Like a see-saw…

Some more balancing today, switching between weapon balancing/testing and experimenting with some gameplay mechanics… I know they should be locked down by now, but I can’t help myself…

First change in the gameplay is that shields no longer have a fail rate… It was just looking weird, and I can achieve the same actual result by tweaking the shield energy… The fail rate meant that sometimes the player would be shooting at an enemy (or vice-versa) and some shots would get through the shield… This seems fun, but in practical terms it breaks the predictability and the standard convention, which means players keep wondering what’s happening… You could kill enemies before you depleted the shield, and that’s confusing! That worked before when the player didn’t have any visual feedback on the health of the enemies, but with the current system, it seems weird…

Another change was the way I handle target prediction… Higher level enemies can predict where the player is going to be, and shoot ahead… that keeps the player on his toes, since he has to go in zigzags, etc, to keep damage to a minimum at medium distance (at short range, you’ll get hit, at long range you have a chance of avoiding the shot)…

The problem is that the hit/no hit mechanic is binary, and it was changing the targeting prediction: if the shot is supposed not to hit, it will target the player’s current position (it can still hit him, though), otherwise, the predicted position… This would appear visually as a mess, like a spray of bullets, which made it simultaneous harder to avoid the shots, and it didn’t look nice:

I’ve modified the system, so that if a shot is computed not to hit, it will still go to the predicted position, but not hit the player. The idea is to add some excitement and make it more obvious where the player has to go to avoid shots:

That’s why some shots are behind the player in the above screenshot… This makes the game more predictable and (hopefully) more enjoyable!

Now, I need to balance the weapons a bit more so I can move to more interesting stuff (lately it’s been boooooring!).

At the time of reading, I’m leaving for Edinburgh tomorrow for a 5-day holiday and sighseeing… I should have enough posts done to keep the one-a-day average, though, since I doubt I’ll have time/patience to work on the game while on the vacation…

Now listening to “Ayreonauts Only“ by “Ayreon”

Link of the Day: I’m not much of an eco-friendly kind of guy, but these news are exciting: http://www.sciencealert.com/audi-have-successfully-made-diesel-fuel-from-air-and-water