Well it’s been quite a while, over a full year since I last updated this thread. In the last year I’ve started college (majoring in CS woot woot!), I made and published another game, and I also have devoted a massive portion of my free time to swimming (20-30 hours a week), but it’s the off season now so hopefully I’ll be able to focus again on making games.
Map Update:
Fallout and Rome were both added to the game. I really like how Rome turned out and it plays very well with the characters. I’m still unsure if I want to keep Fallout in the game, I keep removing it and then adding it back a few days later, as I like the look a lot but not how it plays.
Fallout:
Rome:
In this process of creating the last few maps I realized that complicated maps don’t work super well with the way the characters fight so I’ve started to just make simply square shaped ones. Now you might think that that will mean all the maps are just for aesthetic, but you’d be very wrong. I’ve found that the size of these rooms plays a big role in certain characters effectiveness. For example, Ray is pretty awful in every map, except he is insanely good in Hall of the King. In my AI test his stats went from 0 wins with only 6 kills on the smallest map, to 1 win and 8 kills on the middle sized map, and 3 wins with 15 kills on the largest map.
I’m currently in a sort of a map crisis as I find that some of the maps are completely unplayable. There is 8 maps that I’ve created and currently only 3 of them are definitely going to be in the game. There has been a lot of content that was dropped in the creation process once I realized it wasn’t good. On top of 4-5 maps there are 2 functional characters that didn’t fit the game very well and had to be dropped.
First up is a massive UI upgrade:
The UI is (hopefully) intuitive to use, looks nice, and has a lot of features packed in. The game now supports things like being able to select which characters the bots play as and team battles.
Bot Selection:
Team Selection:
Sounds:
I finally started to add sounds to the game. It’s very early in its stages, but 2 of the characters have working sound effects and the rest shouldn’t be too hard to add. I should make a video in a few weeks, it’ll hopefully showcase the sounds then.
AI:
I did some work on the AI so they work better as well as actually work for all the characters. I actually did a test run of all the AI to see which need improvements and who was the most OP and recorded their stats. I only did this for 12 games per character, 4 on each map. In the future I’ll try and do this again with a bit more data, but the data it did give me was very telling about the different characters. As you can see below, Flame definitely needs a nerf!
AI Stats:
Major Bug Fixes:
Prior to this, there had been a bunch of small bugs in the code that made the game unplayable for a standalone. The respawning code had some glitches and a lot of other small errors with how objects were reset after being pooled made the game virtually unplayable for a long period of time. However, now that’s the past and the game runs great!
Polishing:
I have done loads of small polishing here and there. I don’t remember nor do I really care to write all of them down, but basically it looks and plays better now than it used too.
That’s all for now! I’ve got a list of things to do before release, but hopefully it shouldn’t take too long.
Things I’ve still got to do before release:
-Finish adding sounds
-Revamp input system
-Quality settings
-Tutorial
-Trailer
Things I’d like to do before release:
-Add 3 more characters
Things I’d like to do in the future:
-Add a campaign
