Tag Archives: alpha

Road to the tower

So during the past few days I have been making a number of improvements to the game according to feedback

First I increased the number of enemies around the map and put in some additional stuff trying to fill in the map, you can see the enemies in circles below. I had to implement a couple of lines of optimizations to avoid doing any calculations for this amount of enemies while out of sight, but it was easy.

Tons of enemies, seen here as circles, which represent their aggro-radious

So now about half the level has a medium to high distribution of enemies.
I also added a tower to the level, which will be your destination. Just an asset from the asset store for now. Added some fires and voila:

A tower I found on the asset store, good enough for now

Then I wanted to add some settings so that people could have at least a bit of control on performance in-game, before I roll out a complete set of controls. Someone mentioned motion blur was too much and I saw someone play with a low frame-rate and it was really bad.
So I added motion blur, bloom and ambient occlusion controls, since those are the heaviest effects.

Quick and dirty on/off switches to make life easier

Finally I created a live cursor, which recognizes enemies and tracks them if you can hit them, at the moment it is just a green particle effect, but the plan is to make her into a fully fledged character. Joan the Pixie will follow Jack around and give him hints, target enemies and have a voice, so that the game isn’t as silent and lonely as it is now.

Next on the agenda?

  • complete the level
  • make a navigation map
  • add more enemies and props
  • add interactive objects and characters

but first the map. You can download and play it now