At long last, time for a new update... First off:
4th mission added
The new mission takes you on a 2km x 2km size terrain. On the game's standards, it's absolutely huge, but I wanted it to convey the feeling of wandering in the middle of nowhere. The terrain type is inspired by the endless monotony of dwarf birches on the highlands in northern Norway.
New enemies have new tricks and so do you, so don't expect it to be just more of the same gameplay.
Here's a new trailer, which is mainly targeted to new people so much of it is not new, but there are also some glimpses of new places and features.
Additions and improvements:
1. Handcars
For traveling around on the huge landmass, there's a network of rail roads that would've supplied the ancient blast furnace with materials. You can select tracks with railroad switches and move objects like bombs in carts.
2. Hiding in foliage
In the new mission, you also have a ghillie suit at your disposal. It comes with a couple of new indicators in the HUD. The tree and grass symbols on the bottom left tell you when you're hidden to some extent. Hitting the dirt of course makes you a lot less visible, but moving around makes you an easier target to spot.
3. First person camera changes
This is something that might divide some opinions. I made the original camera immersion first, as something that conforms to the character model's actual physique enough to allow body awareness and head bob.
However, I've gotten feedback of the door opening feeling very janky, and my solutions of compensating the weird position of the camera so far in front of the character to remove clipping with walls were far from perfect.
So in favor of ease (to both the player and myself), and somewhat against immersion, I've made the camera much simpler. Now it's rotating closer to the character's center which is not anatomically correct, but I think the movement feels more intuitive. It's the sort of camera that doesn't constantly draw attention to itself and lets you focus on other things.
4. Vaulting is much smoother now
The old version of vaulting had a sudden movement of character prefab and camera happening when the character grabs the ledge. While visually it was pretty much unnoticeable, it tied my hands a bit with how smooth I could make the transitions to and from vaulting. I've made changes to make it a gradual movement, relying on the sync between animation and code rather than starting with a sudden move to the place where the animation is supposed to begin.
In the comparison video below, notice how fast the character gets back to speed after the vaulting animation finishes, with the forward button held. You can also see a new falling animation just about kicking off before he lands.
5. Mission completed screen
The game tracks how many enemies you've killed and knocked out, but before this update, those numbers haven't been used for much. Some characters comment on the playstyle in the outro of the first mission and some other places, but that was it.
I added this UI view that also gives you kind of a "rank" based on how you performed in the last mission based on knockouts, enemies killed and enemies alerted.
6. Smoother camera when climbing
I managed to remove the sudden position changes of the camera when changing from one climbable to another. It's a tiny change but after bearing with the jittery camera for so long, it's a sight for sore eyes to me at least.
7. Mission selection
The campaign is getting pretty long. On my last test run, it took me a bit over 4 hours to play it through, and I know where to go. Even though the story is linear, I decided to give fast access to all missions through a mission selection menu.
8. Oil puddles
In missions 2 and 3, there are now oil cans you can use to drop puddles and set them on fire by dropping or throwing a torch.
I may take a pause to try out some smaller ideas before concluding the story of this game with the (probably pretty short) final mission. 1.0 launch is probably years away but I'll keep this project chugging along at some kind of speed.
Thanks for reading!