The game feels extremely polished, I just wish there was more of it. My only gripe is that the scope on the SMG feels a little pointless with that recoil. As it stands, the best way to defeat enemies far away is to wait behind a corner for them to come closer.
It's effective, but feels a little cheesy.
Also, I feel strangely compelled to play Cosmic Call.
I LOVE the art. So clean, feels retro but without getting all blurry or anything. Fun gameplay, had to get used to dying a few times per level before I really knew the level.
One issue I found was that if I went up the stairs at certain angles (diagonal? against the wall?) my movement would go jagged where it was seemingly getting caught on the steps?
One issue I found was that if I went up the stairs at certain angles (diagonal? against the wall?) my movement would go jagged where it was seemingly getting caught on the steps?
One of a never ending list of corner cases. Never ever use Bullet!
The game overall reminds me a lot of Oni for some reason. Like Oni if it were made into an FPS. That's a *very* good feeling to be giving me.
I found the first enemy type to be kind of odd, though. I assume they're going to be changed, but the amount of time they spend in their 'huh?' phase seems too long to me.
The game overall reminds me a lot of Oni for some reason. Like Oni if it were made into an FPS. That’s a very good feeling to be giving me.
I’ve been meaning to try Oni, I still haven’t played it. The visual style is definitely similar to what I’m going for so I’m happy to hear it’s working.
I found the first enemy type to be kind of odd, though. I assume they’re going to be changed, but the amount of time they spend in their ‘huh?’ phase seems too long to me.
Some of them have an “ambush” flag set and they respond much faster because they skip this cautious phase. At the moment the phase goes for a fixed time which does look silly up close. I’m thinking of making it based on a detection meter like the standard ubisoft game style (the meter won’t actually be shown to the player) so that the spotting time is dependent on how far away you are.
That may just be over-complicating it though, reducing the caution time to half a second might work better.
I mean how much stealth do you plan on having in the finished game? Or rather, how viable of a playstyle is it meant to be? If it's not going to be something consistently useful then it seems odd to have it in at all.
Initially I didn’t plan on having any, but in my own playtesting I always catch myself sneaking up to do melee kills and I’ve had other agdgers say they do the same. It is intended to be viable, but there will be ambushes and encounters where the enemies spot you immediately, particularly at close range. Which does mean it will be situational rather than consistently useful. You’ve raised a good point, I’ll have to ruminate on this for a while.
I recorded some clips of playthroughs for the new opening level and the more complete Downtown. I'm liking where this is going. As always, it feels really good.
The level design is on point. I think for the most part they're straightforward. In the second level, I did end up missing the blue key and forgetting where it was again. But I like most touches. It feels pretty cohesive. I could see where I need to go, and objectives or environment changes are hinted at really clearly. In my video you could see what I tried to do at times, like jumping on the tree canopies.
The breakables were really cool. I definitely wanted to try and smash up all that glass in Downtown, although I was vaguely disappointed that falling glass doesn't hurt you. The broken cacti seemed to be kind of active for a long time, and I could keep kicking them around. Quite nice.
I only found a single secret, and while it doesn't bother me, I wonder if it's something to do with how the secrets are laid out. I broke through the wall under the hotel in the second level. The rest, while I looked around, I wonder if there was much reason to look for them (e.g. underwater in Downtown - I suspect there's a lot there but I didn't want to bother swimming. Maybe pushing the player to try it out might help - even a little).
AI feels and looks pretty good. I felt like the voices for the paramilitary dudes was kind of weird, and funny. They look like professional types, but sound like street toughs. Still, I found the AI in general pretty easy to deal with, and noticed them acting a little stupid. Dumb choices at times, but it was a fun experience overall. The mechs in Downtown got stuck on roof overhangs twice.
Overall, a really good experience. Here are two clips of me playing through. Feel free to check and see from my perspective. Keep it up!
I was vaguely disappointed that falling glass doesn’t hurt you
I know, I really wanted to add this but because they’re driven using Bullet itself rather than me tracing them through the level, there’s no straightforward way to detect particular hits. Otherwise I would’ve had this in ages ago. The cactuses do poke you if you run into them though! That one was much simpler to set up.
I only found a single secret, and while it doesn’t bother me, I wonder if it’s something to do with how the secrets are laid out.
That one with the broken wall is definitely the most obvious one, I don’t actually know if anyone has found any of the others at all. Many require you to crouch at the peak of a jump or blast-jump with the shotgun alt-fire to reach.
They look like professional types, but sound like street toughs.
lol, this is intentional for lore reasons. The bad guys are a rogue mercenary unit that took over the island without meeting any resistance. So while they are well equipped, they lack discipline and have their guard down expecting this to be a big milk run.
I need to come up with a way to actually present this in game somehow. After seeing the codec calls in your game I’m considering something similar.
Still, I found the AI in general pretty easy to deal with, and noticed them acting a little stupid. Dumb choices at times
It might not be the best idea but I’m going for a quantity over quality approach with the encounters so I don’t want individual enemies to be super competent when the plan is to build up to fighting 10-20 of them at the same time.
The mechs in Downtown got stuck on roof overhangs twice.
They’re still using the old AI, only the regular goons actually use the navmesh this time around. I should have everybody switched over in time for the next demo day though. The mechs actually get a second, dedicated navmesh for larger enemies just like how Quake had a separate BSP tree for the Shamblers
This is a very well-made game. I like how open-ended the levels are as a principle, and you have found lots of nice ways of adding encounter variety to the maps in natural-looking ways. The low-poly artstyle is smart and seems very much deliberate in giving just enough context that the locales are properly contextualized without making them look awkward when they are designed in a way that may appear a little bit unreal.
My main problem with the game at the moment is that I found the best way to play when I haven't yet memorized the map to be to just prance around and not engage the enemies a whole lot, which is boring. And even though I like how the keycard system just barely helps in punishing that a little bit, it feels like a bit of a crutch with how hard it bottlenecks progression. Maybe there could be some mobility resource that's tied to killing enemies? IDK just ideasguying solutions here
-First time playing the intro level, if I recall right, it was good fun. Especially liked the variety in vertical positioning.
-Playing through casually, the new AI feels a bit more satisfying to clobber. Melee in particular is more varied.
-In canals, I wish that when the advertisements are shot, they would be shorted out. Maybe this is going too far, but maybe they could even make a small shock explosion, kind of like a light weight red barrel.
-I realize that the mecha shots are so wide that I can just stand between the guns and never get shot... intentional? I kind of like, it's funny. Suppose it's worse than just strafing around, especially when other enemies are around.
-Finished playing, it was pretty fun. Looking forward to new levels.
-Oh that's funny. I drowned while I was typing this and it glitched; I didn't get a you're dead screen, but at least I can open the menu and exit that way.
In canals, I wish that when the advertisements are shot, they would be shorted out. Maybe this is going too far, but maybe they could even make a small shock explosion, kind of like a light weight red barrel.
I really want to do this too, but at the moment I can draw all of them at once in a single draw call and splitting them up into destroyable statics will likely require extra optimization. It is on my to-do list but as a “nice to have” rather than a “need to have”.
I realize that the mecha shots are so wide that I can just stand between the guns and never get shot… intentional? I kind of like, it’s funny. Suppose it’s worse than just strafing around, especially when other enemies are around.
As I’m aiming for other enemies to be the main source of difficulty I’m thinking I will leave it be. I do have a separate code path that fixes it, but I’ll see how it goes in the later levels.
I didn’t get a you’re dead screen, but at least I can open the menu and exit that way.
There’s no timer for the death screen, it will only show up if you left click. I should make it so Escape puts you in the death screen too though, I don’t think it does.
Still great, the new AI stuff seems to work nicely. Big mech is cool as hell. Machinegun could have a less recoil, shotgun could have more. I definitely want to make an add, perhaps not as a commercial for my game, but something funny you can use. Anything in particular that would fit your gameworld?
Hm, that might be tricky. Maybe not an actual gif as OpenGL doesn’t really support them natively and I’d have to upload the frames on every draw, but flipping through a series of still frames on an atlas would be pretty easy as long as there isn’t too many. That’s pretty much how the monitor heads for the sawblade dudes work and I could add a script to do that on plain world statics too.
They can sometimes lose you a little too easily still, but yeah they can definitely give chase much better than before without diving off cliffs.
Machinegun could have a less recoil
I have a dedicated railgun in the works to have as a more reliable sniper weapon, but I want to redo the hud a little bit when I add it so it didn’t make it into this demo day. I’m hesitant to make the Machinegun any more useful as it’s already a pretty good jack of all trades.
shotgun could have more
It starts to look really silly the way the animation works if I increase it further. However, I’ve been thinking of altering the animation so it kicks up higher and takes a while to recenter. I think that’ll give it that extra bit of oomph.
I definitely want to make an add, perhaps not as a commercial for my game, but something funny you can use.
Sure, I’d appreciate it! Ads you’d find in a tourist trap would be perfect, the kind of stuff you’d see at the air/spaceport in a tropical country/planet like overpriced bottled water. That or dumpy local businesses like expensive hotels, overhyped realtors, “financial advisors”, shady lawyers, dodgy tour guides, private investigators, pawn shops, convenience stores, that sort of thing.
Just note that all the Your Ad Here spots have a little 1px border around them to help with mipmapping artifacts so your actual workable area is 2px less than what’s listed in each dimension.
Both. I intend to slowly replace them all myself but if anybody wants to send me something over discord or post it in the thread then I’ll be happy to include it! Just don’t add scanlines as that’s an overlay layer in Krita, and include “ctes” somewhere in the post in case I have to Ctrl+F for it.
The bug about resizing the window still happens.
I have been able to reproduce it by trying out the Windows version over proton, but I haven’t looked at fixing it yet. I want to switch my window handling to GLFW for a bunch of other reasons as well so I’ll look into it then, currently in the plan for around DD59 or so.
I like the new Ai, guys running away when I melee them was notable. Flashlight is great too, can see all the textures you made now! Sounds could do with a bit of changing up. Jumping and running sound really loud, especially jarring when I was walking on the sand and it sounded like clunking on metal, could eb turned down a little bit. Apart from that, keep doing what you're doing!
It has some quirks but I think it’s already a big improvement. The new system also has them only doing pathfinding and LOS queries on a tick timer so I should be able to get away with quite a few enemies in the later levels.
could eb turned down a little bit
I’ve gone and reduced them a tiny bit for next DD. I’m too used to them and so they don’t stand out as much to me. Gunshots I’m also not certain on, I keep thinking I should turn them down too.
i found the AI to be somewhat… dumber? like, sometimes it would get stuck in a container, or below some stairs, or in the corner of a room.
The guys with the SMGs are the only ones using any new AI but admittedly their system is more complex and prone to breakage. They deal particularly badly with anything that isn’t accounted for on the navmesh. I’m also trying this thing where if you’re behind them they will run away for a bit first before they try to shoot you, this includes going up and circle-strafing around them.
That said, all enemies have now had their “psychic” time reduced from 5 seconds to just 1 so they lose track of you much easier than before.
It’s going to need more tuning. The main thing for now is that Goons shouldn’t blindly jump off cliffs anymore.
Yeah that’s expected, they’re still using the old system and so have zero understanding of their surroundings beyond running at the player in a straight line.
The movement and guns feel really smooth, I feel like that's the most important part for a boomer shooter so that's good. The only issue with movement I spotted was that I couldn't jump while I was next to something (it happened with one of the tables for sure).
Some minor complaints: the jump sound gets annoying if you spam it, I need to have some feedback when I whack the walls with a melee weapon and more projectile enemies please. Would also prefer if the walker had a more interesting attack pattern, it just keeps shooting at you forever, even behind cover sometimes.
The only issue with movement I spotted was that I couldn’t jump while I was next to something (it happened with one of the tables for sure).
Oh yeah, now I see it. It’s specifically when trying to run into a table. I should be able to sort that out at some point.
the jump sound gets annoying if you spam it,
That sounds a like a nice non-mechanical way to prevent jump spamming, lol
I need to have some feedback when I whack the walls with a melee weapon
I do need to add visual feedback when striking inert statics that take damage, but against the environment in general I’d have to do a separate trace just for world collision. One more trace isn’t a big deal especially as it’s only the player doing it but this still doesn’t seem that important.
more projectile enemies please
These are in the works
Would also prefer if the walker had a more interesting attack pattern
I intend for each enemy to be rather simple with encounters combining more and more of them together as the game progresses. I have at least one variant mech in mind and will be using more of the simultaneously on the later maps.
Not a whole not new in this one. Mostly just the new system for secrets, the flashlight, and the basic goons now have pathfinding and revised behaviors.
If you’re on Linux and it doesn’t launch tell me! I’ve static linked Bullet and built against the Scout runtime container from Steam so it should just work on most distributions.
Comments
The game feels extremely polished, I just wish there was more of it. My only gripe is that the scope on the SMG feels a little pointless with that recoil. As it stands, the best way to defeat enemies far away is to wait behind a corner for them to come closer.
It's effective, but feels a little cheesy.
Also, I feel strangely compelled to play Cosmic Call.
It’s really intended to give you an option before you get the railgun which will be the dedicated sniper weapon.
There’s only a couple right now, but I intend to have some enemies that hold their ground and wait for you, especially on unreachable ledges.
…no comment
I LOVE the art. So clean, feels retro but without getting all blurry or anything. Fun gameplay, had to get used to dying a few times per level before I really knew the level.
One issue I found was that if I went up the stairs at certain angles (diagonal? against the wall?) my movement would go jagged where it was seemingly getting caught on the steps?
One of a never ending list of corner cases. Never ever use Bullet!
The game overall reminds me a lot of Oni for some reason. Like Oni if it were made into an FPS. That's a *very* good feeling to be giving me.
I found the first enemy type to be kind of odd, though. I assume they're going to be changed, but the amount of time they spend in their 'huh?' phase seems too long to me.
I’ve been meaning to try Oni, I still haven’t played it. The visual style is definitely similar to what I’m going for so I’m happy to hear it’s working.
Some of them have an “ambush” flag set and they respond much faster because they skip this cautious phase. At the moment the phase goes for a fixed time which does look silly up close. I’m thinking of making it based on a detection meter like the standard ubisoft game style (the meter won’t actually be shown to the player) so that the spotting time is dependent on how far away you are.
That may just be over-complicating it though, reducing the caution time to half a second might work better.
I mean how much stealth do you plan on having in the finished game? Or rather, how viable of a playstyle is it meant to be? If it's not going to be something consistently useful then it seems odd to have it in at all.
Initially I didn’t plan on having any, but in my own playtesting I always catch myself sneaking up to do melee kills and I’ve had other agdgers say they do the same. It is intended to be viable, but there will be ambushes and encounters where the enemies spot you immediately, particularly at close range. Which does mean it will be situational rather than consistently useful. You’ve raised a good point, I’ll have to ruminate on this for a while.
I recorded some clips of playthroughs for the new opening level and the more complete Downtown. I'm liking where this is going. As always, it feels really good.
The level design is on point. I think for the most part they're straightforward. In the second level, I did end up missing the blue key and forgetting where it was again. But I like most touches. It feels pretty cohesive. I could see where I need to go, and objectives or environment changes are hinted at really clearly.
In my video you could see what I tried to do at times, like jumping on the tree canopies.
The breakables were really cool. I definitely wanted to try and smash up all that glass in Downtown, although I was vaguely disappointed that falling glass doesn't hurt you. The broken cacti seemed to be kind of active for a long time, and I could keep kicking them around. Quite nice.
I only found a single secret, and while it doesn't bother me, I wonder if it's something to do with how the secrets are laid out. I broke through the wall under the hotel in the second level. The rest, while I looked around, I wonder if there was much reason to look for them (e.g. underwater in Downtown - I suspect there's a lot there but I didn't want to bother swimming. Maybe pushing the player to try it out might help - even a little).
AI feels and looks pretty good. I felt like the voices for the paramilitary dudes was kind of weird, and funny. They look like professional types, but sound like street toughs. Still, I found the AI in general pretty easy to deal with, and noticed them acting a little stupid. Dumb choices at times, but it was a fun experience overall. The mechs in Downtown got stuck on roof overhangs twice.
Overall, a really good experience. Here are two clips of me playing through. Feel free to check and see from my perspective. Keep it up!
I know, I really wanted to add this but because they’re driven using Bullet itself rather than me tracing them through the level, there’s no straightforward way to detect particular hits. Otherwise I would’ve had this in ages ago. The cactuses do poke you if you run into them though! That one was much simpler to set up.
That one with the broken wall is definitely the most obvious one, I don’t actually know if anyone has found any of the others at all. Many require you to crouch at the peak of a jump or blast-jump with the shotgun alt-fire to reach.
lol, this is intentional for lore reasons. The bad guys are a rogue mercenary unit that took over the island without meeting any resistance. So while they are well equipped, they lack discipline and have their guard down expecting this to be a big milk run.
I need to come up with a way to actually present this in game somehow. After seeing the codec calls in your game I’m considering something similar.
It might not be the best idea but I’m going for a quantity over quality approach with the encounters so I don’t want individual enemies to be super competent when the plan is to build up to fighting 10-20 of them at the same time.
They’re still using the old AI, only the regular goons actually use the navmesh this time around. I should have everybody switched over in time for the next demo day though. The mechs actually get a second, dedicated navmesh for larger enemies just like how Quake had a separate BSP tree for the Shamblers
This is a very well-made game. I like how open-ended the levels are as a principle, and you have found lots of nice ways of adding encounter variety to the maps in natural-looking ways. The low-poly artstyle is smart and seems very much deliberate in giving just enough context that the locales are properly contextualized without making them look awkward when they are designed in a way that may appear a little bit unreal.
My main problem with the game at the moment is that I found the best way to play when I haven't yet memorized the map to be to just prance around and not engage the enemies a whole lot, which is boring. And even though I like how the keycard system just barely helps in punishing that a little bit, it feels like a bit of a crutch with how hard it bottlenecks progression. Maybe there could be some mobility resource that's tied to killing enemies? IDK just ideasguying solutions here
-First time playing the intro level, if I recall right, it was good fun. Especially liked the variety in vertical positioning.
-Playing through casually, the new AI feels a bit more satisfying to clobber. Melee in particular is more varied.
-In canals, I wish that when the advertisements are shot, they would be shorted out. Maybe this is going too far, but maybe they could even make a small shock explosion, kind of like a light weight red barrel.
-I realize that the mecha shots are so wide that I can just stand between the guns and never get shot... intentional? I kind of like, it's funny. Suppose it's worse than just strafing around, especially when other enemies are around.
-Finished playing, it was pretty fun. Looking forward to new levels.
-Oh that's funny. I drowned while I was typing this and it glitched; I didn't get a you're dead screen, but at least I can open the menu and exit that way.
I really want to do this too, but at the moment I can draw all of them at once in a single draw call and splitting them up into destroyable statics will likely require extra optimization. It is on my to-do list but as a “nice to have” rather than a “need to have”.
As I’m aiming for other enemies to be the main source of difficulty I’m thinking I will leave it be. I do have a separate code path that fixes it, but I’ll see how it goes in the later levels.
There’s no timer for the death screen, it will only show up if you left click. I should make it so Escape puts you in the death screen too though, I don’t think it does.
Still great, the new AI stuff seems to work nicely. Big mech is cool as hell. Machinegun could have a less recoil, shotgun could have more. I definitely want to make an add, perhaps not as a commercial for my game, but something funny you can use. Anything in particular that would fit your gameworld?
Also, any possibility of making an add a gif?
Hm, that might be tricky. Maybe not an actual gif as OpenGL doesn’t really support them natively and I’d have to upload the frames on every draw, but flipping through a series of still frames on an atlas would be pretty easy as long as there isn’t too many. That’s pretty much how the monitor heads for the sawblade dudes work and I could add a script to do that on plain world statics too.
They can sometimes lose you a little too easily still, but yeah they can definitely give chase much better than before without diving off cliffs.
I have a dedicated railgun in the works to have as a more reliable sniper weapon, but I want to redo the hud a little bit when I add it so it didn’t make it into this demo day. I’m hesitant to make the Machinegun any more useful as it’s already a pretty good jack of all trades.
It starts to look really silly the way the animation works if I increase it further. However, I’ve been thinking of altering the animation so it kicks up higher and takes a while to recenter. I think that’ll give it that extra bit of oomph.
Sure, I’d appreciate it! Ads you’d find in a tourist trap would be perfect, the kind of stuff you’d see at the air/spaceport in a tropical country/planet like overpriced bottled water. That or dumpy local businesses like expensive hotels, overhyped realtors, “financial advisors”, shady lawyers, dodgy tour guides, private investigators, pawn shops, convenience stores, that sort of thing.
Just note that all the Your Ad Here spots have a little 1px border around them to help with mipmapping artifacts so your actual workable area is 2px less than what’s listed in each dimension.
Is this a real offer or just a placeholder?
Nice progress, the flashlight is nice. The bug about resizing the window still happens.
Both. I intend to slowly replace them all myself but if anybody wants to send me something over discord or post it in the thread then I’ll be happy to include it! Just don’t add scanlines as that’s an overlay layer in Krita, and include “ctes” somewhere in the post in case I have to Ctrl+F for it.
I have been able to reproduce it by trying out the Windows version over proton, but I haven’t looked at fixing it yet. I want to switch my window handling to GLFW for a bunch of other reasons as well so I’ll look into it then, currently in the plan for around DD59 or so.
I like the new Ai, guys running away when I melee them was notable. Flashlight is great too, can see all the textures you made now! Sounds could do with a bit of changing up. Jumping and running sound really loud, especially jarring when I was walking on the sand and it sounded like clunking on metal, could eb turned down a little bit. Apart from that, keep doing what you're doing!
It has some quirks but I think it’s already a big improvement. The new system also has them only doing pathfinding and LOS queries on a tick timer so I should be able to get away with quite a few enemies in the later levels.
I’ve gone and reduced them a tiny bit for next DD. I’m too used to them and so they don’t stand out as much to me. Gunshots I’m also not certain on, I keep thinking I should turn them down too.
LEVEL SELECT, WOOOOO
i still played through the whole thing though.
the only secret i found was the breakable wall in outskirts
i found the AI to be somewhat... dumber? like, sometimes it would get stuck in a container, or below some stairs, or in the corner of a room.
i like a lot the idea of having advertisement pillars all over the town, i can't wait to see the whole thing.
The guys with the SMGs are the only ones using any new AI but admittedly their system is more complex and prone to breakage. They deal particularly badly with anything that isn’t accounted for on the navmesh. I’m also trying this thing where if you’re behind them they will run away for a bit first before they try to shoot you, this includes going up and circle-strafing around them.
That said, all enemies have now had their “psychic” time reduced from 5 seconds to just 1 so they lose track of you much easier than before.
It’s going to need more tuning. The main thing for now is that Goons shouldn’t blindly jump off cliffs anymore.
no the guys getting stuck were the chainsaw ones actually.
Yeah that’s expected, they’re still using the old system and so have zero understanding of their surroundings beyond running at the player in a straight line.
The movement and guns feel really smooth, I feel like that's the most important part for a boomer shooter so that's good. The only issue with movement I spotted was that I couldn't jump while I was next to something (it happened with one of the tables for sure).
Some minor complaints: the jump sound gets annoying if you spam it, I need to have some feedback when I whack the walls with a melee weapon and more projectile enemies please. Would also prefer if the walker had a more interesting attack pattern, it just keeps shooting at you forever, even behind cover sometimes.
Oh yeah, now I see it. It’s specifically when trying to run into a table. I should be able to sort that out at some point.
That sounds a like a nice non-mechanical way to prevent jump spamming, lol
I do need to add visual feedback when striking inert statics that take damage, but against the environment in general I’d have to do a separate trace just for world collision. One more trace isn’t a big deal especially as it’s only the player doing it but this still doesn’t seem that important.
These are in the works
I intend for each enemy to be rather simple with encounters combining more and more of them together as the game progresses. I have at least one variant mech in mind and will be using more of the simultaneously on the later maps.
Not a whole not new in this one. Mostly just the new system for secrets, the flashlight, and the basic goons now have pathfinding and revised behaviors.
If you’re on Linux and it doesn’t launch tell me! I’ve static linked Bullet and built against the Scout runtime container from Steam so it should just work on most distributions.