Hello again!
You all seemed to like the "I f*cked up" post, it got way more likes than any other devlog. I guess my takeaway is: make more mistakes :)
Seriously though, thanks- it's great to have your support.
On to what we've been working on the last few weeks.
New Level
We've been building a new level that will be a combat heavy high action mission. As the game progresses, the missions will be more focused around combat, and we're finding that heavily defended bases make for fun gameplay.
I'm really happy with the direction of this level, we're learning a lot about how these combat heavy missions can look and feel.
Big thank you to Mane aka @m4ndrill who I managed to hire after DMing him on reddit awhile back! He's been wrangling our 3d art and lighting on this new level. I'm really happy how this level came out, I can't wait to show you more. Mane would also want me to tell you this is a work-in-progress, despite it looking amazing.
Prototyping Gameplay Directions
I find that development goes in cycles: prototyping, implementing, testing, bug fixing, repeat. Sometimes it's helpful to prototype things without any visual assets, what people call "gray-boxing".
Now that we have a handful of enemy units, and the core of things is generally working, we're exploring a few other game design prototypes to understand where our levels will go.
I consider the 5 second game loop to be just the core mechanics: flying, shooting, dodging, landing, picking things up with the rope. Those things are all pretty solid and feel good (although we will tweak these continously).
The 2nd level game loop is somewhere between 5 seconds and 1 minute. It's using the combination of core mechanics to do something a bit more complex. It's like, understanding the patterns or limitations of enemies and using that to your advantage.
For example, Desert Strike, near and dear to my heart, had you exploit a few things:
- Approaching AA guns from behind
- Shooting units from outside their range
- Using map knowledge to approach from easier directions
Since we have the benefit of 30 years of game engine and CPU/GPU progress, we get to expand on this a bit. We also have physics :flex:
In order to do this we're building up some quick tools to easily make builds with these grayboxed / prototype levels. I'm a kid of the PS1 era, so I always think of metal gear solid "VR" missions, where they basically gave you some difficult prototype missions that made you perfect all the mechanics.
Right now we're building up tools to allow us to make "playtest" builds that are just prototype levels, to play between the team and our friends, as we explore some different directions the game can go.
This was my first experiment, the UBER turret.
You can survive for about 0.3 seconds infront of this thing. It is however, fast to kill. It helps to really enforce certain behavior, and it actually feels really fun to go up against difficult enemies.
Things we're exploring:
- Altitude in level design: hiding from turrets from below or above
- Variations in turrets: extremely dangerous but slow to turn
- Missiles: making it more effective to shoot them down, and other strategies
- Using map knowledge to approach from easier directions
- Making NPCs a bit less random, and dangerous if not avoided
- Directional damage: making the player approach from behind
We're also exploring different ways to defeat the anti-air turrets. This includes new types of missiles, with different strategies to defeat them. Both dodging and shooting down the missiles should be feasible.
One strategy is to just redirect them back :D
Thanks
Thanks for reading! Let us know if you have suggestions or ideas of gameplay you want to see prototyped!
As for what's next, we'll be working on gameplay until the next update, as well as the new teaser video. Stay tuned for more updates soon, or follow along on Twitter for more content.
Colin