Dear Ghoul Hunters,
Happy Autumn! I have received some great feedback lately, so I added some gameplay improvements to Tunguska: The Visitation.
Improvements
Fixed a bug where if you crouch next to any of the large size enemies (like Scythe), he can't see you no matter when and where.
When you see an item to a trader, that item will now be available for buy back until the trader's inventory is refreshed. For a higher price, of course.
In Slaughterhouse mode, each time you complete a wave, the item unlocks for that wave will now show in your journal. This way you can open your journal and refer back to the list. The list can be empty for a wave that's too short to have any unlocks.
The pistol next to Artyom is now a special one, "Artyom's Pistol". If you take it, you can now give it back to him in the dialogue. And then later when you are interacting with him again for a side quest (not gonna spoil anything here), you'll get a new dialogue branch that is affected by your earlier actions. I did this to add a little more player agency.
Soul Searching
With that out of the way, I was reflecting on Tunguska 1 and thinking how to make the sequel better. There has been a lot of comparison between Tunguska 1 and other games, such as:
STALKER (obviously)
Project Zomboid (for the top-down view and survival aspect)
Fallout (for the UI, dialogue, and RPG elements, and of course the top-down perspective)
Here's the problem: I have tried to borrow a lot of elements from different games that I love, but none was done in great depth. The whole game is pretty light and casual. Not that there's anything wrong with being light and casual, but it may come off as bland and boring to seasoned gamers.
For example, Tunguska tries to be like STALKER, but couldn't achieve the horror and tension of STALKER due to the top-down perspective, where you can see clearly everything around you. It tries to have a good story like Fallout, but my writing is not on par with professional writers, and the quests are quite homogeneous due to various technical limitations, and the RPG elements, skills, stats are very light. It included a lot of crafting and survival mechanic, but they aren't "hardcore" enough to satisfy the survival game enthusiasts.
Of course, Tunguska is not without its hooks, which I believe are mainly with looting, hoarding (doesn't sound very healthy, I know...), and problem solving, which are the most prevalent praises I receive in the reviews.
Making Tunguska 2 More Awesome
I really want to make Tunguska 2 stand out in at least one aspect, so much so that it becomes a high bar which other games try to look up to.
Horror is probably not a good direction, because it's very hard to make top down view gameplay feel scary, since you are well aware of all your surroundings.
Story and writing are also not my strong suit. Sure, I did learn a lot from developing Tunguska 1, but there's just no way I can compete with teams of professional writers available to other game studios.
That leaves survival and crafting. These are more accessible to me because they are just features that I can code. However, survival and crafting have already been done to the extreme among all the indie games, and I'm not quite confident whether I can invent something that makes everyone go "wow".
So I felt defeated.
But then I realized that it's not always about having the coolest features. It's more about the unique emotion the game brings to the player. So what's this emotion I want for Tunguska 2, and how should I achieve it?
For Tunguska 2, I changed the color space. So instead of the bright, colorful sunsets of Tunguska 1, the new game will look more solemn, moody, and ominous. This screenshot captures this feeling perfectly, in my opinion:
The much larger, less crowded maps of Tunguska 2 allows me to incentivize exploration, and with exploration, comes risk and reward. During normal state of the world, players will discover lots of environmental story-telling, numerous hidden side quests, and loot/hoard to their hearts content.
And then when the Whitefall hits, the world turns deadly, with undefeatable Dimensional Beings roaming around, their Shadow approaching and engulfing the map, and the player must stay hidden from them while combatting empowered mutants and other fully armed humans, managing resources to survive the extreme cold, and finding the most treasured artifacts - the reason everyone puts up with the Zone. And then at the end, fight their way to the extraction point before it's too late.
This is the core experience I really want to deliver in Tunguska 2: Whitefall. Does it sound familiar to you? Have you played any game that feels like it? Let me know, maybe they'll inspire me :)