Health overhaul v9
The problem is, matches still end far too quickly. For some reason I thought of the regenerating health mechanic in many modern shooters, and how people complain that it encourages you to cower behind walls for a few seconds instead of running into the action. That behavior is exactly what I need in this game!
I took out the kludgy shield-and-stun mechanic and replaced it with a single special health point that regenerates after 8 seconds. It works well enough that I'm fairly confident it will exist in the final game in some form.
Another problem Ian pointed out was a lack of variation between early-game and late-game play. I addressed this issue with a band-aid patch for now by separating the abilities into two tiers: cheap, defensive, early-game abilities and more expensive, dangerous, late-game abilities.
New maps
Ian has been working hard on new maps. Check it:
I think they're pretty nifty.
Teleporter redux
I brought back the teleporter as one of the tier one abilities. It works a bit different now; it almost instantly teleports you to the farthest friendly control point. Useful for escaping dangerous situations. If you spawn minions, they can also make use of your teleporters.
Radial dead zone
Drew Van Camp commented in my stream, posting a link to a great article about thumbstick dead zones. I was previously using a square dead zone, but no more! Gamepad controls feel even better now.
Story overhaul v10
The story is the only thing that's been through more revisions than the health system. I started looking for a new story when I threw out the parkour elements. When I say "new story", I only mean a different way of communicating the same idea that has been constant since almost the very beginning. As I've mentioned before, Story v10™ returns to the roots of the 2014 7DFPS prototype, which brings us to...
Overworld
The story now unfolds mainly in the overworld. The story is closely tied to the overworld interface, so I decided to flesh it out and reassure myself that I can make it do everything the story needs.
I thought about the interface for about a week and came up with a three tab system:
When a tab is "minimized", it will show a compact summary of its contents, and a notification will flash if something needs your attention.
The overworld will be a separate lightweight management game. You'll be capturing zones, managing resources, etc. You'll be able to deploy a drone to automatically capture zones, but when an opponent intervenes, you'll have to decide whether to risk more energy and manually pilot the drone, or chalk it up to a loss and sacrifice the drone.
The zones are simple shapes built out of triangles, and though you can't see it in the gif above because there are no buildings, the zones recolor all the geometry inside them. I do this by modeling the zones as volumes, like this:
Everything inside the volume will change color with the zone. I use some simple depth sorting and culling flags to pull this off without a stencil buffer.
The zones generate energy over time. Bigger zones generate more energy, and there's a bonus for capturing multiple zones in a chain.
AI
Despite all these new features, most of my time has actually been spent improving the AI. It now handles force fields correctly and can even snipe sometimes. It mostly works, but there's still a lot to do. Once I have a decent baseline implementation, I'll move on to creating multiple AI personalities.