dev log 06 - making moves

moving fast

Another two weeks done and dusted!

Things sort of flew past faster than I had expected - but things got done, and progress has been made.

a new routine

Last time, I mentioned trying to keep a regular schedule with these posts.

To help with that, I've decided to keep a hack-n-plan board to organise my ideas better.

It's not going to be anything crazy, since I don't want to spend all my time managing the board, but it certainly made sure I didn't wander too far off the path.

Here's a little snippet of what that looks like - I can create tasks, give them descriptions, and assign them different statuses. Very handy!

cleanup

Using the new planning board, I mapped out all the major tasks I would need to get the project into a state where it could be playtested to some degree.

This involved a quick test with a friend to catch any major issues that I can't spot whilst testing multiplayer locally.

Fortunately, only a few bugs came from that test - the game itself seems fairly stable.

new moves

Next I wanted to make sure that the player's movement felt a bit more complete - there wasn't any way to crouch, so I wanted to fix that.

Lucky for me, I was able to adapt my weapon state-machine for the player's movement.

From there, I was quickly able to convert the player's existing locomotion to the new state-machine, and then add new states for crouching, sliding, and wall-jumping.

I'll still need to perform some additional testing to make sure this all works as intended, but for now it seems pretty stable.

presentation

If I want to test these game elements, I need to make sure that the players can actually tell what the weapons are doing.

Previously, a lot of the weapons wouldn't play sounds, or attach to the player's hands, or indicate anything that they were doing - not good.

I spent the rest of the first week adding the bare minimum vfx and audio to make it clear what each weapon was doing.

levels

Another thing I need for the playtest are maps! Up until now, I've only had the one tiny test stage.

If I want to change this, I was going to need to determine how I want to construct my levels.

Long term - I would like a level editor for my game - if I use my own level editor it should force me to make it as flexible as possible.

For now, I wanted to find an easy way to construct some levels - to do that I found this tool.

It's pretty cool! Reminds me a lot of the Hammer Editor for source engine game

Unfortunately, it's quite buggy and is way too complex for a level editor - I had issues where surfaces would randomly stop being solid, or would turn invisible.

Still, I made a few test maps before it broke completely.

I have something more involved planned as a replacement, but I'll leave that for the next dev log.

Now I'm off to try and wrangle some of my friends to test the game.

Ciao!