As of right now, we are in the third week of development for the game projects at DAE, meaning that we're hitting the end of the prototyping phase and entering the production phase very soon. We've already learned quite a bit from our endeavours and as such have been trying to iterate towards prototypes that would resemble more or less what we would like to make during production.

This week, we went further with a few questions:

1. Building levels with hexagons? Is that viable?
2. How to deal with aiming from a top-down perspective?
3. What should make the carrying of UFO parts exciting/suspenseful?
4. Could we have some sort of AI director spawning in more enemies based on certain conditions?
5. What about environmental traps?
6. How do aliens lure guards around?
7. How does our game feel?

Building levels

With a little testing, it turned out that building levels with hexagons wasn't ideal for our plans. We often had to switch around custom snapping grids in Unreal Engine, and overall the snapping of pieces didn't work out exactly like we wanted.

As such, we turned to a simpler straight corners modular solution which will be much easier to snap to the grid and thus easier to make iterations with, meaning we can start playtesting on the "final" map quicker during production while still keeping the same overall style.

Here are some preview images:

Aiming from a top-down perspective

Our players will most likely be using controllers to aim in the (hopefully) rarer instances when things will get heated. Combined with the fact that, due to the distance of the camera to the characters, it might become slightly hard for some players to aim towards enemy guards. Since the weaponry provided to the players will most likely have more or less lengthy cooldowns between shots, we really want players to land their shots. As such, we have devised a little aim assist feature that should help.

You can also get a slight idea of the intended power of the shot in the video above.

Carrying UFO parts

Bringing the objective back to the UFO in order to make it operational will already be a little suspenseful as you will not be able to make use of your weapons to defend yourself, meaning you should rely on other players in your team if things were to go wrong while sneaking around. But despite that, we wanted something more as otherwise the players might be tempted to study the AI for too long and stall the progression of the game, when we want to keep each round fairly short. As such, we will simply be inforcing a global timer that will increase as you complete positive actions and decrease if things go south.

If there's anything we have learned from this prototype though, it would be that we need to be really careful with the balancing of how much initial time you are given, how much extra time can you gain, how hard should players be punished and so on... but more on that later during production.

AI Director and Dynamic Navigation Meshes

We had in mind that, whenever a guard would set chase, there would be a chance of extra guards appearing as their numbers will most likely decrease over the duration of the game, and we want to keep the tension up. As such, it's a little feature we added to our AI prototype:

As you can see in the video, a second guard starts chasing the player when the first one does. Prior to the player being chased, this second guard did not exist. A nice feature Unreal provides as well is dynamic navigation meshes: as the video shows, the guards don't jump down into the pit but will actually go around it as Unreal is capable of re-generating the navigation mesh at runtime.

BONUS:

When initially trying out some ways to spawn a sensible amount of new guards, this happened...

Environmental Traps and Luring guards

Something we want our players to do is to take advantage of abilities such as "screaming" to lure guards towards certain places. As soon as they are exactly where you'd like them to be, you could then spring a trap on them and get rid of them. We added more to the AI prototype so that a player could make a noise that attracts guards, have a look:

How does our game feel?

As we're finishing up the prototyping phase, we wanted to get an overall feel of what would sneaking around with other players feel like. As such, we somewhat combined an upgraded version of our link system prototype (players are now attached to a central entity which we affectionately call "Vacuum Cleaner") with the AI prototype, and made a small test map to run around. The AI had to be re-adapted a little to take the 4 players into account but should function well enough for now. Have a look at an example scenario:

Notice that your detection level is also shown at the top of the screen. This prototype has somewhat cemented our idea in place and we're going into the production phase confident in ourselves. This prototype is also available for download on our page.

Bonus

A prototype we hadn't shown last week was one related to another entirely different game concept we had also thought about along with some other ideas during the brainstorm phase. For this other game, players would use cranes to collect parts in order to build a spaceship, although they would be fighting each other. They would have been able to use dangerous items arriving on the conveyor belt to force other players out of their cranes.

However, even while brainstorming we were already thinking that it might not be too exciting to use the crane and thought about swapping roles... this would mean that players would like one role better, and dread having to return to the crane. Our Alien Invasion idea seemed much better in comparison, which is why we ended up being in favour of it.

The Future

Next week, we start the production phase. As such, we will be starting from our most essential features and going towards our minimal set of gameplay features in order to have something to playtest already. From there, we can make more informed decisions on how to balance things for example. We're doing our best to make the best game we can possibly make so stay tuned for more.