I’m constantly pondering what to do about the “boss room” for the game. Honestly I’ve been stumped on how to make it fun. In the meantime I’ve done a bunch of smaller things on the game such as:

Another map

I tried my hand at making a much much bigger map:

The thought was that the huge white cubes would be some kinda skyscrapers, the cones would be some kind of rubble breaking up sight-lines to make the game play a little closer range. I wanted the player to start at the edge of the city and have a set of terminals to control.

The building facades were things I made for a previous project that I never did much more with (see https://willkolb.com/?p=979). Then I applied the fence tool I made (see https://willkolb.com/?p=1146) to give me the ability to quickly spin up those buildings. If I added some randomization tools to the model I think I would have a tool I probably distribute, but I’d have to re-write in C++ to make distribution cleaner.

The map is MUCH bigger than anything I made so far and it showed a few holes in what I was thinking. The big one was that its kinda boring walking long distances without some kind of sprinting.

Sprinting (and Footstep audio rework)

I added a few things here, the sprinting (obviously) the head bobbing and the audio playback tracks. The foot steps are still not amazing, it should be the same footsteps just a bit faster and pitched differently. However I’m just mixing between two sounds at the moment. You can see the audio graph below

It seems like a lot but really all it really has is that the red “Sprinting” input block feeds an audio mixer that goes from walking footsteps to running footsteps. Everything else is just for sound levels and multipliers. I’m still new to the metasound stuff but there’s some info here if interested (https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/metasounds-the-next-generation-sound-sources-in-unreal-engine). Interestingly enough this is probably the most applicable thing to my day-job. If metasounds worked on embedded targets my life would become exponentially easier.

Boss Doors

This is kinda wierd to demonstrate visually but basically those two white blocks are “boss doors” that will only go down once you capture all points on a map. What that buys me is a place to put all of those overpowered bots I made such as the rocketeer (see https://willkolb.com/?p=750). I have it in there in a very hacked manner where essentially the cubes are marked as “boss doors” and then just straight up delete themselves if there’s no more points to capture. In the future I want to put more of a process to take down the doors once the controls points are captured.

Weapon Handling/Damage

I realized one of the most annoying things is that shooting has WAAYYY to much recoil and its very hard to hit targets so I increased damage and lowered recoil so you have a bit more power on your side. My thought is that I want the player to loose around 5% of health per encounter and each encounter with a bot should take around 5-ish seconds. I have no way to characterize these numbers but simply going by feel. At the end of the day this is something I need to catch if I send out copies to friends for play testing (maybe I should add telemetry?)

Mantis Turret

The turrets kinda suck in the boss area at the moment they’re just sticks with tubes on the top:

Not very menacing and they’re more annoying than anything. So I started thinking about how I would build a kinda moving turret and I came up with this guy:

Which fits the same idea that the bots have where the top gun can be pretty much whatever I want just by modeling some kind of mount for it. The gun in this case is a new weapon I’m currently modeling/rigging.

Which takes some inspiration from Helldivers Autocannon (https://helldivers.fandom.com/wiki/AC-8_Autocannon) But really is more of a Barrett M82 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_M82) turned upside down with a Bren gun style sight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bren_light_machine_gun).

The gun is far from complete but the Mantis side is rigged and in game:

It was surprisingly fast to get working because I found out the proper way to use control rigs and modular rigs (https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/modular-control-rigs-in-unreal-engine , plus see See the wrong way to use these here: https://willkolb.com/?p=661). Originally I thought it was a binary choice but I realized the modular rig is really just a way to auto generate a complex control rig. So now I probably should go back through my models and rework them, but really I think I’ll keep going with what I have. I still have a dream that all of the bots are physically animated (such as gta4) but I think that dream is becoming a nightmare of technical debt.

Future thoughts

I think my primary map for gameplay testing will be that small alley-like map instead of the large city. Mostly due to the smaller size which should lead to a quicker gameplay loop, I need to add more complexity to the boss room, add some rooms in windows and maybe some map destruction elements (such as windows, wall breaking etc.). Finally I wanted to try to add some vertical elements to each of the bots. I might throw on some more artifacts to make the game less about trying to hit a small horizontal line on the screen. Also a new name is warranted, “BlackLace” was from cyberpunk and any of those elements are straight up gone now.

A bunch to do and I’m aiming for a June-ish first build to send to people for gameplay testing, not for any reason just to give myself a bit of pressure. Good think it just started to get cold in Massachusetts, now I can justify hiding inside on my computer all day.