Dev Blog #39 - Big Box update, New level and more. (Patreon)

Hey all!

For the past 2 weeks we've spent a lot of time improving core game mechanics and doing level design stuff. The demo feedback we've received gave us tons of things to work with and we've continued to address all the things that have been mentioned on both our Discord and Steam forums. We've been fixing bugs, improving performance, prototyping new enemy types and so on. Not everything warrants an interesting story for a blog post, but there's still plenty of stuff we want to mention! Lets start with... *drum roll*... Big box!

Big Box

I know I brought this up a while ago and suddenly went silent on the whole thing, apologies for that! But there's good news on this front. I have a meeting with someone very special to discuss this in detail, really soon. Unfortunately, I have to be vague with the details for the time being. Once I'm allowed to share more, I will! And Patreon will get the scoop.

Level design

We are currently working on the 4th level of the game, called Starlight. I've explained the premise of this level before, but for those who are new, I'd like to explain it again!

Starlight is an unusual level in a sense that it's the only hub-like level in Selaco. You start the level is a gigantic lobby with a rather ominous elevator in the middle of it. Upon closer inspection, the elevator requires 4 different keys in order to become operable. It is your task to find those 4 keys and go down the elevator.

There are 4 paths you can take in this lobby, each path leading you to a separate level

Starlight Green - Offices (SE_04B)

Starlight Red - Manufacturing (SE_04C)

Starlight Blue - Research (SE_04D

Starlight Purple - Warehouse. (SE_04E)

You are asked to enter one of these levels, locate the key, and retrieve it to the elevator.

After a level is beaten, the other unfinished level get a difficulty tweak. For example, beating Starlight Green will add additional Enforcers to the other levels. Or completing Manufacturing adds additional Crawler Mines. There's constant escalation here.

When you have successfully inserted a key into the elevator, a door in the basement opens. The basement grants you a random unlock. Most likely a brand new alt fire for one of your weapons.

The other thing that makes is unusual is the complete lack of Gwyn Machines and Safe Rooms within the levels themselves. Everything is done through the hub, and once you enter a level, that's it. There is no way back until the level has been completed. This makes preparation more important, especially when playing on Hardcore Mode where you are expected to beat every level without a single death. If you scavenge the levels well enough, you will find plenty of resources to help you for the next one.

We're excited for this one! It's a little game-y compared to the rest of the game, but after 3 (or 4, we might still add a level in-between) levels full of mayhem, explosions and hectic battles, we feel like a level like this brings a much needed change of pace to the game.

Oh and, another unusual thing? Nothing here is destroyed.

Here are some screenshots of what ReformedJoe (our newest addition to the team) and I have been working on:

Enemy Prototype: Gunner

(Very WIP)

The gunner is a variant of the Rifleman family, except more of a pain to be dealing with. Comes equipped with a minigun and has the ability to spawn a weapon-mounted shield whenever he attacks. This shield can be destroyed with enough bullets, but it's better to wait for him to stack attacking or, even better, flank him. A well placed shotgun shot can collapse his shield, but this shot will not damage the shooter right away. We're currently testing the waters with him, but will share more when the time comes!

Glass Destruction system

We've completely reworked our glass destruction system!

When Hexen launched back in 1995, it introduced a new feature to the Doom Engine where glass windows could be destroyed. For the standards at the time, this looked convincing enough, but for something like Selaco this never quite worked. 

Around the time Selaco was still called Ominous, I replaced this system with one of my own. Unfortunately at that time, the powerful language called Zscript was relatively niche at the time and not something I was familiar with, so I wrote it using ACS (A script system that exists on the level layer). This is not a powerful tool since it doesn't give you a whole lot of information to work with, but I tried to work with what I have.

The result is a window shatter system that looks convincing, but not quite accurate. At this time, the level designer selects the window texture that needs to be destructible, assigns our ACS script to it, then adds an actor at the center of the window pane, then instruct that actor spawn a bunch of glass shards when the window gets hit by a projectile attack. This comes with a handful of issues. The most important ones:

- Time consuming. It takes roughly 30-40 seconds of work to destroy one single window pane. Might not sound like much, but every level has hundreds of destructible windows in it, so we had to find a solution to the problem to ease the workload.

- Accuracy. We do not know how long the window is, so it's quite hard to make the amount of visible shards seem accurate and realistic.

With our improved knowledge in Zscript, we have fully rewritten this system to be smarter. Not only does the particle effects utilize our newest particle system, making it perform faster while also looking ever so slightly better, we now take a look at the height and width of the glass pane and spawn the particles accordingly.

On top of all that goodness, I have completely reworked the sound design of shattered glass. We all agree that it greatly elevated the glass shooting experience especially when using a surround system. The effect is longer where individual pieces of glass can be heard hitting the floor from time to time, as well in additional bouncing sounds for the glass particles themselves. You can hear it for yourself once we update the demo with of the improved bells & whistles.

DMR

The voxel pickup of the DMR weapon is ready! If you want to see the high resolution sprite work of the weapon, read our previous blog post where we shared more of the weapon!

Interactive Laptop

A fun little prop we've been working on! We are giving it a fully animated bootscreen which we could unfortunately not finish in time for this blog post, grrr! We have also doubled the screen resolution since the making of this gif since it felt a little too low. But hey, now you have something new to look forward to when the game launches. A fully animated Post and OS bootup screen that have been teased at you in Blog Post 39!

Interpolated Zooming

During the demo, players frequently brought up a choppy zooming animation. Basically, GZDoom only updates the FOV with every game tick, so it can only update 35 times per second. When playing on a higher framerate, this produces quite a noticeable lag effect, making it look like the game runs at a lower framerate than it really is. I think most Doom / GZDoom players have grown numb to this, but many others felt this was jarring. 

We've tweaked the engine to interpolate this effect! See the example below.

EDIT: After posting the gifs below, I noticed the effect is barely noticeable because of GIF / Patreon frame rate limits. I've uploaded the mp4's to IMGUR where they can be seen at 60fps: https://imgur.com/a/57htp6j It's one of those effects that is more noticeable when you actually play the game!

(Current demo version: No interpolation)

(Upcoming demo version: Interpolated)

Gravity Manipulation

The Plasma Rifle comes equipped with a Gravity Manipulation device. We've discussed this in an earlier blog post, but we finally got around to giving it a proper detail and animation pass.

You can pick up most of the objects in the game and turn it into a weapon. We're genuinely excited to see what kind of unintended uses players will get out of this. It's a great gun made even better with an alt-fire that started out as a joke, but worked so well that we decided to just roll with it. Whether we add some fun puzzles with this thing remains to be seen, but we do want to incorporate this tool into our level design somehow.

Conclusion

We are still working hard on updating the demo and do not have an ETA yet, but I do hope that these frequent Patreon Blogs assure you that we are still hard at work! We're still improving Multi-threaded Asset Loading a little further and then we move on to Gamepad support. I already have a rather crude implementation of controller Aim Assist ready go, but it still needs a lot of work in order to be of proper quality. GZDoom's current gamepad implementation is janky at best and requires far too much fiddling around before it can be used properly, which is not what we want. A gamepad should be plug & play after all!

I'm very excited for this updated demo though! It addresses a lot of the complaints we've received and it's a massive step up compared to the current build.

Thanks everyone for your continued supports! <3 See you in two weeks.