WEEK 4

Focus

This week was spent creating some basic levels, adding a new mechanic and starting work on game feel. There were several bugs that were squashed during this week, including issues with the shader not working in the final build, and health bars not working when reloading the scene.

Mechanics

The destructible boxes were added as the first new mechanic this week. The larger heavy bullet is able to tear right through these boxes, and as it does so little colour blobs shoot out and paint the world. The AI navigation mesh dynamically updates based on the presence or absence of these boxes.

Game Over Screen

We finally got around to adding  game over screen, allowing the player to get straight back into the action.

Bullet Colours

To make the bullets stand out more we decided to give them some colour and glow. We also made the player's bullets a different colour to help differentiate player and enemy bullets.

Currently the player's bullets are green but we're still experimenting with different colour combinations.

Levels

Creating the levels was fairly straightforward as we had already modelled the assets (2 weeks prior) to bring them to life, though some key principles were taken into consideration when designing the layout of the levels.

1. Gradually teach the player the core mechanics of the game over the first few levels.
2. Combine previously learnt mechanics, into later levels.
3. Levels shouldn’t have long empty corridors, as the game is supposed to be fast-paced.

Knowing these principles for our level design, these are the levels we came up with.

Level 1 – The Beginning
Starting off with the most fundamental mechanic of our game, host swapping. Players will quickly learn that there is a gap in the floor that they cannot cross unless they swap to a host on the other side.

Level 2 – The Laboratory
Here, players will learn the ability to interact with button panels in the level to unlock the door to proceed.

Level 3 – R&D
This level introduces the player to the Light enemy. The player will learn that they need to keep a light enemy alive to be able to cross the gap to the door.

Level 4 – The Gap
The Gap combines all mechanics taught to the player so far. Players start as the Light enemy, have to traverse to the middle walkway, interact with 2 button panels on either side of the room, and then make it across the gap once gain the the door.

Level 5 – Deep Storage
This level is turns into chaos as it introduces the player to the Heavy enemy. The player will learn that they can destroy boxes blocking their path.

We plan to add some more levels to bring all the mechanics the player has learnt so far together, but for now these levels are a solid foundation to recieve valuable feedback on the mechanics of our game.

Fixes

• Major fix: outline shader now builds correctly and will be included in the next itch web build
• Splat colour shader artifacts and random colour shifts fixed(?)
• Health bars now properly display when loading a scene more than once