Tutorial for Dummies

Hello everyone, I hope you had all had good Easter! It has been another good week for progress. Again, last week was mostly spent on improving the level designer and documentation but this is now pretty much complete. I won't talk about this much because I covered it in the last post.

World Design
One of the documents I worked on was a world guide. This is basically an aid for anyone designing a level. It describes each region of the game world, including information like enemy types and environmental hazards. One of its main purposes is to list the layout of levels within regions. The layout we now have might change, depending on player feedback. Each region will start with a mini level to give players the chance to get used to a new enemy type without the wave based combat. From this level you can access 3 different level pathways. Each pathway corresponds to a difficulty. We're not yet sure if players will be able to switch between the pathways once one is chosen. Again, that will need testing. Of course, each region will have a boss level at the end of the pathways. Bosses will have difficulty levels that correspond to the pathway taken by the player.

Tutorial Redesign
I've made a new design for the tutorial level! This is entirely based on feedback I got at Rezzed and research I've done into tutorial methods. I'm quite pleased with how its turned out so far. It definitely needs tweaking but I'm on the right track now. Something new that I've added in to make this new tutorial is destructible objects. These objects can only be destroyed by player attacks at the moment. I will be using these objects sparingly because they can cause problems if overused. This is because I am not using my physics system for them. Instead, they use Unity rigidbodies so that they appear more dynamic; my system does not allow for rotating collision shapes. Another issue with my system is that my physics objects cannot push rigidbodies, but can be pushed by them. This means that I've had situations where enemies have been pushed into the floor and get stuck. While they are a cool addition, they will not be appearing too often. Also, it's probably important to note that I've added in a new wall jump ability, applied with a mutagen pick-up! This was something heavily requested at Rezzed.

Dumb Dummies
Since redesigning the tutorial, and implementing the destructible objects, I have noticed several problems with the Test Dummy enemy. I won't lie, I did throw them together rather hastily so I knew there would be some issues. To get the destructible objects working, I had to change the way combat worked. This is now a much better system but it exposed so many faults in my enemy systems. Sometimes, a dummy will continue to deal damage even after an attack. Other times, they get stuck in their jousting state, unable to follow the player like normal but also unable to deal damage. I haven't had the chance to fix all these issues but I am very tempted to remake them again, given how janky they are!

In regards to the enemy combat, I have started to improve this. Enemy attacks now use a hitbox collider, rather than distance based checks. This is a much needed improvement as it gives me more control over attack shapes. We also intend to make the attack animations much more dynamic so that we can better indicate enemy attacks.

I'm going to be working on a few combat improvements and level designs this week. Hopefully, I'll have some interesting stuff to show in the next post! Thanks for reading!