepad work we started in December, so nearly all menus now have controller support. Once we’ve finished the last couple we’ll revisit the combat controls so they feel a lot better than they currently do and once this has been validated by the community we’ll mark the store page as having full gamepad support.
The second area we’ve been working on is a multi-discipline effort to expand the core enemy behaviour, so that as you progress through the game you feel like the challenge the main enemies provide escalates.
When I say “core” enemies I’m specifically referring to our most common three archetypes, the Scrapper, Raider and Warden. Currently they each have three tiers: Grunt (grey), Veteran (blue) and Elite (red) – for example here are the three tiers of the Assault Warden:
Additionally, some of our enemies have different weapons – the Raiders can come with alien versions of a pistol, shotgun, burst rifle and assault rifle, while the Wardens can be equipped with either shield plus frag cannon (Storm Warden) or a plasma minigun (Assault Warden).
While we already have some minor behaviour differences between the tier levels, the most noticeable change is how the health of these enemies increases across the tiers. We felt that wasn’t interesting enough, and wanted to take the opportunity to introduce behaviour so that as you play through a campaign the tiers became more intelligent and dangerous.
At a high level, the goal is to:
- Make the grunts feel like they occupy more of a cannon-fodder role
- Add increasing amounts of behaviour throughout the tier levels (for example an elite Raider may dive out of the way of grenades, but the lower tiers wouldn’t)
- Because each Raider/Warden tier can carry any weapon for that archetype, also provide different behaviour per weapon, per tier. An example would be the pistol equipped Raider. The Elite tier is able to use a health stim, but if you kill the enemy before it is used they drop it as a pickup.
When all of those elements are combined, it provides us with a lot of ways we can escalate combat with just the three main enemy archetypes, providing greater moment-to-moment combat variety over the course of a campaign.
To dive into a bit more detail for the Scrapper; this enemy only had their Scythe weapon. So we’ve kept this for the Veteran class and introduced a new melee weapon for the Grunt and Elite tiers that match their new behaviour. Here’s some concept art of these new weapons:
To suit the Grunt tier occupying the ‘dumb cannon-fodder’ role, they’ve been given a blunt club and will no longer perform ranged attacks or dodges. They’ll simply run toward you and try to whack you!
The Veteran will have similar behaviour to what you see in the game now, so they will dodge to the side, perform ranged attacks and do the charging uppercut
The Elite will have more aggressive attack behaviour, will evade grenades and at low health can become enraged – at which point they’ll forgo some of their more advanced behaviour and become focused on melee-ing you.
Because of the different weapon styles, they’ll have new animation sets to provide some nice distinctions in how each tier moves:
From the Community!
I love the occasional chaos that can occur when playing SENTRY, so this month we have videos showing a couple of examples.
The first is from Discord user Kyuirah, demonstrating the risks of throwing a grenade near a Pulse Pad:
The second video is from another Discord user Jajomba. This video has an alien dog’s over-enthusiastic lunge resulting in a near-death experience:
We love seeing this kind of thing, so please send any cool videos/fan art to us and we may feature it in a future Dev Transmission :)
Providing feedback is really important in helping us shape the game. Here’s a bunch of useful links to where you can reach us:
One other area we’ve started to work on is re-doing the introduction. The goal here is to create a new opening that both teaches players a lot more effectively than we currently do, whilst also providing some high spectacle moments that set up the other campaigns (and how they’ll eventually be framed) – it’s early days on that though, so we’ll keep you updated on our progress.
Thanks for the support!
