A little piece written over the holidays,
going over a new mode that we're hoping to add in the near future!
Written by Rob Elam
Over thanksgiving, I didn’t have any family in town, so nothing much special going on… So I decided to take a day off work. The way I often take days off work is to work on something that I didn’t have scheduled :). I suck at taking time off.
Anyway, I’d been wanting to experiment with a different game mode for people that want to just play the shooter portion of Sentinels, without concerning themselves with the building aspect. I added support for the game not pausing after each assault, and just running the waves constantly, and having structures automatically build themselves in preset locations when the resources are available, as well as upgrading them. I built an editor so that I could say where structures would be built, and roughly the order they’d be built.
It was one of those good days, where I made great progress and everything fell into place like I expected and hoped. I went to bed that night, happy about a good day’s work… Then I realized that the mode would be awesome if it just recorded the player’s building order, and replayed that in Lieutenant mode. Don’t you just love it when just after finishing something you think of a much cooler way to do it? Yea, neither do I :).
So the editor for this may ultimately be useless… But hopefully soonish I’ll be able to work on the recording mode, cause that’d allow pretty much any level to be played by players, recorded, and replayed in Lieutenant mode, as well as potentially shared. I’ll likely end up testing and tuning the Lieutenant mode, currently only Factory level has a mission using it.
The effort here was also a bit of synergy, I’ve been wanting to experiment with VR a bit, and there are certain things Sentinels has in place that might be fun in VR, as well as things that almost assuredly aren’t. I don’t think building structures would function well in VR without a substantial investment in UI changes, I think it’d be too finicky to be fun. The shooting, if made more forgiving and perhaps enemies slowed down, could be pretty fun in VR, so I look forward to testing this out. Also, the newer mobile gun platform feature should be pretty fun in VR, as it’s basically the same kind of interface used in VR shooters that allow movement, where you click the location you want to move to. Might even work better than most, since the target location will have user created snapping points, it might be very clean to move around.
We’ll see how the mode shakes out, I think it has promise. Regardless, it’s always fun doing something new, and great when it comes together fast… Nice break from constant tuning/bug squashing :).