Pre-Run Facility
When you first start Beneath and in between each run you'll be in the 'U.H.D.F. Frontline Facility Omega'. The story in Beneath and how it relates to the rest of Paint the Town Red will primarily be told implicitly through the environment and much of this will be in this area.
Certain areas of the facility will not be available for you to access initially and as you progress through Beneath and increase in rank you will gain access to restricted areas.
While the facility area is quite large and detailed, it was important to make sure you didn't need to spend time traveling around it in between runs. Any pre-run setup you can do such as class selection will occur in the facility, but is located right next to where you enter the area and also where you begin a new run.
You'll also also be able to visually see any permanent progress you've made in Beneath reflected in different ways in the facility.
Level Editor Content
Most of the facility content (textures, props, etc) will also be made available in the Level Editor. In addition there are a lot of props and environment assets from the areas of Beneath that will also be available in the Editor.
A lot of additional work has also gone into the enemies in Beneath to ensure they can work outside of the environments they're found in so they can be used in a range of environment types created for user's Workshop levels.
Some of the new gameplay features such as enemy and player fall and impact damage will be configurable in created levels to maintain expected gameplay from existing levels and to allow different gameplay types such as where player fall damage wouldn't be desirable for example.
Development Update
We've been continuing to work on various aspects of Beneath over the past week. We'll go into some more detail about the different ways the levels are generated in a future post, but one area of focus this week has been in setting up a different generation process for a later game area so that the level can suit the enemies and required play-style for the area.
Most areas in the game are a multi-level maze of rooms connected by winding corridors, but others, like the one setup this week is island based, with straight bridges connecting closer rooms. Avoiding being knocked off an island or bridge by enemies like the Charger will be as import as surviving regular attacks.
We'll show more about these different areas in upcoming posts.
There's a number of gameplay mechanics that Beneath's different classes, enemies and environments make necessary and in most cases these will benefit the modes outside Beneath.
One of these changes made in the past week include increasing the punch distance when looking down so that it's easier to punch small enemies and knocked out enemies without needing to crouch.
Another is the much requested feature of fall/impact damage for the player and enemies. This allows you to do much more damage when knocking enemies off high ledges or when they impact hard into walls such as after you use the Shockwave power. Also to properly handle the attacks of some of the new enemies such as the Charger, the player can now be knocked around when hit by certain attacks.