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[Ripityom]

I finished the first prototype for player melee. I couldn't find an animation that I liked, so for now it's only a swing effect.
Currently it has no cooldown, however it speeds up time briefly similarly to shooting.
It also makes no sound so if you are lucky like I've been in the first room of the video below you can clear a whole room without shooting a single bullet.
I feel this combined with the dashing can result in pretty cool moments and interesting gameplay (see the second half of the video for example).

[Ripityom]

I finally did the long overdue redesign of the damage system in way that you can specify damage types. This enabled me to make the turrets destroyable by explosions but not by regular bullets. By default you can do it by shooting the rocket mid-air with your bullet just after the turret shot it. To make this possible I added a circular indicator on top of the turret that shows it's cooldown progress, I hope I can find a better indication in the future.
Also I replaced the character models.

[Ripityom]

I added a new enemy: a sphere shaped drone that chases the player on sight (has 360 radius vision) and explodes if gets close, so it is a good idea to shoot it before that happens:

[Ripityom]

Last week I've been at a game dev conference and one of the talks I attended was about how to create and evaluate prototypes. The main point that really stuck for me was that it is very harmful to create any visuals during prototype phase (as until your design is finalised) not just because you spend time and effort but because it will make it harder to evaluate your prototype. Also you can trick yourself into changing something in the design for the sake of visuals (this exactly happened to me: I decided how long a melee attack should take based on the length of the animation I found on Mixamo).

So long story short: I stripped most of the visuals and set the camera to orthographic, and now the game plays much better!





I'm not throwing away the visual I was going for earlier, but I will definitely stick to this simplistic look until the game design is settled.

[Ripityom]

I started prototyping the abilities, and I'm already done with two of them: the first one swaps the player position with an enemy and the second one spawns a wall that can bee seen and walked through, however bullets and other projectiles are stopped.
In the future I plan these abilities to be consumable or prevent from being spammed in some other way.

[Ripityom]

Yesterday I made the ammo and abilities to have limited accessibility, both can be restocked from pickups (the question mark gives the player a random ability). While the low amount of pickups makes the game too hard and due to the few types of enemies and abilities the gameplay becomes repetitive after a while now I could get a feeling about the code gameplay loop and now it is actually fun to play the game

[Ripityom]

Created new ability: Reverter

It is similar to the regular Wall ability, but instead of absorbing it reflects projectiles

[Ripityom]

I added a new enemy and new ability: a soldier variant who carries a shield with them that blocks all frontal damage, and a grenade ability that rolls a grenade to the cursors position that detonates after 3 seconds.
I also made a couple of tweaks and fixes, like spawned walls disappear after a couple of seconds, swapper ability can be cast on drones as well, etc.

[Ripityom]

It's been a while since my last update, so let me sum up how development is going:

• In order to iterate on mechanics faster I made a static level with one single "room" with walls on two sides and cliffs on the other two.
• I'm experimenting with different level structures. Currently the combat revolves around fighting waves of enemies in a signle room endlessly. The level also have two holed that you can pull enemies into (more abilities to come that pushes enemies around). I really liked the exploration aspect of the old room-based level layout, so probably that will come back later in some form, probably with rooms that you cannot leave until you are done with all enemy waves in it
• Also changed the way abilities work: now you have two slots and if you use an ability you get a random one as a replacement. This almost card game-like feature is supposed to force the player to use different skills, but I feel it adds too much randomness that the player have no control over.
• I added back the old visuals to focus on making the core combat as fun as possible before adding progression and other mechanics

This is how it looks now: