Long time, no see

Long time, no see. Perhaps a better name for a stealth game?

Joking aside, I apologise for the long gap since the last post. That new job, a summer holiday, plus an abundance of Real Life has kept me away. Also, wrapping up the long series on procedural generation took some time and I just felt like just focusing on the code again for a bit.

So what have I been up to? After finishing the procedural generation prototype it felt like I should switch into “production mode” and start building the game for real. However, I was also waiting for the next major release of the Godot game engine, version 4, to come out.

Insert your own joke here.

This version promised some significant improvements in areas I knew I was going to use, such as tile maps and network multiplayer capabilities. The release was only a month or two away, but what to do in the mean time?

I decided to revisit the original prototype in Godot 3, but this time fleshing out the graphics and controls based on my experience building Undead Farmstead. I also wanted to try out some more sophisticated co-op game mechanics. Still just a vignette, and not yet related to any of the procedural generation of levels.

Players got a selection of lock picks, remote server crasher, vulnerability scanner, door hacker, and a security camera rebooter. Their mini mission was to unlock the big doors at the end of the corridor without setting off any alarms.

I roped in Jack and Ozric once more to test it out. Some topics like personalised notifications and fog of war made a lot of sense and weren’t too surprising. But it’s the surprises I like. Leaving doors that could be opened but not closed was frustrating. Putting a lone phone on a desk in an otherwise empty room, which I did purely for an interesting bit of visual design, felt like an obvious clue to the players, which again lead to frustration. With great level design comes great responsibility.

And then, finally, Godot 4 was released. I started the writing the game for real. More on that next time.