Devlog: Blood and Gore, New Physics and Enemies Interactions

13 May 2021Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

Edit from 31-05-2021:
Update will come on the 1st of June (tomorrow), still need a couple of things to be done. Thank you all for your support!

Hi all, it took a lot of time and finally we can present you new enemy interaction system, that will bring new layers to Hard Bullet gameplay. Whole parts of the game were reworked and are still in production, but it's already impressive how you interact with the enemies.

These new enemies will come with other cool things we prepared for the biggest update yet. Don't forget to check the other blog posts about it in the end!

Various Enemy Outfits and Armor Amount

With system like this we'll be able to make decent challenge progression in Rouge mode we are designing and give you more instruments for your own brutal creativeness in the Sandbox.

This is not just a cosmetics option — different armor types and weapon holsters amount will affect how the enemies behave and hold your attacks.

Gun Grab and Easier to Punch

Added this long-awaited ability. Now you can grab enemies' guns right from their hands (you can kick them off too), steal from their holsters or take away magazines right from the guns!

Eye Movements

While faces are still in work (the current one is a placeholder), we finally added moving eyes to make those guys more alive.

Right now it's more like creepy staring, but plans are to add eyeball micro movements, reaction to meele atacks and blinking from time to time.

We plan to showcase more natural reactions and all-new animations closer to the release of this Update.

New Blood and Gore work-in-progress

Trying to work out the best solution for gore on new models. We brought back blood traces on the bodies and surrounding models, so no more clean dismembered limbs or shiny dead bodies with gun holes! Expect more brutal effects in the future:

Performance Optimisation

We try to improve every aspect of enemies and performance issues are very important. While we increased quality of enemy models — rised it from about 10K triangles up to 20K — we also dramatically improved CPU calculation effectiveness.

Reworked limb system, new animation system and better body rig gave sagnificant performance improvements. It's still a work to do, cause we gonna add more stuff and effects to enemies, but we hope to stick to this new optimised engine.

Right now the Minimal Recommended specs from Steam page can support up to 10 active enemies in test chamber. Probably this amount may decrease as we add more complex things to arenas in the future.

And about game engine — everything you see in these Devlog Posts were made with Unity 2019 version that eliminated a lot of Oculus and runtime issues, so it's fair to say that technically new Hard Bullet is completely another game inside.

Physics Progress

Using grabbable pipe to move to the second floor, then using it again to slide down (slowing the movement with my left hand) while shooting from SGM from another hand.

Some physics fun: using those two boxes to bounce off the wall while in the air.