Level concepts

One of the things we worked on in this month was designing new awesome level concepts. We had our designer come up with a number of different concepts and from there we boiled it down to the four best. Right now we are working on implementing and play-testing these four level concepts.

Our designer took inspiration from existing levels where one level is very much symmetric and others have more diversity. This is visible in the form that level 4 is very symmetric where level 8 is absolutely not. Level 3 was designed based on the thought that the tower in the middle could provide some intense firefight and chases for the intel or extraction points. Another level was designed based upon the idea to take away some of the freedom from the player and limit what the player can do.

These are the four concepts, we are implementing:

Trigger issues

Actually the newest gameplay video should have been recorded and released a couple of weeks ago at the start of the month. However, when we sat down and began recording we found this weird bug, where players could shoot for each other and as a result we couldn't record the needed gameplay. Player1 was shooting for Player1 and Player3 at the same time, meanwhile Player3 couldn’t shoot. We used a lot of time and energy trying to understand and fix the problem. Initially we thought the problem was on our end mixing up statements in the code.

However, after support from the studio behind InControl, we found out it was a known bug in the Unity engine. And so we fixed the bug by enabling native input in the InControl settings, meaning we bypass Unity’s input.

If anyone out there wants to implement controller support, I can highly recommend bypassing Unity’s system and use InControl or another asset out there.

As a side note, for anyone interested it seems like Unity are redesigning the whole input system.

Slow collision

Just last week we found out we had a problem with projectiles moving too quickly for a collision to occur, especially rpg projectiles, causing rpg projectiles to hit players through platforms.

In order to solve this problem we added ray-casting to the collision detection logic. With ray-casting we can draw a line ahead of the projectile, and check if there should be a collision. Since ray-casting is rather fast in Unity, it will hit any object in its path before the actual projectile.

Gameplay trailer

We have been working on a new game-play trailer, and wanted to get some non-biased opinions about it. Please do be honest, and give some constructive criticism for the purpose of making better videos in the future.

Original post: https://nervedamagegames.com/blog/devlog-7-level-concepts/