It has been a while since our last dev log. The remainder of April is going to be crunchtime and we are trying to advance the game as much as we can. We are planning on an initial launch in early May.
A few months ago we decided to change the genre of the game from Metroidvania/boomer shooter to simply being a boomer shooter. We also experimented with an endless wave mode, but decided that the game worked best as an old school first person shooter. The endless wave mode will likely make it back into the game at some point. The game is now has a faster pace and is more straightforward.
We have been hard at work designing and building levels for the FPS version of the game. Currently we have eight levels. Level design has been the most time consuming aspect of the project since the beginning, which is one of the reasons we switched genres (the interconnected level design for a 3D Metroidvania is more challenging). We needed away for other people to work on level design for the game without having the project files, which are massive. So I created a level design tool which is a Unity plugin that enables users to create custom graybox levels, and then export and run them in a special build of the game. The tool works but it needs to be more user-friendly before it can be made available to the public. Theodore was able to use it to create a graybox level that has become one of the levels in the game.
I spent yesterday adjusting the difficulty of the enemies and balancing the player's weapons. Previously the disparity between the weakest gun (the "arm cannon") and the stronger guns was not substantial enough, and the same goes for the disparity between the basic enemies and the more advanced ones. So the more advanced weapons do more damage relative to the arm cannon (the chaingun/"auto arm cannon" got a serious upgrade and now fires much faster). The advanced enemies now do more damage and take more damage than the weaker ones. I increased the HP of all of the enemies since I felt that they were dying too easily before. These changes will be reflected in a build that I release next week.
A few weeks ago we added a "brutal punch" feature. To initiate this attack the player holds the grip button down and throws a straight punch. The player's fist in the game will ignite and fly forward dealing significant damage to enemies at a greater melee attack range.
The holomap has been improved so that the map actually looks like the game levels.
We have started introducing some character voices into the game. Right now they are only in the tutorial and at the very start of the game.
There are now options for movement speed and sound/music volume.
Lastly, in the coming weeks we may have some exciting news about new platforms we will be porting the game to.