First level and systems in progress!

Work is going smoothly!

COTD (which very pleasingly is in the urban dictionary as "choke on two d**ks", here: Citadel of the Damned) has progressed into building out the initial level.

Tech

Improvements have been made to the collision and dynamic bodies system. 

I've been doing a tonne of research on Unities Box2D physics system, and have concluded (as well as many other devs) that for this particular style of game, the iterative accuracy and general support for proper physical interactions simply isn't needed. 

To that end, I've spent a good while improving the performance of the dynamic object and collision system to be more aware of the game itself. As mentioned last time, rules like ignoring surfaces when they're not on screen (culling) etc have already been included, however now, we've been through and added cases for when the interaction can be computationally simpler, such as perfect horizontal or vertical lines.

I personally also have spent some wonderful hours learning about quick calculations of linear line intersections. I know, try to contain yourself.

Added to that, I also stumbled across a bug that would have caused slow-down the longer you played the game. Basically, each "Line" in the PointLine system stores a reference to what's on it. I had forgotten to cull this reference for the multiple gore chunks that fly off enemies when you destroy them, so the more this happened, the more of that information would build up. It was by happenstance that I managed to spot it whilst doing some testing for other bits, and is now resolved with a single line of additional code. 

Lighting

We've been experimenting with Unities URP (Universal Render Pipeline) and more specifically the LWRP (Lightweight Render Pipeline 2d). To that end, we've come up with some nifty ways to get psuedo lighting and shadows without hitting performance at all that hard. This is important! For one thing, the less a GPU has to do to calculate each pixel, the less power it will draw and therefor the longer any particular battery will last if playing on handheld. Secondly, we want to make sure COTD reaches 60fps on basically anything it's played on.

At the minute, with my development machine, I'm measuring framerates using a 5700xt and Ryzen 3700x. This combination means when unlocked, framerates exceed 1000FPS. This is actually useful, because it gives a better indication of how certain graphical object affect performance. For example, I can say that with X layers being affected by a new 2d point light, FPS will drop by 15-30 frames depending on the objects on screen in each layer at once. Whilst 30fps is not much to chop off 1000fps, a 3% drop for anything is to be aware of!

Story

The story is coming along! I've dug out all my old notes from my second degree (English Literature) and am now fleshing out a basic plot, and seeing where this can be tied into the MetroidVania style progression. Being set in some time with modern tech, I can use the Metal Gear Solid Codec call style of narrative at any point during the game, even randomly! That's super useful from a story point of view, because it disconnects location from story progression. 

One thought I had also, was that whoevers on the other end can be the device for hints about what to do next (avoiding the dreaded map marker!)

Some ideas about the different areas of the Citadel:

• Dungeon / Catacombs of the ancient dead
• Waste management facility (Shit demons)
• Research and Development wing
• C Suite
• Damned induction program
• The old keep

The Citadel is literally in Hell. In my opinion, any building in Hell is going to need a HR department, C-suite and other areas that are seemingly designed to suck the life out of you.

Mechanics

One things we're really trying to pin down is how to deal with ammo, difficulty, and game play fun.  As the designers of Doom Eternal found out with Doom 2016, people kind of fell into a "One Weapon" groove. Their response? Force weapon switching using limited ammo and creatures that you need to tackle with certain weapons, pokemon super effectiveness style!

I like this, but I don't think we can get away with just a direct clone. Speaking to a friend, they had suggested a few different machanics that would hopefully address this balance:

• Use of a "shield" type item for when ammo runs out - possible melee bash with this to literally shake the ammo out of creatures.
• Possible mild crafting element to use destructible objects throughout the game world to create ammo from. This would be simple, so something like environment objects = metal, creature drops = explosives / plasma.

In the same vein, dealing with low health is something to consider. Right now, a good old fashioned Stomp Crush (glorykill) is what will get you health. That means every area will need a sprinkling of auto-regen creatures to enable this.

Artwork

Up until now, we've been using some modified free tilesets for the environment and a "chibi" style look for the player and enemies. This is being slowly replaced by custom environment artwork, and slightley more realistically proportioned character sprites. Like this:

Sneak peak level 1

Here's a sneak at the development level. We'll be using this as a possible Alpha 1.0 to release for crowdfunding: