Hello!
There has been a lot of progress recently but not a lot of big exciting things to show off, apart from maybe the mines. Mostly I've been working on story and levels to build out a single run of the game to the length I want. I think this has also been the longest break in dev logs, which shows I've either run out of interesting things to talk about, or I've been way too stuck in the details of everything and now need to come up for air.
Mines!
As part of adding some more chaos and danger to the levels I worked on some exploding mines. They're quite simple, in that generally they will explode if you get too close, but combining that with physics and the ability to hide them makes for some fun and unpredictable scenarios. There's a story reason for these mines being here while pilots are engaged in peaceful mining activities, but I'll talk about that a little bit more below.
There's a Seeker mine, which will roam around the level looking for a target, and once it finds one will follow it until close enough, and then explode! This uses the same pathfinding as the Drones, though I had to update it to be able to deal with pathfinding to a constantly moving target. I also got to test out the pathfinding's parameterisation of minimum path widths, since I wanted the Seekers to move quite close to things and not take a longer and safer path. Here's a gif of one creeping up on the player:
There's a very simple "touch" mine, which has four pressure points on it which when touched will detonate the mine. Pretty standard but also useful to the clever miner who can have them explode where they want. I actually ended up updating some core entity code for these guys since I wanted to be able to embed them within asteroids and have their pressure points work perfectly.
The third type is the Jumper, which are definitely my favourite (maybe for obvious reasons). They're embedded within asteroids, sometimes visibly and sometimes not, and jump out of the surface to explode as close as possible to a target. If you're fast enough you might even be able to catch one...
Giant Asteroids
I'll quickly mention some giant asteroids that I've been adding in preparation for some more "diggy" tools I'm thinking to add. When adding these I had to update some of the game's screen wrapping code to handle entities that could be off both the top and bottom of the screen at the same time, which had just never happened before. I also found out that the wrapping code happily handles giant entities colliding with themselves!
(Giant banana is for illustration purposes only. I can't guarantee that there'll be a giant banana in the game.)
Story
Much of the work I've been doing recently is on writing the story and events that take place, and then building out the rest of the levels for a full playthrough. I didn't start this project with the goal of writing a cool story, but I knew I needed some form of story in order to give the game structure. To that end, I wanted the story to be simple and coherent, give an actual reason for the events and scenario of the game, and then not get in the way of people just playing the game. I've heard a few people actually describe the writing as good, which is not something I expected, but I think the best thing for me is to not focus on making an amazing story, just on an overall good game.
So the story I've been working on involves an organised resistance group, the mining corporation becoming more involved with military corporations, and general background worker exploitation. Through all of this you are trying to pay off your debt before your contract is up. This all ties together through your choices, some of which are very explicit (like replying to a mail) and some of which require a little more commitment and action from you (trying not to spoil anything here). But what I've ended up with here is a story with multiple endings, which is cool but now I have to keep track of these endings and provide some satisfying closure for each. :)
Full Playthrough
I've now finished a first draft of all of the levels and general flow of the game. I've been aiming for 4-5 hours for a single playthrough, then there's replayability for different story choices and upgrade/money choices. This has been one of the most challenging parts of development for me, having to sit down and think of levels that are interesting, fresh, and let players play how they want. But I'm happy to have done it, and I'm excited to start play testing the whole thing and see how it holds together.
What's next (or what's left)?
Now that finishing this project is feeling closer than ever, there are only so many things left on my todo list. So I think in roughly this order, this is how I'm going to tackle them:
- Play Testing.
A few full playthroughs of the game as-is will help me take proper stock of everything.
- Endings, Prologue, Epilogues.
I need to properly track each ending and see how I can make each one satisfying, then create epilogue cutscenes for each. Probably more on this in another devlog.
- More upgrades!
Lots of ideas.
- More tools!
Even more ideas.
- Localisation.
I'm going to sit on this one for a bit first, not sure whether I want to do it before or after release.
We'll see how all of this goes :)