There is a difference between playtesting and testing. I test the game all the time, but the scope is only what I’m currently working on. There is a lot of value to be found in the occasional full run through the game, even in its current very unfinished state. That’s because especially true as the overall gameplay, visuals and polish aside, is in a pretty good spot. I’m at the point where I can start honing in on level design, scenario combinations, and the finer points of various miscellaneous details.
The same cannot be said for the pageantry. I do like the visual novel cutscenes, knowing that the writing is so unfinished that there are notes and random letters left in there. The eventual version will be synced with specific images relevant to the scene.
It’s not an ideal solution, but they are so much easier to produce that they win by default. I do still think there’s a ton of value in the radio drama stuff, I’ll try to figure out how to produce some sort of video, and I would love to have quick in-game scene before boss battles, but those features are non-essential. What is essential is finishing the story, and getting some version of it in the game.
What follows is a somewhat disorganized grab bag of things I wanted to talk about that will be expanded upon after this article is published.
Controls
I’m still unsatisfied with the controls. Pressing q/e to alt-fire is not easy to do when you are moving through a hectic battle. The same is true for using the r key to reload, which forces your index finger to move from the d key. I could ask the player to reload using their thumb, by hitting one of the zxcvb keys, but I tried that and it feels incredibly bad. We’ve already seen that the ctrl + LMB scheme is sub-optimal, as it overloads your pinky finger. I could put alt-fire on the right mouse button, and but melee on the keyboard somewhere, but that would just transfer the problem to meleeing, which would be even more of a problem as positioning is more important when you have to physically touch an enemy.
One out of the box solution, actually suggested by a commenter on this site, is to make the weapons single fire, with the alt-fire modes being turned into unique weapons. However, that would require the player to switch between many different weapons, which comes with its own set of problems. Using a Crysis style selection steals another precious button, takes time, and adds a huge layer of complexity. Forcing the player to hit tab up to three times to get to the right weapon is also not ideal. I could solve these problems by making the weapons pickups, and limiting the player to just two at a time, but that’s a totally different game.
I’m not sure there is a great solution to this. The PC suffers from extra mouse buttons not being standard, which leads to your left hand being overloaded, while your right hand is underused. I don’t know if there are any games that figured out how to overcome this, but it just seems like something you have to live with. If anyone has any ideas let me know.
Map Design
The old levels were put together with a few features I don’t like. First, there was never enough cover, which made some enemies have practically no counterplay, unless they were so few in number you could just stomp them. Second, the simplistic layouts were not that interesting.
I’ve talked about FEAR before, and its excellent AI. Part of that is smoke and mirrors. Part of that is the clever use of chirps. Part of that is genuine programming brilliance. But none of it would work if the level designers had not created appropriate layouts to showcase the enemies.
The new designs are much more like rooms than one big area with a pillar or two. Special care was put to avoid long lines of sight, which make a few enemy types overpowered, and produce complex geometry that leads to more guided paths
Boss Battles, and Giving the Campaign a Structure
Halo:Combat Evolved is one of my favourite games of all time, and I really appreciate that they had the vision to avoid boss battles all the way back in 2001. However, they also had the production values to make wildly differing scenarios, on a macro and micro scale. While that game is rightfully criticized for repeating content, namely with respect to Assault on the Control Room and The Library, they usually did a good job mixing up the exact combination of enemies, terrain, vehicle placement, ally count, etcetera. The Ruby Rebalanced mod took the variety to eleven, with the benefit of years of work, and decades of hindsight.
It’s not reasonable for me to make my version of the Warthog Run. Yeah, it’d be great, but I knew if I ever wanted to actually ship this game, it needed to be extremely small in scope. That’s why every “level” is just one room with multiple waves of enemies, similar to RPG random battles. If the combat is solid, it works, at least on a minute to minute scale.
The worst way to create a climactic moment is with a massive difficulty spike. With that off the table, all I can really tweak are the level layouts, and the specific enemies spawned. This provides enough variety for the meat of the campaign, but if that’s all the game has to offer each level begins to blur together. That’ll be less true when I get real art and audio in there that makes the enemies feel more distinct in terms of flavour, but it’ll still be a problem.
The solution is boss battles, which provide a huge change of pace, while requiring only one new enemy type be made, albeit a somewhat more complicated one. As a bonus, they also let me work in unique themes and gags. I don’t have the budget for more than about three of them, in terms of the extra art, sound, programming, and general production that puts on me, but even two would go a long way to freshen up the experience.
I did some work on boss battles a while back, but the game has changed so much since that I don’t think it’s particularly relevant. It’s now become a high priority.
General Jank
I have zero idea why the lighting is broken in some levels. Absolutely zero clue why this happens. It all works just fine in the editor, but in the build, some of them are broken. It’s probably something really stupid and easily fixable, that will take me hours to track down, and then come back again like herpes.
It’s incredibly irritating that the sniper fire occasionally derps out, and shoots the wall, not the enemy poking out from it. I’ll have to redo the logic there.
The plasma rifle bolts strike enemies, then chain to nearby enemies. However, right now they do this even if there’s no line of sight, which means that you can stand behind a wall and shoot it, and this deals damage to one nearby enemy. That’s sort of interesting, but it’s going to be removed.
Very occasionally the player will break through walls. So rarely that it’s irritating it doesn’t happen more often, so I could properly track down and fix this bug. There’s a similarly rare problem where the grenade bounces off the walls incorrectly, which is incredibly irritating when it leads to your death.
The player’s pre-scenario walkout often phases them through obstructions. I thought I fixed this bug, but apparently, no.
Misc
There are tons of missing audio clips. Enemy weapons need to make sounds when they fire. Enemies need voice lines, or at least grunts. I need to redo the player’s audio programming, as the various sounds can stop each other when they shouldn’t. Also, I accidentally turned off the announcer for the campaign mode.
I liked the idea of giving the player a certain budget of health for each campaign scenario, but I went too far. Taking health damage early on is too punishing, as the optimal play is to restart the level. My general idea for a solution is to spawn in a healthpack every three waves or so, which still punishes careless play, but not so much that you feel stupid for not restarting. Actually, a smattering of tiny healthpacks, to encourage even movement through the level.
I also need to fix the scoring. Enemies already drop orbs, something that was turned off for the campaign, but I like the idea of collecting them shaving a small amount of time off your final time. Also, the score is not actually saved. I’ll flesh this out more later and probably write about it in combination with something else.
The hardened shield that radiates shots needs to be massively toned down, as the game becomes too much about hiding behind cover and waiting for that to be off cooldown. It also trivializes the final run to the portal at the end.
Some enemies feel a bit too bullet-spongey. I think the generic ZOGbots feel this way, and various tweaks to enemy poise, health, etcetera needs to be done, especially in light of the gun bug fixes.
Enemy sub-variants are probably too common, at least to start, which doesn’t let the player get a good feel for how much damage they can take, their behaviour, etcetera.
The trash mob types were given a force based pathing solution, that I never bothered to transition to the node based solution. That needs to be done, as they’re derping up a storm.
The snipers still need to have their set up spots improved, or maybe slightly move between shots.
The Fitness Dichotomy levels are best played by mostly staying in one room, dodging the roided out social media influencer looksmaxxers, and hitting them with explosive darts. Not necessarily a huge deal, as they are later combined with enemies that do force the player to maneuver.
Easy and hard modes need to be created, but especially easy mode if I want anyone to playtest this. Also, some scenarios are still way more difficult than the others, despite me doing a first pass to fix this.
The lighting doesn’t transfer with the screenshake. Funnily enough I only noticed this when watching the video, but now I can’t unsee it.
The gore texture was not transferred to the campaign scene, which is why the gore isn’t permanent on the ground.
