It's that time again! Here is your regular sprint round up of development! Read on to find out what we have been up to in the last few weeks and if you are one of our backers on the FIRST ACCESS level, what you can expect to see in the latest build update!
Content (Level Design and Art)
- Created new Character LUTs amd some character variations (as seen above!).
- Cleaned up on the geometry of the IRL hacker and activist characters.
- Setup new system for door prefabs
- Wow this was a big one, but one we have had our sights on a while - the doors and door frames all now conform to sane dimensions and make use of the new nested prefab system in Unity meaning doors and their variations are infinitely easier to create.
- Lots of work on an early level and tutorialisation of rooting your phone and glasses, and the hacking tools you have to install and learn at the beginning of the game.
- Some more scripting of interactions with a more neutral NPC than the fairly intolerant guards you meet in other levels.
Gameplay and Mechanics
- New mechanics for data view trace time & app use and costs. Hopefully this will sort out some of the pitfalls of the old trace time system and instead turns that into a proper game mechanic. Plus the changes give us a way to upgrade player abilities throughout the game while keeping things balanced. We'll test this a bit in action and will then tell you more details.
- This also came with some visual prototyping with Josh Ge's ASCII art and animation editor REXpaint (as you may recognise from his game Cogmind) to try and get an ASCII art / homebrew software feel, we are still playing with this, but it's a nice start:
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| Prototyping visuals with Josh Ge's REXpaint |
- Added support for using physical inventory items (and the Lua API for scripting what the items do).
- This helps evolve the game's "adventure game" like elements
- This allows for finding and using items which can be scripted now to do pretty much anything. We have yet to add a "combine items" button, but watch this space. Mini crafting system here we come! :0
"Its kind of like an adventure game that is then set within this 3d stealth game - which gives you more fail states than 'well I'm too stupid to figure out this puzzle'.
You can listen here around the 1hour 30min mark.
Modding and Lua API additions
- The above point to do with physical item inventory comes under Lua API too of course.
- Not much on it on the wiki yet here but this shows some of the basic usage.
- New scene hierarchy in the Template scene in generated when you create a new mod LevelKit to give a guide to help keep your mod scenes tidy and
Other
- Fixed NPC prefabs to have the correct navmesh area tags so that NPCs would use stairs again!
- Lots and lots of small stuff about doors. How their logic is set up, how the player and NPC's unlock them, and making sure they open away from the character instead of hitting you in face etc...
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| Testing doors! |
If you haven’t already - be sure to wishlist Off Grid on Steam - each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!