5sd064 Turning the power-ups into pickup-able items

Hello again, Thomas Härdin here turning back to the power-ups of our game. As I've written about before I had to decide on the functionality of this games power-ups which turned out to be some fairly easily manageable enhancements to the players projectiles when playing in the hacking mode. We did get three of them, a rapid fire function that activates when 8 enemies are killed, a wider shot that you get through pressing a button, same as the wide shot for our orb that obliterates all in its path.

So the whole reason i wrote this backstory is to get to the point in our project where we needed to make the later two power-ups available to the player. I decided that the easiest way to do it was to let the player have more to do when wandering around the office spaces as the spy character, we put out small but highlighted items on the floor that can be called pick-ups. They look just like the power-up you receive on a square plate and when you step on them you gain a charge of that power-up to use when hacking doors. We got there by first getting the art asset done which i took care of myself, I placed it out on multiple locations in the map and then had one of my programmers code the interaction we needed.


The result we have now as seen on the picture above is the power-ups in form as pickup-able objects around the map (highlighted with the red circles). These are visible as everything else in the players field of view and are placed in a manner to help the player where the player needs it most for example before harder levels and such.

I am very happy we got to this point although i would have wanted to get this done earlier in development because time for fixes was scarce after and since i did not have a balanced plan in case this would not work i am glad it did not turn to shit. In that case the game-play as the spy would have been a lot more lackluster than what it is which was one of our goals to prevent. The amount and locations of said pickups might be changed later but for now i am pleased with the result.

5sd064 Designing Map Layout

Hello, Thomas Härdin, Lead Game Design of group Fenrir here.

Today i will be covering something that i have wanted to work on for some time but was unable to due to the status of the game earlier. Namely map layout.

So what do i mean by map layout? Well essentially it is the structure of everything you can move on and interact with in our game, mainly focused on the rooms that the main character spy is moving around in and between. At earlier stages of our game i have been meaning to work with this but i couldn't either due to lack of programmed interactions or lack of art assets to use for it. Lately however i have had the means i need to build the labyrinth of rooms we desired for the game. As a start i put in a bunch of walls and doors to fill out a playable space followed by making some temporare decoration art to make the rooms feel a bit more like an office space, but reaching that feeling still is beyond current state and we aim in the end to make it look like an abandoned office building with dust marks and moving-boxes everywhere.

First of i expanded the two rooms we had to test the function of getting through doors by hacking them to about six different rooms, i made a short path to the end because of simplicity when it came to our presentation we were going to hold, but the end goal is way beyond that. As earlier mentioned i will be working towards a real office space labyrinth that the player has to explore, this way we can meet the aesthetic goal of exploration to follow up our earlier ideas about challenge and incorporating the feeling of doing industrial espionage. Thanks to what we have now in terms of code and art i can easily expand the map to thrice the amount of rooms and make hacking levels covering each door.

These are the past and current situations followed by the future plans, thanks for reading!