Ivan’s continued work on the high poly Caesar, looking somewhat more ominous than in the previous post.
Traps
This past week I have focused on making a variety of new traps for the game. Some of these introduce new mechanics and potentially systemic behaviors while others are more blunt in that they simply offer different ways to kill the player (or enemies!). Traps should require dexterity to overcome while being surprising and interesting. We previously had a handful of designs to play with but found they lost some effect when encountered time and time again. As of today the game now includes a total of eight traps that can be set up in a number of ways to challenge players. Some of the art isn’t final yet but a few of the newer traps are pictured below:
Crushers
Crushers move up and down and flatten anything that gets trapped underneath them. They can make for some interesting interactions when configured in sequence and are also useful in the ways their timing can divide spaces by blocking lines of sight.
Boulders
Indiana Jones? Tomb Raider? There is something about the classic video game boulder that while not exactly realistic, seems to fit perfectly into the gameplay of a retro fps as well as the pseudo-historic, hollywood-ancient setting of Caesar’s Revenge. One concern I had with implementing boulders was that our game is flat and the rolling might seem a bit far fetched. To solve this, all boulders drop from the ceiling and bounce a couple of times as they move which adds some authenticity to the motion. A happy accident of this approach is that they can also be set up to squash any unsuspecting opponents!
Swinging logs
… in perpetual motion! Although we’re not showing it now, these traps also have positional audio which makes it easier to identify its location when offscreen.
Rollers
Woah! I was on a roll with making these and thought it would be funny to try and make an iconic jungle roller from Crash Bandicoot. Turns out it is actually a lot of fun and one of my favorite traps at the moment. Will be interesting to see how level designs will contextualise this but I imagine it could be suitable for later in the game, in dark tombs or ruins.
Weather effects
The first approach used creates rain around the player using an array of coordinates to draw and loop falling drops. The buffer is large enough to make it feel as though it fills the whole environment while only drawing those in view. This is great for giving an overall level effect and is quite good for performance in that the weather is taking place only around the player – despite the impression of it filling the whole environment. One challenge of this method is that if levels include a lot of roofs and cover, then it becomes quite a bit more complex to work out where the rain should and shouldn’t be. For these cases of environments with a lot of indoor/outdoor flow, we have also created a regional weather system where you can specify the size and intensity of areas, all the way down to a single tile. This makes it easy to have dramatic changes such areas of cover in stormy weather.
Armour
An armour pickup system has been implemented into the game which will provide the player with a little extra protection (effectively an additional health bar). This is useful in a number of ways: it allows us to more finely balance difficulty in levels by managing availability of these items before significant encounters and introduce larger, high tension fights earlier on as the player can be given a small buffer to increase their survival. Additionally, armour can be placed off of the primary path and in secret areas to reward exploration – giving variety to the pickups. One thing we want to focus design wise is that often extra armour will be a little out of the way, meaning that players going for a time trial run will have more interesting decisions around getting these items or pushing forward without them. We have three types planned, the first of which has been completed. The Coolus is a type of Roman helmet prevalent in the time of Julius Ceasar.This example is inspired by, rather than being an exact replica of a coolus and is designed to match those worn by the in-game Roman legionaries. It is currently the mid tier item offering a 50 armour bonus.
