medical necessity

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… [Continue Reading]

Hope everyone’s having a great weekend! I’m really excited to show you some of the biggest changes to Medical Necessity yet! Ben has begun work on turning our test maps into full-fledged environments! Our levels will be following a campaign, and that campaign will take the player character and his teammates through multiple different biomes, from deserts and cities to even underground caves. Our first levels will take place in the forest, we plan to theme these levels around “many individual obstacles”, with few indoor environments and large structures. Similar to how every campaign in Left 4 Dead 2 has… [Continue Reading]

Happy Saturday! As always, let’s look at some gameplay footage from our most recent Medical Necessity build and go over the updates we’ve completed this week: If you look at last week’s footage, the first new thing that pops out is probably that green bar at the bottom. That’s the Team Health Counter, an experimental feature Pat added that tracks the total remaining health on the player’s team. Our intention was to aid the player in keeping track of the overall state of the team, to counteract the tunnel vision that playtesters were showing when focusing on their current healing… [Continue Reading]

Another Saturday, another update for Medical Necessity! And we have a lot to talk about this week! First things first, I’m excited to introduce Matt and Steven, our new audio designers! Hailing from San Francisco State University, they’ll be working with Pat for the next few weeks to design the different sound effects, music, and ambiance for our game. We’ve added a lot of different changes, all of which are visible in this GIF, so let’s break them down part by part! Artwise, the player character’s healthbar has changed back to the original, dynamically-colored green circle in order to visually… [Continue Reading]

Happy Saturday everybody! This week started off with a bang when we got to playtest our game with a group of high schoolers from a local college. It was our first mass playtest, and we were super excited when they loved it! So far people enjoy the exhilaration of strafing gunfire while trying to decide who to heal to survive the level, simultaneously putting to rest a debate we’d been having in the sidelines. My original design document planned for the bullets in the game to be hitscan; invisible straight lines drawn from the shooter that instantly hit the first… [Continue Reading]

Hey everybody! Another week, another update for Medical Necessity! You may have noticed our last Dev Diary showcased footage consisting entirely of cylinders firing at each other, well not anymore! Ben’s been hard at work implementing placeholder animations and sprites so we have more attractive characters to watch as we work. It’s not always necessary to have artwork at such an early stage, but by getting the animations complete, we can tie certain behaviors to those animations and it creates less work down the line. Speaking of AI behaviors, Carry and Pat have been hard at work finding new ways… [Continue Reading]