Development Blog - Nailgun, Accessibility options, Roomba AI and more! (Patreon)

I had a wonderful blog post written yesterday. As I was nearing competition, Chrome decided it would have been the perfect time to crash on me and erase everything that I had written. No draft saved either. Apologies for the delay with the development blog. 

Allow me to share what we have been working on this week!

Nailgun

I've wanted to work on this weapon for a long, long time! When making a F.E.A.R. inspired shooter, there is one weapon you cannot simply cannot leave behind. The nailgun has been on the to-do list since the day I began this project and we finally started working on it. Unlike most other weapons in Selaco, this is a projectile-based weapon capable of pinning enemy sprites against the wall which will, obviously, feature multiple different death animations! Concept art has been created and a 3D artist is about to start turning into a full 3D model.  Once we have something to share, I'll post it here on Patreon right away!

Enemy VO Improvements

I finally gave myself some time to completely rework the way enemy VO works. Currently, they have a tendency to talk over each other and portray themselves as a bunch of amateurs. Now, they patiently wait for each other to finish before they speak, unless something of high priority happens (A player who starts playing aggressive, or a nearby hand grenade). I also wrote subtitles for each and every voice line to display them to the player during combat. As usual, these are option and can be turned off. On top of that, 3 new enemy types are now fully voiced!

Accessibility

During playtesting, a few playtesters picked up on some potential issues that need to be addressed regarding the accessibility of the game, mainly in the visual department. Selaco relies heavily on color-coded icons to guide players to items, flickering lights to add atmosphere and screenshake to add some additional 'oompf' to the guns and certain scripted events; All of which could become problems to people with color-blindness or photosensitive epilepsy. I've done some research and started looking into ways to fix it. Colorblind options and the ability to reduce bright muzzle flashes / light flicker will be added in the future. For now though, options to disable (weapon)screenshake, camera sway and dynamic FOV have been added into the game.

Roomba AI

In the past, Roomba's just kind of drove around being nothing but background scenery. At best they would jump with heart eyes when Dawn got close to them, but other than that, they did nothing. A few days ago I finally got the improving the Roomba's and gave them some proper AI. Now, they actively search for trash to get rid of. If you ever drink a can of Arachnacola, expect a Roomba to eventually stop by to clean it up for you. See the video below!

https://imgur.com/a/jJOa4Hw 

General polish

Now that we are finally on Steam, sending out test versions have never been easier. We have been actively doing playtesting sessions with a group of people and the feedback has been amazing. However, there is still a lot of work to do. As usual with 'early versions', there's a fair of issues and 'rough edges' that need to be ironed out. This week has seen a lot of that. If you are in our Discord server, take a look at #github-commits to see the things we have working on!

There are also a lot of things done that are not really worth mentioning in blog posts. New audio effects, textures and music are all still in full production! Maybe next week I can share a snippet of a new track that Lawrence is currently working on!

Again, thank you all so much for funding this project and sticking with us!

- Wesley de Waart