May 31 Update:
Hello everybody, It's been a minute since the last update, so here's a few of the things that thats being working on.
There's been doing a lot on optimizing on the system, making sure the new art pieces for the rooms and corridors are loading and unloading correctly. The frames don't drop below 70 fps now, even with big hordes of the bugs wandering around. The player needed quite a few things rewritten to make things a bit easier on the system. Now the system checks if the stamina needs to be refilled when it's used, instead of every frame. Which has worked quite nicely! There's a bunch of other minute things like the stamina regeneration (health ie.) that were updated for the player, just to make it easier on the frames and the system overall. The frames feel a lot smoother now since we started combing through everything and getting rid of unneeded things or some old code here and there.
We've added in some new art, like some shelves and some more interesting room bits. We've also added some side rooms for some epic loot once we decide what to put in there, lower more hidden floors and some manually carved out cells to make the rooms seem more dynamic and engaging is what we're hoping for.
There was some problems with the rooms alignments so the centres of the rooms weren't aligning properly, or the pieces getting put into the rooms weren't putting themselves in the right spots, so we fixed that, and for the most part it works great! Just a few minor things left to fix on that with some sub room issues.
There's key cards now! The player will be able to see them on their mini map when they're close to the room the key cards in. There's three levels of key cards and they're all colour coded. The level of the security room doesn't determine where the exit is going to be, it could be in a level 2 room, level 1 etc. There will be a risk-reward system in the futurefor staying longer and exploring, gun or player upgrades maybe :)
The mini map shows the player wandering around now, and when the players got the mini map up, it slows their walking significantly. When I was playtesting I was of walking around with the map open all of the time, it felt like the player had too much freedom with it, so we decided to tweak it a bit. We ultimately decided slowing the walking might make things a bit more interesting, and add a cool dynamic between checking the map for key cards, bugs and the exit occasionally rather than all of the time. It feels pretty good so far!
The player can't hide from the bugs for an infinite amount of time anymore. If the players been avoiding the bugs for a long time they'll slowly start to wander to the end of the map that they're in, so far that goes really well. We'll update y'all more on that as we test and develop it more.
There's an oxygen meter that that slowly runs out as time goes on, as the players traverses through the level. So it's risky to stay in a level for too long. Sprinting too much can take quite a chunk out of the players oxygen supply as well. Lastly on that, when the player reaches the elevator their oxygen supply is replenished for the next floor.
The combats been updated a bit, the bugs feel a bit smoother and if the player kills a bunch of bugs quickly, they'll get “scared” for a few seconds and back off a bit to give some relief in heavy combat. The bugs scale better with the difficulty now and there's new sound effects for the guns, the player, and the bugs. Lots of balancing has been done for both the bugs and the guns, still tons more to do though.
All in all, it runs a lot better, feels better, and we've got tons of work to do on the balancing and art but it's coming along rather well! I'm so proud of Salt, he working so hard daily to make this fun and I'm really happy to be able to be here during all this. I look forward to updating y'all again soon. :)
~Fury
I hope everyone loves it!