For the previous entry, go here.
The initial plan was to update this site once every two weeks with a large update on the game. This made sense back when I was writing a plethora of political articles. I didn’t want to annoy the regular readers of the site with an abundance of game development related posts. It also takes me quite a while to write the articles themselves, as technical writing is difficult and time consuming. It makes much less sense now that I’m deliberately shutting off the outside world in order to focus on Escape From Epstein Island. I have the time to write about the game, so I’ll start writing about the feature updates every week on Monday.
I’m going to write something just about every other day. This may take the form of the cutscenes, the scripts for which will be published on the site, an update on one particular feature, or topics unrelated to our game specifically, such as my series on the state of modern gaming.
Now, on to the build itself.
Various arenas.
“Levels” in Escape From Epstein Island are equivalent to random encounters in a JRPG, which is why I’ve been internally calling them “scenarios.” The skeleton of a scenario is just an arena, which consists of some array of walkable tiles, enemy teleport pads, and pillars, and a certain configuration of enemies which come in a number of waves. This is contained within a Scene, which is Unity’s term for the bundling of assets and scripting. In most games, there are many scenes, typically at least one per level, due to the amount of scripting that most games utilize. EEI is simple enough to get away with essentially three main scenes; main menu, the campaign cutscenes, and the campaign level.
Previously, the campaign arena was always the same, because it was built into the scene itself. I had created a simple, symmetrical arena to play around in, because having something functional was more important than having something interesting. Unfortunately, this meant that whenever I experimented with the arena layout I had to make an entirely new arena. If I wanted to go back, I had to remake the old arena. This was a tedious and time consuming process that restricted my ability to rapidly experiment with different layouts.
Ignore the m_ before each variable.
I have since built a system that loads in a custom arena layout for each scenario, then builds the arena upon level start. I then created a bunch of different arenas, pretty much at random, a portion of which are shown in a prior image. Upon implementing them into the campaign, I realized something that probably should have been obvious a while back. Namely, asymmetrical arenas are far more interesting than symmetrical ones.
Just about every single first person shooter has asymmetrical arenas, even multiplayer shooters like CounterStrike. In contrast, the top down 2D shooters I was emulating tend to be far more symmetrical. For example, arenas in Enter The Gungeon, one of my main inspirations, are made in this symmetrical style, even if the camera rarely pulls back far enough to show this. For visual flair, some meaningless objects are scattered around the arenas, but functionally there is total symmetry.
The main problem with symmetry is that no part of the arena is any more safe than another. Or at least, no quadrant is. With a symmetrical arena, the dominant strategy is to simply circle around the outside of the arena the entire time. While some circle strafing is great, it shouldn’t be mindless.
Asymmetrical arenas have more variance in terms of areas that are inherently more or less safe. The player wants to bias their time towards the safe areas, while the design of the enemies forces the player to eventually move, lest they be swarmed, or flushed out in another way. The player also needs to take into account that the layout impacts the way the enemies can be funneled, and the path of tracked projectiles. Also, it’s just more interesting as a novelty, and there are a lot of scenarios in this game.
Asymmetrical cover, such as that seen on the right, is also more interesting.
Anyway, as the scenarios grow in number it became impractical to not have the ability to select one scenario in particular. I considered making something beautiful, but for now I started with the simplest version of that in the campaign select screen. When the scenarios grow into the dozens I’ll change this, but not before.
In lieu of filmed cutscenes, the player can now flip through the cutscene scripts before any particular scenario.
Finally, I realized that I needed to flesh out the military police, since the next segment of the campaign features them, and one guy who fires tracking projectiles just wasn’t quite cutting it. However, they deserve their own article, so I’ll write about them later.
