Bonjour, Lutteurs!
Adventure mode progress continues, somewhat slowly. This update is going to take a while.
In fact, it's looking like it might take such a while that I'm considering taking a short break to put together a new character and release a micro-update. So that might happen in a couple of weeks, give or take.
There are a couple of pretty big reasons for the slowness:
1 - DESIGNING CORE GAMEPLAY
I spent some time figuring out the core "idea" behind the adventure levels. I mean, I knew the gist of everything, but testing the ideas and making things more "right" takes time.
Originally, I thought I would make each level rather small and self-contained, like a little Wave Mode level you could finish. This would jive most closely with the existing gameplay. However, this kind of felt unsatisfying, and didn't allow players to fully play with the movement options in the game.
In the end, I decided to open up the levels and make them much more in-depth. They're now more like Super Mario or Donkey Kong levels, albeit with buckets of blood being constantly splattered everywhere.
This however raised the question of difficulty and frustration. People die in one hit! As levels grow longer, the likelihood of accidental death grows extremely probable, even for experienced players. I've dealt with this in two ways:
FIRST, and most obviously: There will be a new checkpoint system, where players can activate "portals" in the levels they find. Each portal gives the player an additional "respawn point," with points adding up as players find more and more portals. If you find a section of the level particularly hard, doing well on prior sections (and finding hidden checkpoints!) will give you a much better shot.
SECONDLY, and a more game-changing decision: Killstreaks now serve a purpose. While you have a killstreak active, IT WILL ABSORB ONE HIT and send you flying away, resetting your killstreak to zero. Killstreaks will continually, slowly run out, so you must maintain your carnage if you want to keep your protection.
This change is game-wide, occurring in both Wave Mode and Versus. It should make Wave Mode much easier for confident players, while I don't forsee it having a significant impact on Versus Mode except in A) really chaotic multi-player fights, where it's probably a good thing, and B) scenarios where one player is just utterly destroying another, in which case no one can help them.
I think this change will help a lot in Adventure Mode, while also encouraging aggressive play. I'm looking forward to feedback when it eventually goes live.
There's been plenty of other things I've been finalizing, but they're much less important and this update will already be too long to read. So, moving on!
2 - PATHFINDING
This is the biggest purely technical/programming hurdle I'm facing. Prior to this update, there has actually been NO pathfinding whatsoever in Blast Brawl 2.
Hopefully this surprises you! Currently, characters attempt to move towards whatever enemies they "see," and they make "best guesses" with their inputs (you may notice that many enemies jump randomly as they approach, this helps them get over incidental obstacles). I've designed the wave mode arenas (the only place you can currently fight AI opponents) to disguise this fact - note how they're all fairly large open rooms.
With the much more complex, winding, multi-path levels I'm creating, this will not suffice any more. So I have to code a pathfinding engine that satisfies several requirements:
- Find traversal paths with a potentially huge number of factors, such as surfaces to jump on, walls to wall-jump, realizing when jumps are too far, know when it has to attack destructible terrain that blocks its path, etc.
- Be SUPER dynamic and allow for rapid path recalculation, as every character can basically zip through levels at immense speed.
- Be extremely efficient, as I kind of need to support dozens+ of characters all fighting each other at high speeds to really achieve what I'm trying to do.
Currently, I have a fairly decent idea of how I'm going to tackle this, and the basic pathfinding engine is in-game. However it's NOT finished, and a LOT of very specific works still needs to be done before it's release-ready.
ON THE PLUS SIDE: Once I get this working, it actually will finally let me add bots to Versus mode. The lack of pathfinding has literally been the reason they're not there, pretty much everything else is ready to go.
3 - CREATING NEW MECHANICS
Currently, Blast Brawl 2 focuses quite heavily on character combat, mostly in rather blank arenas.
In addition to adding more enemy variety, I am adding numerous mechanics to make each adventure level have more distinctive gameplay and interesting environments, with hopefully each level bringing something new to the mix.
A brief list of some of the new things in the early levels:
- Lethal spikes that kill any characters who touch them
- Powered doors operated by switches/other power sources
- Enemy detectors that require players to kill all enemies in an area before doors open.
- Mounted turrets that fire a variety of projectiles
- Land mines
- Areas with infinite spawning enemies
- etc etc (you get the idea)
All of these things will make levels more interesting to traverse, no just more difficult. However, they all take time to code and do art/sound for.
ADDITIONALLY, I have to make level hazards register themselves in the pathfinding engine, and have the path solvers take them into account. That shit be hard yo.
4 - THIS IS THE LONG HAUL
I have a pretty big goal for Blast Brawl 2, and I want to make this game as awesome as it can be. Adventure mode is really going to be the capstone/culmination of the game, and I want it to actually be fairly meaty.
To give a rough overview of what the "end goal" of Blast Brawl is:
- I want 8 specific different regions of the game. They will each have a specific theme and fit together as an "overworld," similar to Super Mario World or other similar games.
- Each region will have 3 bosses, spread out with ~10 "regular" levels between them.
- Bosses will be HARD. (My favorite games are Dark Souls/Bloodborne, so extrapolate.) However, if you beat a boss in a region, you will gain an additional "boss life" against other bosses in the region (you start with 3, and have a max of 5).
- Regions will NOT be linear, or even connected to each other in a linear fashion. For example, I intend for players to be able to reach the "second" region - the Sewers - without needing to face a Boss.
- Certain levels will have "secrets," where players can find hidden items and must take them to the end of the level to unlock them. The majority of these will be skins, gear, or lore information.
- A few level secrets will actually open up hidden levels, where players can complete a challenge to unlock a new character. (When the game is "done," money/coins will no longer be a thing and will be removed from the game. All unlocks will be achieved via secrets in adventure mode.)
So yeah, that's a lot. Hopefully after I finalize everything this update I can go more quickly on the future regions, but right now I'm still getting everything together.
And let's be frank, each level takes about a week to make/play/refine/polish. So yeah, this one is going to be in the can for a while.
Anyway, just wanted to give you guys a heads up! If you found any part of this long rambling update confusing, just post a comment and I'll try to explain better!
Anyway, cheers!