Hello! I'm back with new monthly post. It's a first post in 2017 and first post since November 2016. Sorry guys, it was busy winter!
First of all, we finally came up with new name for the game! Please welcome, Oddinary Highway!
Since November 2016, we've made large amount of updates, so I would like to cover following main things in this post:
Elite enemies behavior has been completely changed.
New location has been added to the game – City. It's very important location, I will cover it below.
Changes in Elite enemy
As I've mentioned in previous posts, Elite enemy is crumble stone of the game. Player should encounter this type of enemies to get new weapon.
Before change, we were making special waves that includes one Elite enemy surrounded by different infinite waves of enemies. Such waves could occur only one per level. When elite enemy is spawned, it was flying around the screen and following some patterns of shooting and moving. One of the downsides of this approach was that duration of wave was unpredictable and player could be stuck facing Elite for a while.
Other thing that was bothering us is that we were creating unqiue behaviors for each level. And everything started to look like we are overdoing things and elite looks'n'feels like mini-boss.
After discussion, we decided to make following changes on how Elite should work:
Elite still appears only one per level.
Elite doesn't shoot to player, until it receives some amount of damage
Elite is surrounded by some guards at first, but later on following enemies waves start to spawn. So, you will encounter Elite together with ordinary enemies waves.
Overall Elite behavior is simplified.
New location – The City
During the winter season we wanted to move forward and apply to Greenlight somewhere during the spring (it was before Steam Direct news). One of the things that the game is still missing it's a complete game loop. In Oddinary Highway level is "looped": once player completes first loop, he will proceed to beginning of the game. And new loop has an increased difficulty. The end point of each loop will be the same location is the gorgeous City.
Like other locations in Oddinary Highway, the City has its own mechanics that is used in enemies design. One of selected game mechanics is based on summoning other types of enemies. Main advantage of this mechanics is that it allows us to reuse already created enemies from previous locations (Sand and Ocean worlds). And it means we can create gameplay slice pretty fast for new location.
To make level more engaging, Arseniy proposed to use additional mechanics. It came from game lore:
the City was once a capital of Universe. But when father of main protogonist lost it to head of the Debt Syndicate, everything is changed. Now, the City is threatened by robots mafia gangs.
So, some waves of enemies will consist of mafia gangs on hover cars.
Other thing to mention is a light system. During the work on concept art for the City, Ksenia asked if we can "colorize" background objects more interestingly. After short research, we decided to use lighting together with normal maps. There are some other doubts regarding usage of normal maps for other game objects, e.g. player's ship or weapons, because it will require extra art-related work.
Besides of these main updates, we were polishing, improving, creating new content during last months.