Turnover - Progress Report for 5/12 news

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Testing and build revision continues on. Levels decoration is coming along, new sprites are being created, and game play elements are being revised and improved. Only a couple of more levels need heavy testing/decoration work. I still need to give everything a quick once over after that and run through the game again.

There’s a saying along the lines of “the first 90% of the last 10% is the hardest 99% of game development”. In many ways, that’s no shit. This is where everything is taking a final shape. When I was writing the engine and designing the game, there was much more logic required. Now, it feels like I’m almost running on instinct. Frequent testing is helping me make sure everything plays and feels right.

I have an internal schedule for when I’d like the first version of Turnover to be finished and I’m trying like hell to meet that date. But, these things are going to take as long as they need, and I would rather do it right then rush out something I’m not comfortable with.

Onto a few recent things –

Aiming has been redone for Turnover. Previously, there was an accuracy penalty for thrown objects, just to add a little difficulty to the game. In testing, we found that the loss of accuracy severely diminished the players ability to distract enemies correctly. So, the accuracy penalty was placed into the aim system itself. Now, if the player takes a moment to aim (with the resizing reticle to inform the player) before throwing an object, it will maximize accuracy. This seems to be a good compromise.

Never liked the fire sprite and animation I had created, so I went ahead and remade it. The new version has ended up looking pretty decent, I think.

Here’s a simple drip animation that I posed on Twitter earlier this week. Thought I’d post it here for the hell of it. I’m going to be going through all the levels soon and adding some more decorative animations.

Also, I’ve been pulling off a lot of optimizations lately. The collision system, which was the most resource intensive part of the engine, has seen a +30% speed improvement. I’m quite happy with everything now, speed wise. I doubt I’ll be doing much tinkering with the engine any more.

Here’s the recent changes since the last progress report.

• New aiming setup & reticle graphic.
• Various new sprites.
• Fixed file loading crash.
• Fixed bug with Workers trying to disable player owned servers.
• Tweaked all NPC dialog.
• Tweaked all enemy sound awareness.
• Stunman calls for reinforcements better. Should be more dangerous.
• Recreated how vision cones are drawn to allow better draw-over.
• Increased sound generation radius of noise actors.
• Security Cameras will now keep player’s position updated with Sentinels so they can catch the player easier.
• Added player server hacking animation.
• Fixed NPC Info so name generation tries to avoid pulling names twice.
• New death animations for Enemies.
• Tweaked the Continue screen.
• Rewrote the save system to fix some bugs.
• Increased Sentinel stun time when hit with a wrench.
• Fixed perks not clearing when starting a new game after beating the game.
• Fixed wet footsteps not drawing.
• Removed unnecessary calculations from the collision engine. This fixed any outstanding performance problems in the collision system.
• Fixed old screens being drawn on level load when playing in full screen.