Hello, everyone
Vote for Cold Shell here, on IndieDB >> Indiedb.com <<
Last year, my previous game (Molten Armor) managed to reach Top-100 indie games and it was awesome, thanks to all the people voting.
I move forward, implementing features and adding diversity to gameplay. Points covered in this dev blog entry were originally advises from DevGAMM'18 in Minsk, which i visited recently.
People told me that there are tons of boxes scattered around levels, and they wanted to bash them. I saw people constantly walking towards a box and hitting it. Awesome idea, i thought. Too bad that it results in some hard work and re-designing some levels once again. Ok, cool, can do it. I've started small.
Test level with a bashable box. Works fine. Note that the box didn't roll towards my mouse - that pissed me off. Back to the drawing board. Some time later...
That's what i like to see. One can bash a box into an enemy through a glass. Looks fun, works fine. Took some serious effort - I've never coded anything like that. But that is just a test level. got to see how it works in the real gameplay.
Nice. I'll polish it a bit overtime, but it looks nice. Bashing a box into enemies looks like an awesome starting move to initiate a fight. Poor thugs seem overloaded with such a change in their environment. They are in need of some AI tinkering now i guess. Alright, anyways it's a great addition to gameplay. Now i wanted to address some quality of life features. One can live without them, but it's always nice to have them on board, you know. First being quest and room notifiers. 
Yeah, the quest text has highlighted parts and one can get pretty fast what to do next. But people tend to make mistakes. I never expected that someone would skip even such a short text completely and be lost with no clue what to do next. Silly me. Thanks to showcase i saw people missing like 99% of texts, just hungry for action. Alright, why not. If you wish to skip any and all text entirely, the game will still show you where you should click next. For like 5 seconds - should be enough for a sip of your soda or to shoo your cat away from your keyboard.
Next was a function i really missed while showcasing Cold Shell. When you encounter a boss for the first time, there is a roll-in image of the bad guy facing you. That's nice, good stuff. But when you lose and restart, the roll-in is displayed again. That's still ok. Some people were defeated by the enemy like 11 or 13 times. Their faces were sort of empty - they were just waiting for the cutscene to be over already godamit! That was NOT ok. I can totally understand it. So i went ahead and made some cool stuff for that. 
If you are defeated and restart, the cutscene will be skipped and the boss will appear faster. That should do the trick. It was surprisingly not-so-easy to implement, but i did it.
That's it for this time. DevGAMM's feedback keeps me occupied and i am very happy with that. Well done reading it all the way here. It means a lot to me. A friendly reminder - you can vote for Cold Shell here on IndieDB Indiedb.com if you fell it's worthy :)
