Reaching Terminus - Dev Log
Week 24 (Oct 14th - Oct 19th)
LC Finalisations:
After finding the natural falls of the stags on the Tar Tunnel LC, I decided to change the system for the stags falling to swap their models out for stand ins that are always at the correct height to avoid soft locking players, as it turns out the distance the player shot the stags from determind how fast they fell, which made them very inconsistent. But now, they will always land at the same heights for easy player traversal.
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I had received a lot of feedback on how the Line Launcher pickup on Dividium wasn't obvious enough. So now it lays directly in the path of themech when they walk into the LC's final room, with a spotlight to illuminate and emphasize the pickup, making it almost impossible for players to miss.
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Adding in this spotlight led me to adding in some lighting to the interiors of the DT LC, Dividium and the Hanger to help the interiors looks better, which was pretty effective.
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Since I had the time, I redid the assest for the start and end sections of the Acid Lake, to better match the style and polycount of the rest of the game, and now the acid lake feels far less disconnected from the rest of the LC's.
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I also added in some new assets to Dividium, as the LC felt somewhat empty in the middle areas of each room, and they do help to fill out the LC.
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​Added a short segment to the intial mech drop animation in the hanger to rotate the mech holding clamps up to avoid clipping while in mech.
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Now that I had shortened DT's side path, I updated the key rooms map.
Game Feel/Impact
Addons:
I wanted to add some kind of visual indicator for players when they leave the mech running to go with the audio, so I added in some smoke plume particle systems for the mechs exhaust pipes, which are set active depending on if the mech is consuming resources.
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After finding the pilots slidiness and ability to slip between small gaps to be annoyign, I made two changes to how the player collider interacts with the world. Firstly, I changed the pilots groundcheck to be a CheckSphere like the mech, which makes players far less likely to get trapped by falling into small gaps. Secondly, I changed the physics material on the player to be less slippery, and have enough friction to not slip off of platforms they fall onto, which was a common issue on the later LC's with platforming sections over massive gaps. This makes pilot platforming feel far more acheievable, although players don't move as smoothly against walls now, but it's a fair trade.
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I also finally swapped out and animated the mech's cannon stand in assets for the proper ones I made in Maya, which look much nicer.
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​I also swapped out the pilots capsule shadow for a blob shadow thats a decal from a decal projector casted towards their feet using URP.​​
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I had been watching players use the Line Launcher over the last few playtests, and felt that the option to fire the cable then reel in was kind of cool, it wasn't very nessacery. So I removed the reel key function, now the mech instantly reels itself the moment the line connects, which saves players a bit of time and resources. I also extended it's range and increased it's speed, due to many player's feeling they we're never quite close enough to hit the Hook Points consistently.
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After hearing some players ask for it, I've given the option to self destruct at any point rather than when they are out of resources. I also updated the resources signs in the hager to looked higher resolution.​​
Final Bugs:
​​I found a bug where the mechs interior wasnt being set to the right rotation during animations when being set active then inactive via the Ignition button, due to the frames rotation not being a key frame in any of the mechs animations outside of the mech being inactive. This led to the crosshair inside the mech being at the wrong height to match up with the line laucnher and cannon firing locations, which was frustrating. But adding rotation key frames to all the mechs other interior animations resolved this issue.​
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I found an issue in the game build where the best times of players we're not being saved during their first run, so I went back and rearranged the code that updates and sets the best time. This was also due to an issue with the timer code, where the timer needed a defaut value for the best time if players didn't have one when first starting the game, but if this was 0, then the player could never get a time lower than this, so the best time would never update. So to counter this, I set the deafult bets time to 10 hours, which hopefully will not ever be someone run time. Mreover, the best time now only shows when the player wins, to avoid them seeing the 10 hour best time.
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There was also an issue where the interior fires of the mech would not stay on when the coolant was above 0, even if a fire was still active. I Changed the if statement surrounding coolant being above 0 to check if there is or isnt a fire, then set the interior fire effects active accordingly.​
Last Additions:
The final additions I allowing the cracked rocks on the crane in the Acid Lake LC to be destroyed when shot.
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Also added a new asset and animations for the mech resources collectors. Now when players deposit resources, they get some nice visual feedback instead of their currently equipped item disappearing. These small changes really added a lot of impact to resource collection, and is one of many examples of small addons making big game feel related differences.
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Also added tutorial to start of each time the game is opened inside of mech to tell players how to start the mech by using the Ignition button. This was a simpleway to help confused players on their first run of the game.
