Refinements & The First Playable Prototype

Greetings, fellow game enthusiasts!

The feedback loop is an essential part of any game development process. After our recent playtest with peers, we were handed a checklist of bugs to squash and potential improvements to make. I'm thrilled to announce that after some intense coding sessions and gallons of coffee, I've tackled each item on that list, culminating in our first playable WebGL prototype of Level 1, now live on itch.io! 🎉

Improvements Made:

Core Gameplay Enhancements:

• Cursor is now locked during gameplay.
• Resolved the dark lighting issue experienced when launching from the main menu.
• Refined the camera's position and its downward look angle.
• Improved raycasting for shooting.
• Enhanced the health orb mechanics.
• Tweaked the blaster's accuracy at long ranges and removed the range limit on guards shooting.
• Introduced a progress saving feature.
• Balanced the frequency of enemy dialogues and optimized GUI scale.
• Adjusted various difficulty scaling elements across all modes.

Level 1 Fixes & Changes:

• Addressed enemy placement and spawner issues.
• Removed non-functional in-game ladders.
• Corrected collision layers and adjusted the first upgrade room's design.

Features Introduced:

• A narrative introduction to give players some context.
• An options menu with volume controls, sensitivity sliders, and more.
• A pause menu with quick access to settings.
• On-screen notifications for upgrades and battery pickups.
• Enhanced UI elements for upgrades.
• Integrated camera collision mechanics for smoother gameplay.

Investigated:

• Some players reported instances of the character moving involuntarily (unable to reproduce).
• Reports of occasional lag and frame drops (one of our enemies was very high poly and placed prolifically, fixed!).

In our previous devlog post, we discussed the invaluable feedback received during our Peer Testing Session on October 3. While certain gameplay aspects required a revisit, especially the lack of notifications and level balancing, the inputs proved to be instrumental in guiding our refinements. As we approach the finish line, there's a palpable sense of excitement and determination to meet, if not surpass, our original vision for the game.

As always, your support and feedback are paramount. We're looking forward to sharing more updates soon, and in the meantime, do give our Level 1 prototype a whirl on itch.io!

The plan for the final week:

Now that the bugs are squished, we need more content!! The goal is at least one more level and some new upgrades, fingers crossed!

Upgrades

I'm considering these as possible upgrade additions:

Legs: Thrusters Left Hand: Energy platform gun (glowing forearm) or Thrusters Shield generator - deflects attacks Bomb - strong damage and area affect but costs energy Right Hand: Hyperblaster BFG Body: Heavy Armor - Bulks up max energy but slows him down Gravitron Armor - Greatly increases health orb gravitation, lowers gravity? Power Armor- Drains energy to create an energy shield that damages melee enemies and reflects bullets

More Levels....

Level 4 (Control):

For the 4th level I'm thinking of having our little upgraded robot engage in a showdown with his enemies in their headquarters. It's a simple level idea where he get's swamped from all sides and has to survive the onslaught before he can finally escape. He'll emerge from the stairs at the centre of the level, at which point an alarm sounds and the onslaught begins, with increasing intensity.

Level 3 (The Deep):

For level 3 I've planned a pretty complex map with a lot of verticality. The player will emerge from a pipe (the one he jumped into at the end of level 1) and will realise he is underground and also under a body of water. He'll have to sneak/fight/run into the central area and work his way up a heavily guarded spiral stairway in the centre of the building to get to the final level. There will be several more upgrades to find in this level, including the hyperblaster, a torch, and an armor upgrade or two. The torch will be needed to navigate a dark basement area underneath the map where the most powerful armour in the game awaits. It's going to be a real crunch to get this level done in time for submission on sunday though, fingers crossed!

Performance optimization:

Framerates are currently decent but I noticed some slowdown when many enemies were on-screen. Some basic investigation in the editor showed the cause: A couple of our models had over 50,000 tris, which adds up pretty quick when there are a bunch on-screen! Firstly i replaced some of the manually placed enemies with spawners, which wont turn on until the player gets close to to them. Secondly we're simplifying the problem models: Jon has updated his scrapper model, which is now only around 27,000 tris I've updated the Dalek model which has come down to under 20,000 tris That should give performance a nice boost in the next build!

Until next time, Josh