"The Last Road" is now "Beyond The Veil". This decision was made primarily because The Last Road is already a popular android game, a play, and a movie. However I feel that the new name better reflects both the mood and the subject matter of the game.
The Combat side of the game is nearing (ish) completion now. Implemented the melee minigame I had been planning for a while now. It's similar to the quicktime events in the new Tomb Raider games, where you are shown a button to press that is within a small ring. I've linked a video, but here's a description anyway. A large outer ring collapses down onto the smaller ring, and when they overlap you have to press the indicated key to succeed. This version uses the WASD keys as the target keys to press (aligned to the correct sides of the screen i.e. Top, Left, Bottom, and Right). Players are given a sequence of this minigames, each with a shorter duration than the last. If the player succeeds an individual minigame they deal damage to the enemy, if they fail, they receive damage. Whoever loses the final minigame is knockeddown for a couple of seconds. During melee you can't be harmed by other enemies, and the combat encounter is essentially paused.
Melee Video: Imgur.com
Melee Combat Screen
Also implemented a few new enemy types:
- The Warlord summons allies when their health is low. This can quickly overwhelm the player, but they can be interrupted. There is a hard limit of 7 enemies on screen so Warlords cannot summon allies beyond this number.
- The Witch can throw Grenades which either directly cause damage, or inflict conditions on the player. They have low health, but are always equipped with a condition-dealing weapon.
- The Sentinel boosts the power of nearby enemies, and recovers health when in cover.
- Grenades (not strictly an enemy) explode when they touch the ground, dealing damage, knocking characters back, and inflicting conditions. All explosives can be avoided by Dashing.
- Mines cannot be seen until you are close to them. This distance depends on your characters perception.
- Decoys look like regular enemies, but have no health, and disappear when shot.
Weapons can now apply condition damage, which is the final addition to be made to weapons, so aside from variety and balance, these are feature complete. There are 4 types of condition:
- Pierce: Either deals 50% damage to a single enemy behind the target if unarmoured, or deals 50% damage directly to the opponents armour if armoured.
- Bleed: (Stacking) Each stack deals 1 damage per second. Stacks decay after 5 seconds.
- Burning: (Stacking) First stack deals 4 damage per second, second stack deals 2, third stack deals 1. Stacks decay after 2 seconds (though this will probably change in testing).
- Sickness: (Stacking) Stacks have no inherent functionality. When 10 stacks are applied to a target, a large amount of armour-ignoring damage is dealt to their health, then all stacks are removed. Stacks decay after 2 seconds.
Explosives, conditions, and skills should all provide methods for players to deal damage to targets regardless of their armour level and health. Higher level enemies have more health and more armour, so there is an even greater need to use armour-removal effects in order to conquer them.
On a slightly less exciting note the save system is semi-working. I've built a fairly robust system that recursively creates an XML file containing all save data. This is done primarily because it's easier for me to read and debug XMLs. I will try and find a way of obfuscating the save data so that players can't fiddle the numbers at some point in the future.
Finally I've recorded a video of the gameplay to show everything in action. Please be aware that I've focussed on the functionality of the systems, so there might be some text that doesn't make sense, or a few buttons that don't have any navigation so I've had to use the mouse. The game speed is also significantly higher than it will be at launch, so if things are difficult to take in, don't fret- it's just for testing! All this will be fixed in future, and I will be providing full support for Keyboard Only, Mouse and Keyboard, and Controller input.
If you have any questions at all or want to know more about the project, please do ask away! Hope you enjoyed reading another update, and have a great weekend.
