Dev Blog #44 - Exclusive Demo Level, New Enemy Type and more (Patreon)

Good day backers!

First blog post of 2023! Let me start by wishing all of you a very happy New Year and hope you had a lovely Christmas holiday! I'm feeling so lucky in 2023 so far that I am, once again, going to post this blog post without any editing / corrections made from the team. Please sound off in the comments how terrible the spelling in this blog post is and how I should never do this without approval from the team ever again.

For Selaco, a large focus for the year 2022 was promotion and advertising. The game itself progressed steadily as it went on, but a fair bit of time was spent hitting deadlines and ensuring we had something to show and play.  We shared a preview build with influencers, we launched a patreon demo followed by a public demo, we listened to feedback for both demos and aimed to fix all of it and worked really hard to get the game known to an audience. I think we succeeded. With your help, we’ve been able to gather up to 125.000 demo downloads and almost 130.000 Wishlists. These are fantastic numbers for a studio our size, but we’re not there yet! Wishlists don't mean anything if we do not stick the landing, so the year 2023 will be all about the game itself. Add content, make it larger, expand upon the roster, the combat sandbox, the story, its lore and much more. Now it’s finally time to turn Selaco into an actual cohesive game rather than a bunch of separate scenes with non-demo enemies that bug out if you look at them wrong.

We expect developer blogs this year to be full of new stuff and in-depth discussions about new and finalized systems. We’re looking forward to it and hope you will stick around with us. Regardless of how long you are planning to support us, we thank you, greatly. And we will not let you down.

Lets jump into some of the things we’ve been working on:

New weapon (Sort of) - Dual SMG

Whenever we show the SMG on Twitter, our discord or anywhere really, the question about whether or not players can dual wield it becomes a rather common occurrence. Surely, we should be able to dual wield it, right? What would a John Woo inspired shooter be without one?

Let's talk about how it works first. We wanted it to look like an actual dual wield rather than having a duplicate sprite that is mirrored (albeit with the supporting hand removed). A pet peeve that I have with a lot of games is that sprites or models are very obviously mirrored. For a perfectly symmetric weapon, this is not always a problem, but you may spot that even little things on the weapon, like a handle that is supposed to be on the left side, is suddenly also on the right side. We did not want to do this, so added a second SMG to the scene and reanimated the entire weapon except with the second weapon in mind. Surprisingly, this ended up not taking nearly as long as I had thought! I think roughly 2 work days were spent implementing and animating this. The balancing aspect will take a lot longer, however.

When acquiring your first SMG, you will have access to a generic ‘Zoom’ alt-fire, similarly to the UC-36 Assault Rifle. Press the Alt Fire button to zoom which reduces spread. Useful, but nothing too exciting since players already have the UC-36 for precision shots. This is an intentional misdirect. Players not familiar with the game may pick it up and think this is it, but only a few minutes later, a player who pays attention may spot an Alt Fire Modification item that allows them to Dual Wield the SMG. Suddenly, a weapon that was already fun to shoot became even more fun! The player is now able to press the right mouse button to switch between single and dual wielding at any given time.

The ability to Dual Wield was not originally the plan. To be quite honest with you, I do not enjoy dual wielding in a lot of video games. Or rather, I enjoy the feedback it gives me as a player, but the way they are balanced out never works for me. Most games that do it, make it so powerful that there’s no reason not to dual wield since you would otherwise miss out on the DPS (Damage Per Second) potential of a dual wield. Or add certain awkward player limits by disallowing the ability to melee or throw grenades. We wanted to allow the player to still do everything they otherwise could, but also wanted to encourage players to not exclusively use the dual wield mode. And man, this was hard. We're still wrapping our head around it but we do have an idea on what direction to take.

Trigger warning for the gun nuts who are about to read this: The SMG shares its ammo with the UC-36 (Assault Rifle)! I know, heresy, that’s not how it’s supposed to work but it makes a lot of sense from a game design standpoint. The ammo being shared gives us an interesting balancing opportunity.

We knew we wanted an SMG relatively early on, and designed it around the idea that it's an inefficient bullet hose. Great at dealing damage, but a good amount of ammo will be sacrificed. With the UC-36 Assault Rifle being the most versatile weapon in your arsenal, this can be risky since you want to be able to use it. Every bullet for the UC-36 Assault Rifle hits a little harder, but does so at a slower rate. The SMG is the other way around. It kills things quicker than many other weapons and allows for run and gunning, but will eat bullets like it’s nothing.

Now imagine a dual-wield. You get double the damage but also double the ammo drain. The ammo efficiency takes even more of a hit since the spread is a lot higher which requires you to get even closer, risking taking extra damage at the expense of less wasted ammo. Thankfully, Machine Gun Ammo is plentiful in Selaco but you have to make sure to not spend everything with your dual SMG unless you are very sure that this is the right course of action (or in some cases, be fully aware that it's a bad idea but do it anyway because it brought you fun)

I think this concept of balancing works, but we will have to do a lot of number tweaking to ensure things make sense and work well. We haven’t gotten to that yet, but we will!

Watch Dual Wielding in action here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYQBLJacZ1I&ab_channel=Selaco

New enemy: Saw Drone (name pending)

Little robotic saw drones that are relatively straightforward. They have a saw and they want to cut you with that saw! Relatively easy to kill, but often traverse in small packs and move around a fair bit. If you have a fast weapon like a nail gun or SMG, these are easily dispatched. Slower weapons work, but you better not miss!

Currently working on the AI of this thing while Lloyd is working on the model to use as a sprite reference. I expect the 3D model to be ready when the next blog post hits!

Level 4 Starlight status

Remember the hub-like level we talked about a while ago? It’s almost done! I did a full playtest yesterday and it ended up taking 90 minutes to beat. Long, but so much fun. The 4 areas that are connected to Starlight are a blast to play (and a visual treat!) that these 90 minutes flew by. Still a few things left but these are largely for the hub area level of Starlight. Every area you beat gets you an unlock that you can acquire in the hub, then, players are expected to spend some time in the Safe Room to prepare for the next area. When Level 4 is done, we move onto the streets. Which is going to give us a whole new set of challenges. It puts my mind at ease to know that just the 4th level is roughly the same length as a good amount of Early Access titles out there right now. I’m confident the launch of Selaco’s first chapter is going to provide a lengthy run that most players will not beat in one sitting especially when exploring and experimenting.

Speaking of streets, Arturo is working on some concept art for the street levels! Can’t wait to share those with you.

For now, have some screenshots of Level 

New voxels

As is tradition, there are once again new voxels to show. We’re currently working on a functional Jukebox, but cannot show that one yet. What I can show, however…

Random props:

Interactive bio-analyzer:

Sandbag deformation (fully destroyed version is in the works):

A wire spool (please ignore the placeholder text):

And few more voxels have been made that I would love to show here, but perhaps some other time!

Other stuff:

We’re completely redoing GZDoom’s save/load menu and how autosaves are handled in the back-end. This is largely a prototype since we're still working on this!

Also some tweaks to the typography and style of the menu

Minor character tweak

Dawn is a little angrier than usual.

Exclusive Demo Level

As mentioned last year, we’re going to launch an extended demo for backers later this year where one additional level can be played; The Backrooms. We have no real date yet, as we want to focus on the full game for the time being. Best I can do is ‘’This year’’ for now!

This extended demo includes the SMG (dual wield included), Upgrade System, Crawler Mine enemies and a couple of other surprises. This is the level we used to preview the game to a select number of people, albeit upgraded!

Conclusion

I’m incredibly stoked for what’s to come in 2023. This year will be difficult, maybe even more so than last year, but now that we no longer have public deadlines after every corner, we can fully sink our teeth into this and make sure everything is snappy and fun to play without constant pressure. The release date we have internally is still standing, because I do find it crucial to have targets, but that’s far less demanding than a public one.

Thank you for taking this journey with us. See you in two weeks when we launch the next blog post!

Wesley de Waart