Once again, we draw closer and closer to the completion of this huge challenge I have undertaken. I spent the week before last designing and editing the trailer for Beyond The Veil, which you can now watch on the recently published Steam page! Woohoo!
Improved Shatter Effect
As a gamer I'm sure you are sick of hearing developers ask for you to wishlist their games and throw us a like or share on Twitter. The thing is these small things are enormously helpful to us developers! With every Wishlist on Steam, Beyond The Veil becomes more visible to others, and will rank higher in the Coming Soon/Newly Released sections. Although I am certainly not in the industry for money, financial success will mean that I can continue to support Beyond The Veil after launch, and hopefully build on the foundations I have made over the past year to bring you more, exciting games.
Improved Fire Effect
Anyway, I'm sure the real reason you are reading this blog is to get some more progress updates. Good news all round on that front then! I think it's been around a month since my last update, and there has certainly been a lot of polish going on since then. Let's get down to it.
New Character Layout
- Generally improved the Map generation and appearance.
- Added a Tutorial to the game. I've tried to keep it to a minimum, as most features of the game should be fairly explanatory either from past experience or just through experimentation.
- Removed target locking from controls- this just made the combat boring and took some of the player skill away. It's supposed to be difficult!
- Vastly improved performance across the board. Large assets are preloaded at start up to improve scene transition time. Lighting speed improved, reduced the particle count in lots of systems (still looks great though).
- Changed the Character UI to a horizontal rather than vertical layout. This is far easier to read, but more importantly, easier to navigate using a keyboard/gamepad.
- Added a whole bunch of decorations to the UI, icons, glows, dividers, etc.
- Reduced overall information density to make it easier to read the screen, particularly in combat.
- Lots more visual feedback when clicking on things or performing actions like crafting, activating skills etc.
- Simplified the armour mechanic and shatter damage. Armour provides a flat amount of damage reduction per point of armour, and can only be damaged by shatter attacks (no more dividing up health and armour damage from bullets).
- Removed autosave feature, felt a bit counterintuitive in a game like this. Now all saving must be done manually, even on game exit, to avoid situations where an autosave occurs before a non-survivable situation.
- Improved fire and shatter attacks to have a bit more visual punch.
- Added a new attack type- Needle. Starts as an immobile projectile that constantly accelerates until it hits something.
- Burn/Shatter/Void chance is now modified by magazine size to prevent high fire rate weapons triggering effects more than they should. Also results in Rifles effectively becoming fire cannons.
- Lots and lots of bug fixes.
Example Tutorial Screen
New UI Design
That's it for this week. Hopefully, I'll get some good actionable feedback from some playtesting over the next few days. Incredibly my to-do list has only 2 items on it now, so I must be doing something right (or I'm just blind)!
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