Medical Necessity Dev Diary #7
Happy Saturday everyone! As always, we’ve got exciting things to report on our Medical Necessity progress!
The biggest change is that we’ve finally finished the weapon roster, so let’s go over the different guns that will be present for the initial campaign! These six weapons will be wielded by enemies and allies, and can be equipped by the player as healing versions.
(Note that we gave the player 2000 extra health in these example GIFs just so we could get lengthy footage of the bots firing)
The Sniper rifle is the dedicated long-range weapon. It has a slow firing speed and long reload, and a laser sight helps the player track who’s about to lose a large chunk of health.
The Assault rifle fires in three-round burst, making it the best burst healer of the long-range weapons. Its primary downside is that it requires more frequent reloads due to firing three bullets a shot.
The Shotgun is the only weapon with a wide pellet spread. It’s devastating at close quarters, and bots with the shotgun will rush their target to deal maximum damage per shot. The shotgun reloads a single shell at a time and has a slight delay behind each shot.
The Minigun requires revving up, but then fires a devastating medley of powerful but inaccurate bullets with decent range. Most bots will consider him a priority target since he can decimate any other firearm with his sustained fire.
The Submachine gun fires low-damage bullets with low range and medium accuracy. Like the shotgun, the SMG is considered a close-range weapon, and bots wielding it will attempt to close the gap between their target so their gun deals the most damage.
The Lever-action rifle is semi-automatic and fires medium-damage bullets with high accuracy. It has a large clip size and can fire rapidly, but it reloads one bullet at a time.
Finalizing these six classes was the big project this week, since it required Pat and Ben finishing the reload system and the priority list where each type of bot determined which enemy they would target first if given multiple options. But Ben has also been slowly transitioning into more of a level-design role. We’ve created a couple different maps, testing different arena types like open, cluttered, or segmented into lanes. Also, now that we have multiple levels, Pat and Carry have been exploring the method by which our levels link up.
The core process by which a level ends after victory. The player’s team revives, the player can choose to take a moment to calm down before walking to the next level, whereupon the camera follows the player into the new section and the next round starts. We’re going to drastically increase teammate’s movement during this transition period so that the player doesn’t have to wait for them.
We want each level to feel like a part of a bigger campaign, so we’ve been incorporating them into a single playable space that gets played in sections. The player’s team eliminates any enemies within the current section, and upon success the player is able to move to the next one. If the player’s entire team dies, they only need to replay their current section, to encourage the fast-paced pace core to our game’s philosophy. Our goal is that the lulls between winning a section and moving onto the next create periods of ‘low intensity’ to offset the ‘high intensity’ firefights within the levels themselves. As this video talks about in depth, most good video games stagger their action between periods that let the player catch their breath, and without these transition periods the players were finding themselves overstimulated by immediately launching into a new level after completing the last.
It’s exciting finally being done with the core elements and getting to work on more narrative and story-driven parts of the game! I can’t wait to talk to you about the big things we complete next week, since we’re getting into the exciting part of playing with the pieces we’ve created to design a series of fun levels. Talk to you then!
If you have any questions about our game or our development, you can always contact me here on The Daily SPUF or on Steam. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to updating you all next week!