Progress Update, February

Howdy all, it’s been a good few weeks since I last updated so I figured you were all due some progress info, how time flies eh!

Progress is marching on at a nice and steady pace, we could probably do another dev video with what we have done but we’re thinking of waiting until we have the enemy AI stuff working before we do that.

Interfaces

Interfaces are now fully ported, improved and are hooked up to drive the game through events.

Portals

I’ve recreated the portal code which allows you to move between maps based on the other improvements done already and also added Spine artwork which makes portal creation more straight forward. The portals now also use Spine based hit box detection to make them more accurate to interact with. They also now use the same interact prompt as objects so when this gets more advanced you’ll be able to choose actions such as picking the lock or kicking a door down.

Combat Animations

I’ve made a bunch of new animations for Will which are going to be used in combat. Animations such as crouching, aiming and firing along with variations for when Will is unarmed and armed with a pistol, other guns will come later. I’ve learnt a lot through working with Spine and figured out quite a few areas where I can speed up the work-flow meaning I’m now working like a well oiled machine with the entire process so I should be able to build a lot more art in a smaller space of time. Here, have a sneak peak…

Player Sprite Shooting

Combat Interface

Something else that I’ve tackled has been a brand spanking new first pass interface for the combat screen, it doesn’t have any hooks to the game code yet but it’s ready for when we start on the combat mechanic itself and uses the same event driven UI as the rest of the game meaning it’s extremely simple to have it talk to the main game screen. Here’s a sneak peak at it running in game, note though that it’s all using place holder art for now, certainly don’t take this as any inkling of what it will look like in the end…

In Game Combat UI

A sneak peak at the new in game combat interface.

Enemy AI

And finally Dan has been busy working on the enemy AI, he has them patrolling about and is currently working on player detection and vision cones. They sometimes have a tendency to not stop walking however, so when the code is a bit more stable and they are behaving themselves we’ll look at getting a dev diary up to show you it in action.

Hopefully soon we can start looking at some combat!

That’s all for now folks!

Alex