It's time for another update! Lot's of exciting progress to talk about.

Game Mode
As I mentioned in the last post, Squillamorph is now a primarily 'horde mode' style game. I've begun working on the system for this and have made great progress! A number of creatures will spawn each wave/round from a list of spawn points. You can see a shark spawn in the above GIF, it does need a bit of tweaking. As the round number increases, so will the number of creatures that can spawn. There is a short rest period between rounds that will allow the player to do anything they need to without being bombarded by creatures.

However, because of the pathfinding limitations, explained in the last post, the list of spawn points must change to be in the same room as the player. Each area in the game that is separated by one or more vents is a room. I have setup a script in unity to act as a room. Each room has its own list of spawn points which will be fed to the spawning system depending on which room the player is currently in. Room switching is dictated by the vent system. Anyway, that's the wave system in a nutshell.

Shark Attacks
The attacks for the Flop Shark have progressed somewhat. As a team, we thought it would be cool to have the sharks be able to grab each other, as long as the player was infesting one. This way the player would be able to briefly carry around an enemy or vice versa. However, this system has turned out to cause more gameplay issues than I thought it would. Rather than being a fun combat move, it feels quite unsatisfying to do and frustrating when multiple sharks grab you at the same time and you can't escape. I am also experiencing more glitchy movement when attacking with it. You can see some of this madness in the GIF! I am not going to throw this away. Perhaps it will be a less common attack or an attack for another type of shark.

I should mention that we are considering multiple shark types to help increase difficulty as the rounds increase. Anyway, the current attack will change and I will add other forms of attack, like a tail swipe, for the normal shark. We are also considering the use of visual effects to better represent when a shark is attacking as it can be quite confusing when there are many sharks!

Test Dummy
The test dummy has been updated to work with the new pathfinding system properly! I'll admit it isn't perfect but you can get the idea of how it will move now. I am having a few technical difficulties with its jump when infested but I'll iron out the bugs soon.

Visual Updates
I've added a few visual changes since the last post. The old field of view system I showcased in one of the earlier posts has been repurposed to light up whole rooms. This is so the player's vision is limited to the current room they are in, allowing me to turn off any performance demanding parts of other rooms. I've achieved this quite simply by using white tiles on a tilemap rather than the dynamic white mesh which it use to be. You can see this in the image below. The GIF shows the new effect turned on and off. I may find that this isn't needed in the end but either way, I like this new effect. There are also a few post processing effects which I've enabled to make things a bit more interesting for me to work with!

That's it for this week's post! If you liked it feel free to leave a comment and share on social media! The next post may be a little different as I am running a game jam over the next week for the university course, which will mean less work on this project. Either way it will still be interesting!

It's that time of the week again! This post will be full of my adventures with pathfinding, combat and game design. Also, I'm going to try a new way of formatting these posts by using sub-headings.

Gameplay Change
At the beginning of this week, I talked to the team about the type of game Squillamorph is. We have decided to change things slightly. It was going to be a linear story based game, with levels that lead the player from point A to B. However, Squillamorph will now be more of a 'horde mode' game. This does not mean the core mechanics will change, just the level design and level focus. More of an emphasis will be put on combat which we have exciting ideas about. The game will still primarily be story based but there will also be an endless mode for each level. We are very excited about this change and we hope you are too!

Pathfinding
I was recently designing a much larger level than we have been so far. It was playing well, so I decided to see how the Flop Shark behaved in it. This was when things started going wrong.

This week I’ve struggled to do much with the game. I’ve had a cold which has frazzled my brain and made it very difficult to work properly. Nevertheless, there are a few new things to show!

Connor has been creating more tile sets which I have put into Unity. I have normal mapped one of them and will complete the others over the next week. I am now using them to construct the main area for the Flop Sharks. You can see some of the new tile sets in the GIFs of this post.

I have also started working on the test dummies to be used in the tutorial. These are slightly more difficult to construct than the shark because they have to be upright. While I am not happy with the current solution I am using, it does the job, when you don't infest it, for now. I will use what I learn with the dummy to make a better Root Toot, the humanoid ranged enemy from the demo, who had a very unstable movement.

That's about it for this week's post. I have started making some behind the scenes changes to the creatures but they are minor changes which I might talk about in the next post.

There is an important update I should mention which is that I am now working on the game full time for the foreseeable future. This should mean great things for progress and possibly means more frequent updates but we'll have to wait and see about that! If you are enjoying these updates please spread the word about the game and this devlog, we appreciate it!