Devlog 6 - Finishing Touches (for now)

Devlog 6

Hey everyone, I'm here with probably the final devlog on DON'T DO IT unless I ever think about returning to the project. This week was a race to the finish line so while I got a lot done that I wanted to, not all of it was implemented to a point that I'd call any of it 'complete' but oh well.

Explosions

First thing's first. Explosions! Explosions were definitely something that I wanted to put a bit of a focus on as they would be the one effect the player would be exposed to the most. The old explosions in the game was just a simple sprite that appears at the player position which did the job but didn't look visually appealing and definitely didn't scream 'cool explosion' so I did a big overhaul it. What I envisioned was chunks of flesh flying everywhere with streaks of blood painting the walls.

With a few effects from unity's particle system and flying rigid body flesh chunks, I got an effect like this which I think nails the kind of visuals I was going for. This definitely sells the effect and is 1000x more dramatic than a static blood splat.

Background

A minor improvement to the visuals of every environment in the game is the addition of a background other than the stark white colour. This helps with the lab aesthetic and makes it look way less bland.

New Modes

2 (kind of) new modes are finally here! I did a little work and got a new mode and a variation on the old 'press this button' type game alongside a completely new one that turns a few rules on their heads, shaking up the gameplay (like the aim was with adding new modes).

- Climbing

A new variation of the 'press the button' type mode in which the player must platform their way up to the correct button before the time runs out. This puts more of an emphasis on the platforming aspect of the game that normally wouldn't get too much of the spotlight otherwise.

- Lasers

A completely new and unique 'game mode' based around dodging lasers until the timer runs out. Lasers are a new hazard introduced into the game for this specific game mode (who knows, I could maybe get some extra use out of them later on) which wind up before expanding and becoming 'interactive' in which they can tag the player and kill them (although an alternate mode where multiple colours of lasers do different things like '1 colour is bad so dodge that one but others are good' kind of concept). It came to my attention after creating the latest build that their hit boxes are really strange (oops) so I'll investigate that later but for now pardon the unfairness.

The other new element in the laser mode is the introduction of survival timers that are essentially a timer in reverse where the objective of the level is to outlive the timer in order to progress instead of it being the cause of your death. I think this is a good addition as it gives variation to the concept of objectives as every one isn't just a 'race against the clock' but alters the way the user plays.

New Levels

To match the new modes, I made new levels that made use of the tile sets robustness to go all out and make super intricate shapes (mainly on the one and only climb level) and new maps for the 'press the button' type levels some of which are small with tight timings to really put the pressure on the player (maybe a bit too tight). This makes the game way more fun as there were only what... 3(?) old levels in the previous builds which definitely got stale fast. I didn't end up adding as many as I wanted mainly cause they were fairly time consuming because I didn't set up auto tiling or anything with a proper tile set but I think there are enough for at least a little replay-ability for this build (also just wanted to show off my tile sets uses).

High Scores

A small addition that I made was high scores. This just gives a little more incentive for replaying the game and was something I was meaning to implement for a while but got distracted with. Now the player has score that continues over each run! The highest score is displayed at the end of each run with a prompt telling the player if they did or didn't beat it/set a new high score. This isn't displayed anywhere else though as I didn't want to spend too much time on this but just get it to the point that I could say it's a feature cause I do still think it adds a nice touch.

Anyways, this is bye for now but I hope that I'll start this project back up some time! (probably with a major ground level rework if ever. Its spaghetti in there...)