Dev Blog #55 - Shooting Range, Ladders and more (Patreon)

Happy Friday everyone!

Last week we launched a test build of the Extended Demo to our Admiral backers and I can proudly say that the test went really well. Couple of issues were found, but most of those have already been fixed at this point and time, and more are on the way.

This means that the Extended Demo for all backers might be available a little earlier than we originally anticipated (hooray!). My target is the last week of August. So stay tuned!

For now, let's discuss some new additions and improvements.

Ladders

Yay, we have added proper ladders to the Doom Engine!

If you’ve played a number of Doom Mods before, I’m sure you’ve seen a number of solutions towards the lack of ladders in Doom. Mappers either make very thin sectors to give the illusion that you are climbing something, or assign an action script that causes the player to propel themselves upward when touching a wall / line. All very suitable (and, honestly, charming) solutions.

However, with Selaco being a standalone game, we kind of felt like we owe it upon ourselves to do something better. So instead, we wrote a proper ladder system where the player can latch onto a ladder, and press Up or Down to change directions.

But there’s more!

Ever played an FPS where you could not climb down ladders? Of course you have, that’s the majority of them! Half Life and Doom 3 are good examples as they are both guilty of this, where climbing down ladders would require finger yoga to pull off, but even then it often felt like a coin toss. We didn’t want that, so we came up with 2 solutions which are both used.

Solution #1:

The Use Prompt. This is the obvious one. Selaco’s push for interactivity meant that we had to add interaction prompts to the game. Incorporating the ‘Use system’ for ladders is very easy to pull off as a result. You get near a ladder when standing on top, press use, and Dawn latches right onto it. Easy! Add a little texture on top so players are always aware of a ladder.

Solution #2:

Walking backwards. Originally we were skeptical about this solution, but figured we should still give it a go. Standing above a ladder, then moving backwards when your back faces the ladder, will automatically attach yourself to the ladder. It feels natural in a way, since most of us would do the same thing when climbing a ladder in the real world.

Selaco is a fast-paced game that still aims for things to be grounded, so while climbing, you will not be able to fire any 2-handed weapons. The only weapon available to you is your Roaring Cricket (Magnum). Climbing down is faster because Dawn is an action hero and slides her way down to the floor. Some fun sound design was used for this!

Modders will have an easy time adding ladders too, since it’s essentially just an Actor object you place in front of the ladder, facing it. Once the level is loaded, the actor will be able to read the length of the ladder accordingly which the player actor can ‘read’ before engaging in a climbing mode. A wonderful little hack that works beautifully.

Designing it took some doing though, there are a lot of little hurdles you have to overcome when designing such a thing. Do we allow strafing? What happens to the weapon? What if the player Slide Jumps against the ladder? How do we handle downward movement? What if the player jumps? There’s a lot, but it worked out really well and based on Extended Demo testing, it felt organic.

Shooting Range

Shooting ranges are nothing new in first person shooters, and we are no exception. However, since Selaco has upgradable weapons, we felt like this was essential as players would love to test these type of things.

The Shooting Range can be accessed from any Safe Room in Selaco by simply taking an elevator. Once you arrive, a nearby console can be interacted with to set up a bunch of rules for your Shooting Range session.

Mockup. This image is not in-game

Once your session is set up, the shooting begins. Detailed stats will be displayed on the top-left corner of the screen. Including bullet damage, DPS and the amount of headshots. Game Modes include Endless, Time Attack and DPS Measurement Mode (1 dummy that cannot be killed)

Unlike the other screenshot, this is actually in-game

This is useful information, because there is a Weapon Upgrade station right next to you. If you want to see the difference between your newly acquired toys, the shooting range is the perfect solution to that. It’s also useful to us, the developers, because it means we can easily perform balance checks in terms of raw damage potential and accuracy.

While in the Shooting Range, players will have infinite ammo reserves. So you can shoot to your heart's content without worrying about losing ammo.

And you know what? It’s actually surprisingly fun to just mindlessly shoot things from time to time.

VAC-BOT Mines

Here is a man being obliterated by a VAC-BOT armed with a landmine. Very usual first person shooter stuff. Moving on.

The light not following along with the VAC-BOT is being fixed later

Other tweaks and improvements

Playback Device option

We’ve added the option to adjust the playback device the game should use. In case you have headphones plugged in and want the game audio to play through the speakers, or because sound is somehow coming out of your microphone instead of your headphones.

Invasion Tier Menu

As most have noticed in the demo, enemies become increasingly more lethal as you progress (thankfully, so is the player), granting access to new abilities and combat maneuvers. We never had a proper way of displaying those, but now we finally got it done.

The menu is intact, but the contents still have to be filled.

Ambient Audio Culling

Phew, this was a surprising one.

Selaco relies on a ton of world audio. If you wander around a level, all kinds of machinery and roomtones will be playing around the player. When we did some debugging, we noticed that all 256 audio channels in the game were always being utilized, even when the room the player was in had no audio to speak of.

As it turns out, GZDoom is always actively playing every single ambient sound in the game world, regardless or whether they are in reach or not. How silly of us to assume that would be the case!

We made an engine tweak to address this. If you’ve ever noticed audio getting cut-off in the Pre-Demo, or things feeling a bit more noisy than needed, it’s likely because the audio channels were completely clogged at all times.

Fixed now!

Particle Freezing

This is primarily used for debugging, but results in some very spectacular imagery. We can now freeze time, and Smoke and Particles effects will fully respect that rule. Of course, players can do it too through a cheat code! Fun to do after an explosion.

Conclusion

Next step: Launch the Extended Demo for all backers. Stay tuned for more information on that. Thank you all for supporting us in the month of July. We hope to see you in August as well. <3

Wesley de Waart