Status Update 004: Open World Tech, Story Mission 001, Milestone Adjustments (Patreon)

Enough development has happened that I thought it was time for another status update! We've been hard at work designing and implementing the mechanics that Manhattan depends on to become an open world hub for missions and activities.

I. Why One Hubworld: First, I wanted to communicate a design change: Instead of having the story take place in multiple, smaller portions of cities, MA will now take place in one huge, varied city: Manhattan. Even the real-world Manhattan has a lot of spatially and visually distinct areas, so I don't think variety will be an issue. Cutting down the loading time from city to city makes the game a little more immersive, too. Areas of the city will be unlocked throughout the progression of the game, so hopefully that mitigates the risk of running out of places to explore too early in the game. This change mostly comes as a reaction to current production speed and funding, as making 3 cities is vastly more expensive than making one really good one. However, if Manhattan gets finished ahead of schedule and we find out it's valuable to have another hubworld, there's a good chance we'll add another one or two. 'Dungeons' that exist outside of the primary Manhattan area will exist as well, which will look and play more like the one-off missions in games like Devil May Cry. These will help with making sure the pacing of the game is good as well. Changing the design to one open hubworld also has rippling consequences, which will be expressed in later points in this post.

II. Hubworld Function: Manhattan is important because it houses a lot of the player progression related actors, and acts as a hub for a lot of open world missions. After fiddling with the Manhattan prototype a week ago, I realized more mission selection should be handled by interacting with something within the city, instead of through a menu. Ideally, this makes the game more immersive since you're in direct control of the character while doing it instead of selecting "MISSION: [name]" through a menu. It simplifies the code too.A neutral consequence of this is that the base no longer serves as the primary mission hub, but I think it's still important for:

• a change of pace from the layout and visual design of the hubworld area of Manhattan
• handling certain intimacy events and quests
• showing player progression.
• being a pure non-combat zone (ties into pacing)
• Crafting

III. Mission Zones

A part of the original design of MA involved having Zones that you can liberate that may come under alien attack. Originally, these zones were all going to be individual levels that are loaded in at the start of each mission, but with some open world missions being streamed in now, that design had to change. Mission Zones are now areas within Manhattan. Once liberated, the frequency at which they come under attack will be tweaked and balanced as well so they're not annoying / frustrating to deal with. The current function of Mission Zones is to provide:

• Unlockable spawn zones for Manhattan, which are unlocked by liberating the zone, similar to Farcry 4's bases and radio towers. This means that you lose a place to spawn if it falls.
• Automatically provides resources and benefits over time Certain zones, once liberated, might provide global effects to all bases, like giving all of them more HP.
• A place to buy recovery items and sell items collected in the world
• Receiving some quests and reporting them once complete
• A way of showing player progression through upgrades (design TBD)
• Crafting

The current design for handling base invasions is to give each base Health. If they come under attack, you'll get a ping and the icon in the map becomes red and flashes to indicate it's under attack. If you return to the base and fight off the invading aliens, the alert is called off. If you don't, there's a chance the base defenses will lose a bit of health. If a base loses all its health, it falls and becomes a hostile zone again.By design, controlling more bases will make them harder to defend and manage. This negative feedback loop will be paired with the positive feedback loop of gaining more resources as the bases automatically provide resources over time. As each base provides slightly different benefits, choosing whether to take over a base should be a strategic decision.

IV. Current high priority tasks, milestone adjustments: To get the open world accessible to players, Story Mission 001 needs to be in a playable state, as it unlocks the first spawn zone in the map and provides onboarding for new players.

The previous milestone document prioritized the Base HQ milestone before the Manhattan milestone, but since Manhattan has taken priority, that means the Base HQ milestone has been moved down and the Manhattan milestone has been moved up. You can see the updated milestones here.

In addition,

Milestone 001 is done:
The next Bleeding build will be available after MIS_ST_001 is playable. MIS_ST_001 might take a little while to become playable, so please hang on a bit!  

MIS_ST_001 dependencies:

• Environment art for ny_pier
• Enemy 003
• "World Map" code and UI
• Story for MIS_ST_001

*Note that Ignite / Berserk mode will be included in a later milestone since it is intended to be unlocked later in story progression; this mode will expand Amelia's moveset.

*Feedback Response: Shooting while moving is moved to a later milestone since the core game is playable without it (but will greatly benefit from it).  Juggling and air combat is viable in the latest development build.