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Sentry guns have been added to the game. They behave similar to cameras, in that they'll rotate around as they search for targets, only if these spot you, they'll shoot. Like the camera, they ignore enemies, which players can use to their advantage. They'll also hold their fire if an enemy is between them and their target, so as not to harm them.

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With the security systems in place, I'm wanting them to not just be a hindrance to players, but a potential tool for them, as well. My next line of updates will be working towards accomplishing this, granting access to the various systems and more, in order to manipulate them.

At the moment, I'm planning on three tiers of access, which players earn by picking up items, currently represented by disks. In the actual game, these items will be separated throughout the level, in progressively harder to reach locations, but it will add more options to how levels can be played.

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Level 1 security access now allows players to activate/deactivate security systems at any time. Once you have access, you can click on any device while paused, which will bring up the option to toggle the device's power. While deactivated, the device will stop functioning entirely, and its typically green indicator light will change to black.

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Level 2 security access lets players enable/disable security system safeties, which causes devices to treat enemy units as if they were players. For devices that cause harm, this means that they will also harm enemies.

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Level 3 security access is now in place, which allows players to toggle lights on and off. This might not be as exciting as turning a sentry gun on an enemy, but due to the sheer reach of this ability, I felt it should be the highest level. Because this allows you to control all lights, this means that at any time, you can turn a light off from anywhere, and since enemies will typically react to this and move to turn the light back on, this can also be used as a distraction so that they'll temporarily move away from their current location.

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My next set of goals revolves around getting some mission mechanics in place. With how the levels are planned, every level will be mission-based, in which you go in tasked with a specific goal, and once it is done, you will then need to escape by leaving the building and going to the level's border.

This example shows the basics of how things will work, showing the new mission display at the top of the screen, how mission targets will have a unique highlight color in order to stand out from other things, and an actual mission complete screen. These are the basics that I'm starting with, and going to gradually add more mission types, some post-mission feedback, and just making general improvements, both behind the scenes and visually, in order to get everything working together.

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I've added a new type of mission, this time where your objective is to kill a specific target. Like before, once that is done, you then escape. Other notable additions in this update includes a timer that will keep track of how long you've spent on a level, as well as some much needed work on the pause and menu mechanics.

As a first step towards providing some post-mission feedback about how/what the player did in the level, the mission complete screen now also shows how long the mission took to complete. I'm hoping to expand this into a sort of rating/reward system, once everything is in place.

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I've added a new type of objective, this time tasking the player with kidnapping the target by knocking them out and carrying them away. The target must be brought out alive, so if they die, then the mission is automatically failed. Other additions in this update include tracking the player's kill count, which is now shown in the mission complete screen, as well as adding a restart and exit button to the menu itself.

Note: As you can see in this example, although knockouts are effectively the same as a kill, the knockouts are considered non-lethal, and are not included in the kill count. Because missions will vary in terms of whether or not a target must specifically live or die, there will be levels where the player will not technically be able to reach a 100% mercy/kill rating. However, I intend on making these forced situations eventually not count, despite it showing as 3/4 kills in this example. What this means is that if you're going a pacifist route, then even if you're required to kill the target, you'll still achieve 100% mercy if you left everyone else alive. Similarly, if you're going a kill-everything route, you'll still reach 100% kills, even if the mission requires you to bring the target in alive, as long as you've killed every other enemy in the level.

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There is now a mission failure screen, which comes up when the player dies or fails at their objective.

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I've finally sorted out the menu system by adding a new general menu. This gives access to all previously shown menus, such as player upgrades and the various game options. It also adds buttons to resume the game, restart or quit the level, and go back to previous menus, which makes everything easy to navigate. I've also made it to where the level itself becomes darker while the game is paused, in order to help shift focus over to the menus.

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The post-mission feedback now provides much more information than before. Now that this information is tracked, it opens up the possibility for some type of reward system later on, such as using time to judge a speedrun, sightings to judge a stealth run, or kills to judge a violent/passive run.

Time: How long it took to finish the level.
Enemies: How many enemies were in the level.
Sightings: How many times the player was sighted by an enemy.
Knockouts: How many enemies were knocked out.
Kills: How many enemies were killed.
Shots: How many shots were fired by the player.
Criticals: How many headshots the player landed on enemies.
Accuracy: How many bullets made contact with an enemy.

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With this update, I introduce a long-needed main menu. Up until now, the game was strictly level-based, where it instantly loaded into whatever level it was assigned to load, with no way of switching or leaving levels within the game. Now, though, it has the basic functionality that one would expect of a game!

All in all, there isn't really all that much that is new to it, since it mainly offers the same options that have been shown before, but with the addition of a level select menu and the ability to quit missions in order to return to the main menu. Most of the work was behind the scene stuff, just making it possible for things to work outside of an actual level.

Note: The loading time between the mission select and the start of the mission has been trimmed down in order to save a few seconds of watching nothing happen.

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As you may know, Valve announced that Greenlight will be closing within the upcoming months, and is to be replaced with a more direct pay-to-enter sort of system. This is a somewhat bitter-sweet announcement, because on one hand, Greenlight was very flawed in practice. It was a great idea, and I feel it would have worked wonderfully under different circumstances, but as it was handled, the lack of curation left it open to abuse and allowed even the worst of games to overcrowd Steam. On the other hand, though, I understood Greenlight; my plans revolved around using Greenlight, and so with this new system still being something of a mystery, it does make me uneasy by not knowing much about it.

I think what bothers me most isn't the worry about getting onto Steam, actually, because regardless of what system they use, it is something that will eventually happen. I don't think that the change to pay-per-submission is unreasonable, as I personally believe that there does need to be a higher barrier of entry. The one-time fee made it too easy for shovel-ware, and so until the actual fee is known, I'm not opposed to the idea. What bothers me, though, is that the new system seems to just have you launch onto Steam, with no community build-up. For all of its flaws, Greenlight did help good games obtain attention and a following before an official launch, customers who might have otherwise missed the games. That's what bothers me most, because there's a big difference between launching to a pre-existing following, and launching out of nowhere, as an unknown game. It's hard enough gaining traction, even before losing a major discoverability source like the Greenlight community, so losing that is very unfortunate.

This puts me in an unexpected situation of either launching a Greenlight campaign very soon, much sooner than originally planned, or waiting it out and seeing how this Direct system plays out. At the moment, I'm honestly not sure which would be the right action. The game itself is functionally solid, so in a perfect world where it can be judged solely on gameplay, I'm confident that even in it's unfinished, ugly state, it presents a certain standard of quality, but I can't ignore the fact that the graphics simply aren't on par with that functionality, and how it looks would make a very big difference in how it would be perceived.

For now, I continue on as normal and try to figure out how to best approach this.

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This update introduces a scoring system to post-mission feedback, which is based on a 0-3 scale. In order to properly show how it works, this example consists of two runs at the level, both resulting in different scores. The scores themselves are based around various general play-styles.

Time: How fast you beat the level. Speedrunning.
Stealth: How many times you were directly spotted by an enemy. Sneaking.
Kills: How many enemies died. Aggressive.
Mercy: How many enemies were left alive. Passive.

The score for the current run will be shown as green, and if you have a higher score from a previous run, it will show that as gray, in order to give some comparison to your current and best scores. For example, in the second run, the player got a kill score of 0, but had gotten a score of 2 in the previous run.

I wanted to go with this sort of system in particular, because it provides more level replayability than something like a one size fits all type of general score, since completionists can come back to levels and try to max out all categories, playing the level in a different way than they probably did before. The next step with this is to implement some type of leveling system and link it to the upgrade system, making this play a part in how you would earn upgrade points.

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Levels and weapons are now set to be unlockable as players progress through the game. When a level is completed for the first time, the next one unlocks. Similarly, individual weapons will unlock after finishing specific levels, which then allows players to select that weapon to start levels with.

This example starts at the level select screen, as if playing the game for the first time. The only option is to play level 1. Once the first level is done, the mission complete screen shows that the handgun has been unlocked, which is then available to be selected back at the level select screen, as well as level 2. Level 2 follows the same pattern by unlocking the suppressed handgun and level 3.

Ultimately, the weapon unlocks will be spaced apart throughout level progression, but because there are more weapons than there are levels, currently, there's no room for any gaps.

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The scoring system is now linked to the upgrade system, finally providing a way to obtain upgrade points in order to improve your character's stats.

The way it currently works is that since there are 4 scoring categories, each with 3 tiers, every mission provides a maximum possible score of 12. For every 5 (to be adjusted later) score points that you earn throughout the game, you will earn 1 upgrade point. This means that the better you score in specific categories, the faster you get points as you progress through the game.

I felt that this method helps provide level replayability, without the sort of grind that usually comes with a more typical experience system, since it helps incentive players to go back and try to earn better scores in different categories, most likely by playing the level in a different way than they played before, as it is impossible to completely max out both the mercy and kill scores in the same run.

One issue with this sort of method, though, which may be a pro to some but a con to others, is that since it rewards points based on score, it may be a hindrance to players that have trouble achieving good scores. In such a case, because weapon unlocks are still based purely on level completion, players are still rewarded for their progression through the game, regardless of overall scores. As they unlock different guns, they can then go back to earlier levels with potentially stronger guns to help achieve a better score.

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For about a month now, I've been specifically focusing on bringing the game together by adding the necessities that most games absolutely need... like a main menu and actual goals. With the most recent update, I'm finally able to say that I've achieved this. Although there's still much to add, improve upon, and even just plain rewrite, I've reached a point where there isn't all that much else left on my primary to-do list, the must-have features that aren't already in the game, even if only to a basic, buggy degree.

At this point, I believe that it is time to finally shift my focus over to the visual side of things, in order to get this looking like something that wasn't just thrown together in a day. This in itself will be a whole new challenge, and I'm not delusional about that, so I expect to be stumbling around for some time, with amateurish results, but any attempt will be better than what I'm currently working with. Just to be clear, though, this isn't to say that I'm not doing any more on the programming side of things in the meantime, just that anything I do will most likely revolve around the visuals in some way.

Although this shift has been building up for awhile, with the original goal being to get the game ready for Greenlight, the announcement of Greenlight's upcoming closure has sort of messed with those plans. I had thought about going for it as-is, but I would really rather wait until the game is in a slightly more presentable state, despite the risk of missing Greenlight entirely. Regardless, this visual work is simply what needs to be done in order to move forward at this point, so I'm just going to continue on and see how things go.

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I've taken this week to experiment, add more wall colors, create better floor tiles, and, most importantly, improve how the flooring itself is generated.

Before now, floor tiles were strictly generated from 16x16 images and placed in 16x16 tiles throughout each room. This filled the room well enough, but didn't allow for much variety in terms of patterns or subtle differences; it simply created the same image over and over again. Now, though, the floor generator can work with any size image, which allows for much more complex patterns. It can also use subsets of the same pattern, which is the same image, but with slight differences. This is best seen in the grass, where the majority of it is a solid green color, but with grass blades placed throughout the area.

On the plus side, with this done, I'm the only thing in my way, rather than before, when I had to contend with both my own lack of ability, as well as technical limitations. Unfortunately, I still suck at art; one week isn't going to fix that. Baby steps.

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This update brings improved muzzle flash and a tweak to how windows and other short walls are perceived.

With the new muzzle flash, not only is it much more noticeable than the old version, but there are now four types, with each gun using the flash that best suits it. They range from the smallest, as seen with the handgun, to a full-on blast, as seen with the shotgun.

For windows and other short walls, the wall coloring now goes all the way through, unlike with normal walls, where there is a gap. They also appear darker, in order to help give a sense of depth. The reason for these changes is to have a way for players to be able to distinguish between a completely solid wall and a short wall, so as to be able to know which walls will not block things like bullets, sounds, and vision.

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When I first introduced the rain effect, it only actually covered the player's view, in order to save on processing. Because of this limitation, I had to disable it any time the camera was put into unlocked mode, since the rain would cut off if you move the camera around, leaving the rest of the level dry. Unfortunately, this meant getting rid of my favorite part of the effect.

Now, though, I've reworked the system in order to cover the entire level, without adding any extra processing cost. This allows the rain to remain visible while the camera is unlocked, which lets the camera move around the rain as it is paused. This is an absolutely trivial update, but I like the pseudo-3D effect that it provides as it adjusts to the camera's movements, which really brings a sense of depth to the rain.