Hi, friends. This week, we are showing how heights work on Immortal Redneck. It's not that we are making a platformer, but sometimes you'll jump and want to get he high ground to shoot your enemies.
WHY HEIGHTS MATTER
Immortal Redneck has randomly generated floor layouts with rooms that have been designed very intentionally. That's is, the rooms are our creation, but the position and doors assigned to them are random. That means that even if we don't know what room is on the other side of a door, we know that is has an intentional design, that its built with some ideas behind. It's not proceduraly built, but proceduraly placed with others.
We control the design, and that's why we decided to make rooms with different heights: you can move around the ground, but also jump or go up some stairs to get to the second floor of that same room.
We did it because not many FPS roguelites had this kind of structure. It allowed us to experiment with the redneck's moving patterns and made the shooting far more interesting. Going around a room dodging enemies, killing them and using the stairs to go to another floor and get away from the danger is a common thing in our game. Also, player awareness is increased, because some enemies will attack you from above.
WHAT WE HAVE
We have smaller rooms, medium rooms and bigger rooms. Thanks to our
awesome algorithm we can make all kinds of rooms and place them however we feel like. That's why we made it so awesome, because we didn't want to feel contrived by the partially random nature of our game. Look a these room, for example:
The good thing about both layouts is that they work as well when you throw enemies into the equation. Shooting ranged creatures and dodging flying ones that pursue you up and down is great, no matter if the room is 20 or 40 meter tall.
Obviously, this bring up some question. How would the enemies follow the player into a different height? How do flying creatures move around those heights? As you can imagine if you have developed a 3D games, the creatures have a navigation mesh that tells them how they must move around.
Since our enemies wander when they don't see you, they can go up and down as they wish, no matter if they are terrestrial or aerial. Obviously, that is rather strange: they will easily see you when you enter a room. So normally, every creature will go after you: if it's terrestrial, the navmesh help them know which is the shorter path, through stairs or jumping down from a higher place; if they fly, they will charge towards you, no matter if you are in another floor or if they are.
In the end, having two or more heights in Immortal Redneck help make it more complex, in a lot of ways.
If we add the abilities and more specialized enemies, it gets better and better. How about an enemy that shoots grenades from above and makes moving into the ground floor really hard? That's something we have kind of planned and that we have to test, but that's where we are going from here.
It's not just that the rooms look great and the game seems bigger: having this structure makes playing Immortal Redneck a lot better.
SOME MORE GAMEPLAY
And now, a new short video with some gameplay. We have enough stuff into the game to record how we play and show it to you. Remember that this is pre-alpha gameplay and we could change tons of stuff prior to launch.