Okay, so here’s the latest. CA Shooter by EternalAmbiguity
A couple gifs:
capitaladventuroushalicore
yawninggloriousamericanindianhorse
In response to Billy’s feedback last week, I went through and added audio for a lot of things. Enemy/player shots, enemy/player damage, enemy death, the “gas” effect, the interactable object in the scene, and a background “mechanical” noise (let me know if this is too loud - I had it a little lower in the past - trying to find the perfect level of “unintrusive but always present”).
I also moved to a new, much simpler map meant to showcase the main player-enemy interaction without any distractions (see the gif). The first room gives a chance to engage directly with the enemies, but the time spent there allows the second room with enemies to fill up, hopefully to a point that the player concludes that they should find a solution other than combat. That leads to the room with the “modifier,” which applies some hazard to any rooms within a range.
The modifiers are all applied to a whole room. They and their effects are:
Heat - damages player, causes the blob to grow faster
Cold - damages player, slows blob growth
Power - prevents player energy regeneration, drastically slows blob growth
Antiseptic - has no effect on player, strongly damages the blob
Poison - damages player, has no effect on the blob
The poison converts to the antiseptic after it dissipates, and the antiseptic just converts to regular air.
Since I’m a chemist nerd, I’ll point out that the “poison” is meant to be H2S, which is toxic to most biological organisms apart from some extremephiles. It can react with O2 to produce hydrogen peroxide, or “antiseptic.” But labeling it thus in the game itself seems pretentious.
Right now there’s a dropdown that allows you to pick when effect you want. I was thinking about having it be randomized, but that would present situations where the player can die without any choices (temp change or poison). I was also thinking about having a moment at the start of a level where a player has to set these for all rooms, and then make it through the level without changing them, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea. It shifts the “puzzle” side of things to its own separate piece of gameplay, and arguably makes things less dynamic.
Anyway. What’s here seems okay to me just in terms of the gameplay itself, but I’d love comments.
One minor problem I see is that door locations aren’t obvious if very close to them, and the range of the “modifier” object isn’t obvious either. I have a couple ideas but these seem like small problems to be addressed later.
In partially addressing it I’ve revealed another problem: the lack of clutter in the middle of rooms. This is meaningful because it will start to create pathways through maps for the player and enemies. Furthermore, it implies two different types of obstructions: ones you can’t move past but can shoot over, and ones you can’t even shoot over. This is something I need to work on; yesterday I started up a bunch of sci-fi games and took screenshots of their environments. I need to go back and start populating these rooms with more realistic clutter, and see how that affects the gameplay.
Anyway, I’d appreciate any comments, especially on the combat and on the “room modification” system.
Edit: since there haven’t been any responses yet, I added a couple more objects to the main room and uploaded that build, in the hopes of providing more situations with obstructions.
