Implementing the enemy subclasses was good and necessary, even though it temporarily broke the game in many different ways. The spawning system for both arcade and campaign mode flat out didn’t work to start, and all of the created scenarios for the campaign were totally broken. However, that ended up not mattering much, as the enemies had been reworked so much that the old scenarios were totally irrelevant anyway.
Since the time I originally made those scenarios the enemies have been buffed in two ways. First, they’re smarter, as detailed in numerous posts. Second, I gave most enemies more health, poise (hitstun resistance), aggressive firing patterns, or other details with the goal of making each individual one more of a threat. The idea was to enable them to live long enough to express their respective personalities, and increase the visual clarity of the action. I underestimated how much I succeeded, and even the new “easy” levels I created were in some cases impossible.
I recently captured some gameplay footage to show to a group of people. I meant to play just a few minutes, ideally ending with me beating whatever level I chose. I then stubbornly played it over and over again for the next fourty minutes until I finally succeeded.
I’ve never been someone to fetishize difficulty, and obviously the campaign needs to be massively reworked when it gets in the hands of players. However, while I went way overboard, difficulty reveals design irritations that are often papered over if the game is too easy. This fourty minute play session, while mostly an indulgence, did reveal a myriad of issues with the teleportation controls, annoying audio bugs, miscellaneous enemy behaviour and tuning issues, spawns being potentially unfair, level design, the FBI Agents breaking into the level too quickly and in too high numbers, the lack of tracking for the player’s progress through the scenario, few campaign specific announcer lines, etcetera.
Having said all that, the gameplay is in a good enough spot for me to iterate on other, rougher aspects of the game for a while, before circling back to this. Specifically, I need to get the cutscene programming up and running first, and get that workflow figured out. As the premise behind the cutscenes is that this is a radio drama, the end result is supposed to look something like the old Starcraft 1 pre-mission Skype calls.
I’ve also got to fix some miscellaneous issues, drastically improve the menus, especially the intro splash screens, and do a few other things before circling back to the gameplay.
