Loads of work!

So today I took the day off so I could work on Gateway…

Most of the work was small tweaks based on feedback I got at the Lisboa Games Week, to prepare an even better demo for the last round of Playstation Talents and for ComicCon Portugal next week.

I noticed in the demo that most people didn’t catch any of the alloy and health packs that dropped from the enemies that you killed… There’s two possible reasons: one, they don’t see the use (that fits with the alloy, but not much with the health packs), and two, they don’t see them at all because of the noise in the scenery. In case the problem is this last one, I added some code for the items to bob up and down, and for them to have a glowing outline (with a neat shader). They are way more visible now, and on ComicCon I’ll be able to test my theory on this…

I also changed the stun mechanics on the game… It was a bit too overpowered, in my opinion… Now, when you hit an enemy with a weapon that can stun, it will increase a stun-meter, and when that meter reaches the top, it will trigger the actual stun, that will last for a few seconds (with a visible effect so you know it is in effect), and then has a cooldown so you can’t keep stunning indefinitely. I think this works better, looks cleaner and it gives rise to a few more potential mechanics in the future (for example, if two players are blasting the same enemy with a stun gun, it will stun faster). The implementation of this wasn’t as good as I’d like, but for the immediate purpose is good enough.

I’ve also tweaked the bosses a lot… Because of the birth of the game as a single-player game, the bosses were to be “designed” and not procedurally generated… Now they are procedurally generated, even if currently it’s just a glimpse of what we will do in the actual game. They can have different payloads, shields, and mechanics as splitting into more enemies when they are destroyed… When I showed the game at Lisboa Games Week, people would breeze through the boss as if it was just another enemy, you only felt that he was a boss because he was bigger than the rest, had a bit more health and was standing in the middle of a temple… Not anymore!

Tomorrow I’ll also be working on this, mostly just polishing, adding a score system (I think that might work in a demo environment, so people have a feeling of having an objective), and a game timer so that sessions have a fixed time.