We finally made it – a complete game loop! This week was another big batch of technical additions and improvements.
Programming
Bug Fixes
There were a ton of miscellaneous bugs and issues that have been fixed – the parasite jump motion and physics has been made a lot more reliable, and network issues with duplicate objects have finally been ironed out.
Win Conditions
We added a universal game-end state that is activated when all local and global conditions are fulfilled for the current human player. The UI doesn’t exist yet but now we know the system works and can start iterating on interesting tasks.
Basic Tasks – Richard
Designing the tasks for the human player to accomplish while running around the spaceship is key to making sure the player has goals they want to accomplish while they’re in the hot seat – and doing them should give the other players time to potentially hijack the player.
I spent sometime making up some basic wall panels to test that the conditions work for the human player (pardon the lighting): – After making sure that works, I moved on to more design work – the goal is for these games to be instantiable, so they have to be able to dropped into a level and work out of the box. Furthermore, – they should be simple enough that the only necessary RPC’s should be task failure/completion – if the player gets hijacked, they should be interrupted on the spot and the game/task gracefully close – they should varied enough to not get tedious. The current goal is to have a mix of more mundane tasks that might just involve standing in one spot (something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRCoQgUNTxk) survivor gameplay but for nowhere near as long), and others might be more involved, such as the minigames in Among Us or the lockpicking from the Elder Scolls games. Implementing a game inside of a game presents an interesting challenge to tackle in terms of managing game states inside of another game, but hopefully as long as we keep the games simple it shouldn’t be difficult to implement. I’m making headway into a simple DNA matching game where the player is presented with a short DNA sequence and is told to pick the right match out of 3 options right now to lay the foundation for more games in the future.
Level Components
The level components have been fully integrated into the prefab system – now all we need to do to make the level look nicer is replace the meshes on these components.
Parasite Jump UI
We have a line renderer component in the works which generates an arc which shows the player their exact trajectory they would follow with a jump in a specific direction and specific power.
Sound
Being able to properly iterate on sound has been difficult so far since the fundamental game loop has still been coming together, so this is something that will expand a lot more once we pass alpha and start much more vigorously play testing.
But in the meantime – here’s some cool background music Ian has put together
Art
We’ve integrated the latest parasite model into the game – its quite fun to see it bounce around after the jump – I’m personally really looking forward to getting a proper jumping/falling animation in for it.
