Enemy Health & The Hub

Hello everyone! The past week has been quite good for progress. I've finally worked on a visual representation for enemy health and I've also worked on a new idea for the game.

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Now that I am able to focus more on the content side of the game, after making progress with optimisation, I wanted to work on something visual. I chose to work on visually representing enemy health, something that was highly requested during play-tests. I like to make gameplay information diegetic where I can, rather than using UI elements such as health bars. I have done this with the enemy health. I've added an extra parameter to the enemy shader that allows me to change its colour saturation. The more damaged an enemy is, the less colour it will have. I also added a secondary texture so I can have some cuts and/or decay appear on the enemy as it becomes more damaged. I am happy with the resulting effect and hope it will improve combat.

The second major thing I worked on last week was a feature I only just decided to add. I've noticed that going back to the main menu when the player runs out of lives doesn't encourage them to continue playing, and also makes it seem as if they've lost more progress than they have. To change this, and give a bit more structure to the game, I have created a hub level. The player will start in this level and return to it upon failing or completing a region. You can choose to go to any of the unlocked regions from this level and also see doors that lead to future regions, which gives the player a visible goal to achieve. The hub level also allows the player to replay previous levels, something I haven't previously allowed without starting a new play through.

There is one downside to this. I am now unsure how to handle the leaderboard 'time' entries. If a player goes back to a previous region, do I reset the time back to what it was when they first got to that region? Do I keep increasing it no matter which region they choose? Do I create fastest time high-scores for each individual region? I am not sure which to choose but I am leaning towards individual fastest times. I would display these in the hub level rather than cluttering the leaderboard and they would carry over between playthroughs. I will still add a time to the leaderboard if the player completes the early access game content no matter what I decide to do.

I am excited to hear what you think about these ideas. So feel free to leave a comment here or on one of the social media platforms. The best option would be to join the Discord Server and leave your thoughts there.

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That's it for this post, I hope you like the new progress and ideas. I am going to continue working on the hub level and some more new content this week.​
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