The antagonist has arrived! In RUNTIME you’re hunted from the skies by an automated drone. Spend too much time in its spotlight and it will disable your robot and end your run.
For anyone who remembers runner from last year, you will recall the HUNTER. It chased you through the sub-basements of a corporate tower. The HELI this year has a number of advantages: it can fly anywhere, move almost as fast as you, and move diagonally. But it has a problem: it doesn’t know where you are. If any enemies manage to get a “lock” on you, they give HELI your location to come lock you down.
The CAMS are stationary but plentiful. Try to avoid their watchful eye!
When a BOOMER picks up your scent, it runs at you and explodes, leaving behind impassable terrain and usually causing a crash.
TURRETs are stationary but have a variety of munitions to ruin your day: EMP clouds (above), caltrop zones, oil slicks, and smoke screens.
The bottom right corner now hosts a mini-map that shows an abstract view of the city (incidentally, re-using my city generator models as a UI) with fog of war and indicators for the player, the HELI, and (soon) objective locations.
Overall – highly productive day. I should have swapped my day 2 and day 3 work. Getting enemies (especially the HELI antagonist) built feels really important for having something playable. I can start to feel the game now. I don’t know if it’s good but there’s something in there.
Next Up
To really close out the core gameplay loop, I need objectives. I think this is going to be special vehicles that wander the city that you need … bump? … to steal their cargo. Let’s say 3 objectives per level, you gotta get them all, and then make it to an exit point on the edge of the map. This should be relatively straightforward. The main thing I don’t have a plan for is the “steal” action. I guess bumping is the main verb at the moment, so we’ll just do that.
Then I will switch to movement tuning. The movement has to feel SO smooth and it’s far from that point. I want to add an energy system to limit turbo usage, fix some input buffering issues, fix the “drift” marks, make braking actually work (or remove it), and tune some bits of the low-speed logic. This is all vibes. Not normal roguelike work, but I’m enjoying these really micro input considerations.