Feedback Friday #158 - March 26-29, 2021

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How To Give Feedback

• Be positive. There's something of value in every game.
• Focus on the design, not the designer.

Feedback Friday #157 is here.

 

https://eternalambiguity.itch.io/ca-shooter

This is primarily for @Antypodish , since he's the one who pointed out the remaining performance issues, but hopefully others can chime in. I made significant changes to how the blob grows that will probably make the "blob is playing an RTS" thing easier, but more importantly for now basically eliminates most of the real-time calculations.

I ran the game on my old laptop with a 2 core CPU @ 2.2 GHz and it ran fine in the intensive scenario mentioned last week, so I'm really hoping this works for everyone else. If so I'll shift back to implementing/designing features.

So basically - for anyone who gives this a try, does it work in intensive scenarios (where there's a lot of the blob around)? If you have any other feedback I'd be happy to hear it, but that's the main thing I'm concerned about.

 

Performance was smooth with lots of blob around.

 

@EternalAmbiguity pressing Q makes camera spinning out of control, until clicked again.
See console error log, as object exception not set to an instance of an object (when pressed Q key).
What Right click shoots (green bullet)?

Right, game is much smoother. My CPU didn't went berserk, so thats good.
There were latter in a game few small lag spikes, but bearable.

There is much balancing required, as blobs spreads too fast (specially after NPC release), with default settings, but at least it is playable now

Should door not get automatically closed, after being open?
That should prevent blobs to spread to other rooms.

 

Q is a light that's directly over the player. Q is supposed to shift it from pointing down at the player, to being right behind the player and pointing forward (so you can see further. This was for when I had room controls to turn lights/power on and off; I've neglected that since I was focused on just the blob enemy without room controls, and I've made adjustments to the GO hierarchy that holds that light and the camera. I'll need to fix that.

Therightt GUI panel should say "main Weapon: X and "Secondary Weapon: Y. Whatever the secondary weapon says. that's what the right mouse button shoots (you can scroll the mouse to move through the options)

The left GUI panel should have an option that says something like "blob growth rate." That can be adjusted to make it slower. Let me know if you hit upon a number there that you like.

I have the doors set up such that it something, including the blob, is in their "open" range, they'll stay open. That brings increased risk from moving backward without taking care of the blob first - it'll let them move forwards to the next room.

A while back I had the blob's growth tied to their power usage, with the power nodes supplying said power. I dropped that when tweaking things here, but I'm thikning about pulling that back in as part of the whole "TS" thing Any power nodes the blob is connected to will give it power. The "capture eggs" will siphon "biomass" from people. The blob will use those...somehow. Anyway, if I tie their growth back into the power somehow that should make it something the player can manage.

Semi-related to the above - the change I made was to find and store the room "centroids," or places in each room that can see the most other places. Right now the blob is set to go to some of those and then from there out to each interactive object it can access. I'm thinking about having a structure for those centroids that the blob needs resources to build which give it some ability.

I'll fix the Q button so it's not affecting the camera and I'll bring back the room environmental controls.

Apologies for any types - I just had PRK Thursday and I can't see very well right now.

 

I wasn't up to much recently due to a bit of time constraint, but I have started working on greyboxing some buildings for my city-builder/RTS game, i'm still figuring out the footprints of the buildings.

here are two buildings that are going to be residential, what do you think about the layout?
the entrance tile can be occupied by several buildings so it doesn't waste space.

small:


medium:


I still need to make a new tower, a fishing dock and something with a river waterwheel(?) to finish the building system code, but I should probably go eat something first, I jumped into blender basically right outta bed, gotta stop doing that

 

Okay, so a fishing dock too, but now I'm really going to eat something.



(sorry for the double, you can't attached more than 5 images per message)

 

Those looks fine. From a design perspective, next Friday it'll be interesting to learn how you plan to use each building.

 

That's the end of this Feedback Friday. Come back next Friday for more feedback from the community!