Game dev, Suit’em up – New polish features

We have recently had our second playtesting session, the pre-beta one. We got a lot of great feedback to work with. The one thing I think we need to add desperately at this point is player feedback. Another thing that needed to be added, which came up during the playtesting was that playtesters thought that it was boring running long distances across the world.

I’ve been working hard on the second point, the “boring long distances” these past few days and I’m happy with the result. We have added two features to prevent this, destructible objects and checkpoints.

Destructibles ingame (the flies follow the avatar):

Checkpoints ingame:

The graphics for all new things above (you should see the animations!) are made by our excellent graphic student Måns Löf, a talented man in everything he does. He is working on graphics and audio for the game.

The destructible objects are a two-part feature, there are the actual objects, the eggs and there are also flies that come out of the eggs. The eggs are stored in a std::vector as base class Object*:s. Their locations are loaded from a text file and they are “destroyed” with one hit from a player projectile. When they are “destroyed” the egg breaking animation is played and flies are spawned. If the egg is outside the screen for 10 seconds they are renewed.

The flies are a type of EnemyObject alongside all other current enemies. They have no attack damage and a custom AI called “Chase”. When they are inside of the player aggro-radius they are calm and if they have had a direction they travel around the avatar in semi-random directions with a low speed. If the player tries runs away from the flies their movement speed is increased and they run kind of toward the player. What i mean with “kind of” is that they move towards the player with a random offset so that they seem more like flies in a flock. There is no flocking behavior implemented and it’s not needed for our feature, this behavior is actually really nice as it is if I may say so myself. If you get a chance to try our game i suggest that you gather a fly army. Try not to kill them all, they think of you as their mother. That’s why they follow you around. :(

Onward, to the next feature! The checkpoints. They were made really simple, as stationary objects placed on certain locations in the world. Then the avatar collides with them, the avatar spawn location is moved to the checkpoint and the checkpoint plays an activation animation.

I also made “speech” bubbles of two types. Timed ones and area-based ones. They are attached to other objects with an offset and follows their parent object around until they are removed. When approaching the first hidden rooms, one of these bubbles appear over the avatar. That’s an area-based one. When exiting the area, it is removed.

Timed bubbles appear over certain enemies heads when they are aggroed. There exists graphics for the bubbles but I only use placeholders right now.

The speech bubbles look like this ingame:

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading!