Sound/visuals/gameplay balance

After my last experiences with being almost burnt out from dealing with audio-only stuff, I decided to balance the time spent on different activities. I did create some new sounds though, and completely redone the weapon shooting sounds as well. There are still quite a lot of sounds waiting to be handled though. This will be a long process...

Still, I won't be sharing any audio with you just yet. I will focus on gifs as they are more amusing.

Anyways, I also tweaked some animations. Here is the ranger taking his adrenaline shot:

Now that I am thinking of it, injecting stuff in your neck might not be a good idea... ;) But I can always say that such way of injecting medicaments is completely fine in the game world. If it seems funny, just explain it with the game lore, right?

I have also spent some time on the fun/gameplay mechanics aspect. It seems that recently I was focusing too much on the audio part and forgot that the game needs also to be fun to play. I have redone the demo level three times. I made sure that it is more horizontal than vertical (horizontal gameplay looks better in widescreen aspect ratios); I've also restructured the places which contain the searchable loot so that the player needs to take more risk to reach them.

Evac points

Now, the evac points will get their own section here. Until now I was placing them at the edge of the level. Player needed to reach that point anyway, so placing it at the end made sense.

Old approach: evac point is right next to map edge. Also, the ranger is picking some stuff up.

However, moving the potential positions of evac points deeper into the level made the gameplay more interesting as it introduced some extra risk/reward stuff: player is now able toperform an evac as soon as they reach the point, or try to move further into the level to grab more stuff. Then they'd have to backtrack to the evac point, but - due to enemy reinforcements appearing constantly - this seems like a good backtracking practice.

New approach: evac point is placed in a middle of the street.  Also, note that I've added blue background to the exit area which helped it stand out.

I had more ideas on how to make the evac point even more interesting. Player might be requesting evac on any place on a map (therefore the evac point would be created dynamically); such evac point would be then appearing only after a couple of turns (as the airship needs to reach the destination), and would only be active for a couple of turns as well (as the airship would have to leave, to avoid being shot down).

What is more, calling evac would be draining airship's fuel - meaning that the player would think twice before performing such action.

Anyways, this will not be a part of the demo. As I mentioned some time ago I want to avoid feature creep; I am now focusing only to finish the demo, which itself is pretty time-consuming.

What's next?

Well, I'd like to have the rat sounds done! I am planning to record them myself ;) so we'll see how it will work.

I might be also adding graphics for another enemy chararacter as Kurt (the freelance artist I am working with) is nearly done with it.

Thanks for reading!

As usual, if you'd like to receive more frequent updates about the development and a heads-up about release of the demo, follow me on Twitter at @bryquTheDev.

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See you next week!