Animation Overhaul
Animation is by far my weakest area in game development so this overhaul was badly needed. The clunky placeholder animations that have been used for literally years now are finally gone!
New Grenade Throw Animation
New Slide Animation
New Melee Animation
More Fluid Jumping
Have a look at some comparisons of the old terrible animations compared to the new ones! Note that the new animations are not final yet but should be a big step up from the old ones. This animation pipeline is firmly in place now so I'm really excited to improve the enemy models and animations next.
Walk Comparison
Jump Comparison
Turn In Place Comparison
All animations were actually authored in Unreal Engine itself using the amazing new Control Rig toolset. This saves a lot of time as I don't have to go back and forth between external software and import files after each iteration.
New Grenade Mods
Grenade specific mods were introduced last month and are allowing me to create some much more powerful grenade buffs that can really synergize with your weapon to create interesting builds.
Here are some fun grenade mods added this month:
- Crystal Barrage: Chance for grenades to explode into a crystal barrage
- Fireworks: Chance for grenades to explode into fireworks that shoot in random directions
- Clone Explosion: Grenades spawn more grenades when exploding
- Spinning Blade: Chance for grenades to spawn a spinning blade when exploding, dealing damage to all nearby enemies for several seconds
- Dagger Blast: Chance for grenades to explode into a cluster of daggers
- Crit Grenade: Chance for grenades to crit when exploding
- Black Hole: Chance for grenades to spawn a black hole when exploding
- Chaotic Grenade: Grenades deal more damage but move in random patterns
- Snake Grenade: Grenades deal more damage but move in snakelike patterns
New Weapon Mods
The final (for the beta) batch of weapon mods have been added this month! It's been really important to make sure that there are a nice wide range of mods to choose from even during the beta to allow for many different builds. Since you choose a specific weapon before starting a run, some mods are far better or worse depending on the weapon: for example the Uppercut mod deals bonus flat damage for every 5 shots fired: this synergizes nicely with fast firing rifles and is much less effective on slow firing shotguns and snipers.
- Targeting Shot: Shots that hit enemies spawn new shots that target other nearby enemies
- Zig Zag Shot: Shots deal more damage but fly in zig zag patterns
- High Caliber: Damage increased but clip size reduced
- Clip Shot: Damage increased for each bullet remaining in the clip
- Leech Shot: Chance to heal when dealing damage
- Sharp Shot: Shots deal additional flat damage
- Wind Up: Damage increased for each shot fired until reloading
- Long Shot: Shots have a longer range
- Steady Shot: Damage increased when aiming but reduced when hipfiring
- Trick Shot: Damage increased when hipfiring but reduced when aiming
- Boomerang Shot: Shots fly back towards you after a short time and have a longer lifetime
- Recoil Shot: Damage increased but firing knocks you back
- Streak Shot: Crit chance increased for each shot that hits an enemy in a row without missing
- Shrinking Shot: Shots initially deal more damage but shrink over time, dealing less damage
- Uppercut: Every fifth shot deals increased damage
- Precision: Damage increased for each shot you hit in a row without missing
- Exploding Shot: Chance for shots to explode on impact
- Juiced: Increased damage, fire rate and reload speed
- Accelerating Shot: Shots deal more damage but start slow and accelerate over time
These new mods below are triggered when firing your weapon: they inherit the effects of almost all other equipped mods: you can get some busted combinations here! All of the FX shown below are placeholder but you'll get an idea of how these mods will work.
- Fireworks: Small chance to fire fireworks with your shot
- Crystal Blast: Chance to fire a close range AOE blast with your shot
- Mace Balls: Small chance to fire mace balls along with your shot
- Sharpened Axe: Chance to fire a spinning axe along with your shot
- Fireball Cluster: Chance to fire a cluster of fireballs along with your shot
- Dagger Arc: Chance to fire an arc of daggers along with your shot
Other Stuff
- Survival Enemy Variants
It's been fun creating tougher versions of enemies that scale all the way up to elite or even boss variants. More of these tougher variants will show up as you get further into a run. Shown above are the new Ice Slug variants that explode into a freezing damage area!
- Crab Model Improvements
It's not a very noticeable change but the crab is now fully symmetrical with new claws and has had many subtle texture improvements!
- Level Design Improvements
While doing daily playtests, I'm constantly iterating on both how the levels look AND more importantly how they feel to play. Interestingly, wide open beaches seem to be much more fun to play compared to caves and other smaller islands.
- Survival Difficulty Levels
I've put a lot of thought into how to make Survival mode challenging but still allow it to be fun and accessible at the same time. While Normal and Nightmare difficulties can do that, I'd like for players to be able to continue to escalate the challenge after each completed run to give them a building sense of mastery rather than going from Normal (a moderate challenge) to Nightmare (extremely hard) in one jump.
To solve this, I'm testing a difficulty levels feature- each level adds a new rule that makes the game harder in some way: which of these rules are fun and also how many difficulty levels there will be is still to be decided (currently looking at about 10-20 difficulty levels). Ideally this system should give players a fun way to earn cosmetics and a reason to replay the game while increasing the challenge gradually rather than all at once. With this in mind, the potential level 20 difficulty is FAR harder than the original Nightmare difficulty was going to be.
- Audio Overhaul Many placeholder sounds have been replaced this month (crunchy explosions, whooshes while dashing, calming ocean soundscapes and much more!) as well as lots of overall sound mix adjustments to further increase awareness during gameplay. These changes will be showcased in an unedited gameplay video of a Survival run that'll be posted nearer to the release of the game.
That's it for this month, thanks for reading!
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