We are now in the first week of the second (and final) phase of production! This means we eventually will have to wrap up all the functionality during this sprint as the next one is the polish sprint, during which we are only allowed to improve upon the final set of features, which is why it's important for us to nail everything down as soon as possible. Have a look at this week's progress:

Introduction

After some time spent on playtesting our own prototype together, we have come to the conclusion that trying to spread out our set of mechanics into many small ones wasn't necessarily what we wanted, especially when the power source was just begging to be used for example to smash into guards. As such, that's exactly what we did this week gameplay wise while also going further with the stealth aspect by applying numerous changes you can read more about below.

As the lockdown situation hasn't cleared yet and probably will not for quite a while, we have continued working online without being able to meet up in person, which admittedly might be taking its toll on the project but we hope you would enjoy this devlog nonetheless.

Art & Design

This week we tackled the more technical side of the lookdev part mostly, so not that much new eyecandy. We mostly focused on unwrapping the existing props so we can get a proper light bake and pushing the existing models a bit further as well.  Here are some examples of the latter:

Level

This week, we made the decision to switch our overall mood and lighting to a sunset theme. This will make the level much more readable as it is much easier to see the players and the guards, while the level isn't too bright either. This decision also makes our lives a little easier as properly lighting a night scene would take an immense amount of time, and some detail would still be lost... which is why we are much happier with this new theme. Here are some screenshots!

Took some time to give each mesh a proper custom collision, which results in the map finally being fully accessible and playable! The players can now use the stairs and rooftops to navigate through the level/collect parts.

Main Menu

Here's a mockup of our main menu! It isn't available yet in the current build but we will make it ready as soon as possible!

Programming

As we re-defined quite a portion of the gameplay style this week, we had to spend a lot of time re-balancing existing systems by tweaking properties we had set up, re-working our code to allow new features we now deemed necessary while still continuing to work on what we initially had planned. Thankfully, we didn't encounter too many issues but it's been quite a heavy week. Have a look:

HUD

Obviously, our game needs a HUD. As such, we have been working on implementing it and having it coupled with our different game states such as being detected, collecting UFO parts and so on... Here's what it looks like right now:

It is also built with the consideration that there might be less than 4 players.

When a positive or negative action occurs, the concerned elements light up in an appropriate colour (see both top corners):

If the player manages to trigger the escape event after having collected all parts, this animation will play out:

If the players lose, they will be met with the following:

In addition to the previous animations, the screen will slightly blink red when players are being chased by guards.

Gamemode & Gamestate

To allow elements such as the HUD to function correctly, we made adjustments to these two classes by adding some fairly self-explanatory delegates:

Any number of elements can then "subscribe" to these delegates and perform actions based on these events. The HUD is our prime example right now as it makes use of all of these.

In addition to the above, we have spent quite a bit of time playtesting and trying to rebalance different parts of the game which these 2 classes touched. Here are some of the changes:

• Increased max initial time to 480 seconds
• Reduced the amount of UFO parts to collect down to 4
• Increased the amount of extra time given for collecting UFO parts to 120 seconds

Power Source

Our main goal gameplay wise is to really push the power source to the forefront of the scene. As such, we have reworked most of this entity as it now also, for example, completely replaces the weaponry players were provided with previously. We decided to pull the different radii of the power source closer together first, while increasing the healing radius (green) too. Beyond the red radius, players will automatically slightly pull the power source while, between the blue and green radius, they are neither healed or pulling.

The next step was to replace the pull with a charged fling, much like how you would previously charge up your blaster but this time with the power source itself.

To give it more punch, the power source will wildly spin up while charging and cast a powerful light, and only the charging player's cable is highlighted for clarity. Also, the player actually charging up the power source has their controller rumble for added effect.

Once a player releases the charge button or waits long enough, the power source is flinged and goes into cooldown, a state in which it cannot be flinged and will cast a bright red light.

To make sure players wouldn't have to fiddle to extremely unreasonable degrees to get the power source to ever hit something, we simply re-used the auto-aim functionality we already had before and re-implemented it for the power source itself.

Guards and UFO parts are now both valid auto-aim targets, as you can see in this video:

You might have already noticed but we also took care of enhancing the "oomph" when the power source collides into something. Simply put, we added some basic camera shake on collision:

Additionally, you can now fling the power source into guards and use that as a weapon! Not to mention you have a "bowling" effect in the sense that, if you line up your flings correctly, you can take down several guards at the same time. Depending on how strong the hit was, the guards will ragdoll with more or less power:

Finally, the power source now homes in on downed players in order to avoid having situations in which players would try to pull the power source back and forth, continually fail and have their teammates perish due to that.

Needless to say, quite a few properties have been tweaked, especially concerning forces, to get the desired effect. We also had to add a fair amount of new ones... To give you an idea of what everything looks like right now:

A very small tweak we added as well was how the hover reacts to the surface beneath it. Here's a picture to give you an idea:

The previous behaviour is illustrated by the red arrow while the new behaviour is represented by the blue arrow. What would happen before is that the power source would slowly slide down when hovering over an angled floor, as the hovering force was based on the surface normal. To fix that behaviour, we now simply use the up vector as repulsion which makes the power source hover in place just like before even on slopes.

Weaponry Component

Despite the fact we didn't want aliens to possess weapons anymore, we quickly revisited this component to add a certain property to all weapons:

We have modified weapons to also have a random weighted hit percentage chance, meaning that each weapon may now fail to hit anything at occasions. A hit percentage of 50% would mean that, out of a 100 shots, about 50 will hit. (let's not get too much into probability)

Players

Overall, the main change to our player characters this week was to immensely slow them down. Their previous speed was extremely counter-productive to the stealth element we're trying to cultivate so their maximum speed has been cut down by more than half.

As discussed before, the power source now entirely replaces the weapon that aliens previously used. The players are essentially unarmed bar the power source itself, which we will is a big change for the better.

The status of each player in relation to the power source (whether they are being healed or such) is also shown through a faint light placed at their feet now:

Red is the outer limit, yellow is the middle area and green is the inner area, in which players are also continuously healed.

Guards and AI

As we slowed down the overall pace of the game, guards have had their maximum movement speed reduced by quite a large amount too. We came to some values which we thought might work for now (keep in mind the chase speed was previously over 800):

Some changes we applied to the AI were the following:

• Keeps better track of seen targets which are trying to escape but are still "known" by the AI
• Can now hear when aliens are being revived by using the power source
• Will get alert when the power source hits them without killing them (it could cloak as an explanation for why they don't see it)
• Power source will not block view anymore, at all
• The game can keep track of whether guards are chasing the aliens or only roaming (alert phase vs calm, used for HUD for example)
• Reduced the amount of time a guard will chase a target
• Some minor enhancements to make the AI behave better

Miscellaneous

• Our game will eventually contain a vast array of sound effects to ground both environment and actions in the world better. As such, we have set up some sound classes and a main sound mix, which will greatly help us if we set up volume sliders. Some other functionality like an equaliser is also provided.

• In addition to the above, we made a base sound attenuation profile which provides 3D sound by simply using the spatialisation features of Unreal sounds.

• Even though we have little animations actually ready to be used in the engine, we have set up some animation blueprints and blendspaces to start off with. For example, here's a basic state in which it feeds direction and speed to a blendspace to return the pose.

• Since the pace of the game has been slowed down quite a bit, we pulled the camera in a little to emphasise that further.
• Bug fixes

Conclusion

That's all concerning the progress for this week! As stated before, our main goal now is to make all the features we definitely want in as soon as possible and see what should get onto the chopping block. Additionally, the stealth experience will still be refined as we work on it more and more. Some things we will definitely look into in the future too are: sound effects, more visual feedback, animations, refining the level itself, more game menus and the likes...

A build of what we have right now is available right here for you to try out! The controls are now a bit more streamlined as the shoot action was removed, here's the current set:

• To move around: Left Stick or WASD
• To look around: Right Stick or Mouse
• To fling the power source into aimed direction (hold up to 3-4 secs to increase the pulling force to max): Right Bumper or Middle Mouse

See you next time!