Tutorial
I created the tutorial mode this month, and then re-iterated over it four times from the feedback I got. The tutorial now shows all the core gameplay elements a player will see in the game, which will be important when onboarding new players. This should lead to less players being turned away from the game when they first start to play it. Depending on if I add any new features to the game in the future, the tutorial mode is ready now.
Camera
I have also updated the camera for singleplayer game modes (I still have to work on updating the camera for multiplayer game modes, but that will be done within the next few months). Some of the changes I have done is placed the camera little further back so the player can see the level more, make it rotate more top-down when the player has started aiming or shooting to give them a clearer view of the area, and I have made the camera rotate in increments.
The last change is the most important as I always wanted to keep camera rotation in the game to be less restricted with level design, but I also noticed that rotating the camera was more of an annoyance for players trying to set it right perfectly and then going into fight. Now, when the player presses a button, the camera will rotate in a 90 degree clockwise or anti-clockwise direction. This feels much cleaner and still allows me to be less restrictive with my level designs.
Focus
A feature that was hard to showcase to players was the focus ability. Focus allows the player to slow down the game time so that they have more time to react to what is happening in the level.
To help it stand out, I made a visual effect that shows focus has been activated. This allows players to immediately see it is working. To ensure that the player knows that focus is still active, I decided to darken up the borders of the screen to give a more “focused-on-character” view. Both these changes put together makes the focus ability easy to stand out and understand.
Another change I made to the focus ability is that it now slowly refills itself over time. Initially, it could only be refilled by killing someone, which I now find too punishing for players. I decided to still fill the focus meter fully when the player kills someone, but also slowly fill the focus meter by itself when the player isn’t using it. This gives less inexperienced players a chance to still enjoy the game.
Weapons
I decided to make the weapons a bit friendlier and less punishing for players. The first thing I did was decreased the aim distance offset increase amount of all ranged weapons. The aim distance offset is how much offset of the aim will increase the further the player aims at something from where they are standing. It’s a simple change, which already feels like a big change the gameplay.
Weapons can also now be holstered (which is done automatically) when a player decides to carry an item, such as a fuel canister. This allows the player to immediately fight back if they get pushed into a tight situation instead of a certain death for them.
Aim Assist
This is the most recent change I have made this month, and I am still working out some bugs with this feature. The basic concept is that if the player is aiming over a character, the cursor will automatically lock on that character’s position.
This is great because players do not have to be 100% accurate with their aiming to ensure that their aim cursor is over the character. This is especially important since this game has an isometric camera, which makes it already hard to be sure where a player is aiming.
GUI
I have made slight changes to the gameplay GUI, which was just moving stuff around. But the biggest change I made with the GUI is that there are now in-game prompts when you are playing to show you what you can do. So far, prompts come up in-game when a player is in front of a door to show that they can knock or open it. This will be especially good for new players when they first start playing the game and are still not accustomed to the controls yet.
Singleplayer
Most of this month was spent on coding and fixing bugs in the singleplayer mode and working on creating new levels. This is a big task but I feel like I am making good progress on it, and I feel like some of the levels I have designed can be repurposed to multiplayer levels with a few changes.
Summary
There was a lot of work done, and re-done, this month. The project is still on-track to be released early next year. The game is looking and feeling better as I spent more time with it, and I will be soon looking forward to bringing the game to some events and showing it to more people.