This past month has been good for me personally. I’ve joined a Div 1 men’s beer league hockey team, a boxing gym, started a new part time job, and just said goodbye to my extended family. It’s been more mixed for Escape From Epstein Island.
The first half of July was spent preparing for the Nationalist Media Conference talk that I wrote about earlier. In preparation for the talk I penned a very long set of notes which I read from for my presentation. I plan to convert that into a series of published articles. However, the conference organizer has done a great job editing my talk and will be uploading it shortly. I’ll write about the conference again when he does, and only release my series after the fact. Until such time, we have only the fake trailer I made for the game once again.
Even though my talk was well received, I believe I got more out of it than anyone else present. They say you don’t know anything until you’ve explained it to someone else, and the process of putting together my presentation made me realize that I didn’t have good explanations for many of my choices within EEI. Drastic changes will have to be made, as detailed in upcoming articles.
In the meantime I have implemented a charged stasis field, as the new alt-fire for the plasma rifle. I was never happy with the original expanding orb thing, which seemed like a great idea, but in practice was just annoying. I have since relegated it to the sniper’s alt-fire, and it may be replaced entirely at some point. As for the stasis, which I am quite happy with, it works roughly how you would expect if you’ve played any similar video games. In short, you make enemies in a certain area freeze, while also being immune from damage. There are a few caveats, which I explain in the video below.
*You may notice that there are x’s on the tops and sides of the arena that were not there before. I’ll explain those later in the upcoming article on degenerate strategies. In short, it’s a way of forcing the player to not mindlessly circle strafe.
There have been a few minor updates to the game as well. I fixed a bug where the antifa applied their proximity bad spell attack every frame at full power. Fixing the bug was trivial. Tracking it down was a nightmare, considering that I wasn’t sure if it was just my imagination when I kept going from 100 health to 0 nearly instantly, since this is a game where there are lots of enemies onscreen at any one time.
I also made the health/shield bars for the enemies usually hidden, but revealed within a second after taking damage. In the long run, the idea is to have multiple enemy sprites which represent their health within a certain range. That’s not feasible in the short run, so the idea was that we’d get the best of both worlds, where you can see how much damage you’ve done to the enemy, while not having a bunch of health bars floating everywhere. After playtesting, it does appear to have worked out well.
Teleportation damage wave, since removed.
I also made a very simple change that begets a long explanation. The teleport no longer casts an expanding wave of damage around itself, which I detailed in this article, and which you can see in the above image. The point of the damaging wave was to encourage aggressive play by the player. I didn’t want them to always use the teleport defensively, and wanted to tip the scales in favour of more offensive and interesting tactics.
One of my inspirations for this was a MOBA that I used to play, Heroes Of The Storm. In that game there are a number of characters who have abilities that effectively teleport them a short ways. Often the standard play is to use this teleport purely defensively.
For example, my most played character in that game was Muradin, a tank. He had one of these leap/teleport abilities, and the standard play is to use it defensively most of the time, jumping away from the battle in order to survive. However, there are a few talents which could be chosen which changed this, most notably an early talent which slowed enemies that you land on at the end of the leap. This might not have been the best build, but I loved playing it because it was so much fun, as it pushed the risk/reward strongly towards being very aggressive, jumping in and causing as much chaos in the other team as possible, even at risk to oneself.
Muradin – top middle-left, jumping in on three enemy team members.
I assumed that the teleport in EEI should provide additional offensive capabilities for the same reason. However, similar to my semi-successful attempts to lift design from shmups and FPS’s, taking from MOBAs was fraught with danger. This game is nothing like Heroes Of The Storm, and the player is already incentivized to be as aggressive as possible, since the enemies will build up and overrun the player if they’re playing too cautiously.
On top of that, the wave itself caused a lot of visual confusion, and it was a nightmare to balance. If it expanded too quickly, it did very little damage to enemies. If it expanded too slowly, it did massively overpowered damage to enemies, since they would be stuck in the hitbox for more damage ticks.
This is not the first time I’ve combined two disparate mechanics into one ability, only to separate them out again. I thought it would be a great idea to combine the sniper and shotgun into one. In practice, it was just irritating that the same weapon required the player to be close range and far range simultaneously to maximize its value. Likewise, I thought it would be good to combine an attack with a teleport, but it’s totally unnecessary. There are already so many different uses for a teleport, many of which are offensive. Hell, in playtesting, I think the most common use case is to teleport right next to an enemy, often timing this to avoid an incoming wave of projectiles, to melee them. It’s unnecessary to complicate the process by adding anything extra.
Anyway, August is much more of a free month for me, so expect the posting pace to pick back up again.
