The Titan Seed

Roughed in a couple more sections of the map today. Though these are only rough outlines, it’s interesting how much mood can be created in that state, and hopefully some sense of how these sections will feel to play. I’m sure I’ll need to tweak these layouts as I play-test — I worry that some of these sections might be obnoxiously large to play through in practice — but I’m liking the general vibe of these zones so far. Tomorrow I’ll probably go back and add some details to the sections I’ve sketched before I attempt to build it out much further.

My other concern, I suppose, is whether these environments will work well for the types of challenges and navigations I want the players to have to deal with. To a certain degree that type of design is going to have to happen much later, though, and I’ll just have to hope I don’t paint myself into too difficult of a corner along the way. I’ve already painted myself into some slightly tricky ones and found my way out, though, so I’m sure it will work out.

Focused on building out more of the world map yesterday and today. Got most of the hospital section of the map planned out in broad strokes, will probably work on the cathedral section tomorrow. Definitely feeling like I made this map Too Damn Big, but quite pleased with how it’s all fitting together.

Prodding at music and programming work. I don’t have a ton of focus right now but I’m slowly untangling some tricky bits. Hopefully focus and momentum will follow.

Worked on some music stuff today to try to get back into the swing of things (again). Feels like I end up spending an awful lot of time trying to get back into the swing of things… Anyway, made some tweaks and improvements I’ve been considering for a while to some old tracks, started sketching out elements of a new one.

One of the ideas I had at… some point, was that rather than making a bunch of completely different enemies, it would be interesting to have some of the basic enemies evolve over the course of the game (while still, naturally, introducing other new ones along the way). I realized a lot of ideas that came up for enemies were some basic variation on “guy who wanders around”, so the basic zombie-type enemy can be upgraded with new abilities as the game progresses — from slightly better intelligence and decision-making, to being able to navigate some simple obstacles, to being capable of aggressive pursuit, and maybe more. These abilities are probably going to be more of a slow trickle than a deluge. The first couple that come out will probably be subtle enough the player will be uncertain if the behavior actually changed or if they just misremembered. But as the game progresses and these behaviors get more extreme, certain early-game areas might become significantly more difficult — and maybe a little scarier.

Anyway, to do all that I’ll need additional animations, so today I made those. Odds are good that at some point I’ll need more, but it’s enough to get on with now.

Fixed some long-standing room transition issues and added a special effect to add glare to reflective surfaces

Forgot to update yesterday and didn’t get any game work done for the rest of the week. Made some solid progress today and yesterday though, fixing issues with slope collisions and wall-jump/ledge-hang mechanics. Realizing that the diagonal screen transitions suggested by sloped surfaces are… a little finicky.

Not a week for huge progress, but I’ve been getting 2-3 hours of game work in for the last few days, which I can hopefully keep going and build on next week. Got the knife and pipe weapons working again in the new weapon system — these were also a test case for the concept of mixed attack types, where certain weapons might behave differently based on the position and directional input of the player. In this case, the pipe acts as a standard swinging weapon in most cases, but has an overhead two-handed strike when the player presses down, while the knife is mostly a swinging weapon but has a slightly longer ranged thrust if the player presses forward.

Those were what I worked on yesterday and the day before. Today I fixed a couple of issues with dynamic pushable/breakable blocks and added the ability to join them to one another. Joined blocks fall together and can’t be pushed until a single block is broken off, so these will work to simulate large breakable objects like brick walls and fallen beams of wood.

Spent the last month and a half or so moving to a different state and taking care of many of the tasks that come with that. Barely got any game work done in the intervening time, but finally got a decent work session in today where I rebuilt the pipe weapon to work in the new weapon system.