Dev Blog 4

This sprint was a great success in terms of the amount of work done. Perhaps this was spurred on by having some extra time over Spring Break to work but nevertheless the features added into the game recently have been very beneficial. Furthermore, we had an incredibly important playtest conducted by our professors in which some valuable insight was gained. 

Firstly, the added features. Chase added in more advanced enemy AI to the game which will massively improve the feel of our combat. Currently, all three frames have their own behavioral patterns in order to emphasize their strengths in combat as well as the weapons they wield. Currently, the light bodies have a hit and run playstyle. They will rush the player and attempt to shoot them from up close. However, once they take too much damage they will attempt to retreat and find cover. 

The medium enemy will fire at the player from a distance while utilizing its assault rifle. 

The heavy enemy will mainly be stationary and fire at the player while slowly advancing.

Their high health and deadly damage output up close made any complex AI patterns unnecessary to creating a challenging combat experience. Enemy AI is very important to a shooter as the way the enemy reacts to the player’s actions helps make combat more dynamic and fun. 

Next, Dylan worked on finishing up the frame transfer system as well as more visual improvements to gameplay such as action lines when dashing and adding worldspace health bars so the player knows when enemies are damaged. Firstly, the dash VFX were created by Angel but were implemented into the scene by Dylan.

I think they provide a fantastic emphasis to the dash feature as the player really feels like they are moving at incredible speeds and have lots of mobility. Furthermore, the inclusion of worldspace health bars really helps with recognition of damage dealt to enemies and the integrity of a body you hope to occupy. I wanted to add this feature because during play tests it was incredibly hard to tell when an enemy was being damaged by the player and how much health they had left. This new addition will help provide the player with more information in battle. 

For modeling, the light, medium, and heavy bodies all have textures now and are currently being rigged and animated. 

I wanted them to have different colorations on top of having different body shapes in order to help with enemy recognition. I think that these color changes should be sufficient. 

When it came to the playtest conducted by our two professors, I feel like I got some very useful data from their feedback. Firstly, the inclusion of platforming was not welcome in the game design. The game was confused in terms of its genre and was currently trying to be an FPS, mech shooter, and platformer all at once. Therefore, I decided to focus on one genre by eliminating most of the platforming sections while transitioning most of the mech shooter elements to fit better into a boomer shooter mold. The next piece of feedback I received was about health being an expendable resource. This was rectified by massively decreasing the amount of health regained by dropped health cells from 40% max health to a numerical value of 15. Now health is a much more valuable resource that can only be regained through hacking enemies with health cells now being a way to temporarily prolong your stay in your current body. Furthermore, we are adding a new feature where levels will reset upon the player’s death. These two gameplay changes combined will make the game more difficult but also encourage the player to learn the skills of hacking enemies and evading attacks in order to stay alive. 

Lastly, the hacking ability felt like too much of an instant win button that could either be completely ignored or singularly used to beat the game with no downsides. This was a huge issue that I sought to remedy in multiple ways. First, was the health changes I detailed earlier with making hacking necessary for healing and  staying alive to complete the level. Secondly, I asked Dylan to re-add a feature where hacking speed would scale to enemy current health with the speed of the hack increasing as the enemy’s amount of health decreases. Lastly, I placed extra emphasis on completing our last feature to the game, the stagger system. This system will allow enemies to be stunned after taking enough damage in a short period of time. While the enemy will be stunned and thus easier to hack, they will also be at lower health and thus riskier to occupy as a body. Hacking a fresh, undamaged body will be harder as they will be actively firing back at the player and moving around. 

Hopefully all of these changes prove to be satisfying solutions to the problems brought up during the gameplay test.