De/Man Devlog 3 : The fog is coming

Welcome back to the third instalment of my devlog series. This month I tackled level props, weapon models and the sisyphean task of improving AI!

Basic gameplay additions

After last months Devlog, I got straight to work adding a few subtle but important gameplay additions, the first of which being Vertical Auto aim.

While De/Man is primarily a top-down game, I still wanted to be able to incorporate different levels of elevation when the time comes to start producing maps. Inspired by games such as DOOM, I came up with an "auto aiming" system for projectiles handling heights.

Essentially, bullets will slowly descend from any elevation, but can only travel up small changes of elevations (such as stairs) without hitting a surface. This means that a player on top of a tall ledge can't be hit by shots fired below, but also that a player below a ledge can somewhat dodge bullets by staying close to the wall.

Another addition you may notice in the gameplay above is the slightly extended UI. This comes in the form of 2 small touches, a Dash and an Armour indicator. I covered dashes last Devlog, but armour is new. De has a small pool of 25 armour which will take damage before her health does. However, unlike health, this armour will recharge if she avoids damage for a certain amount of time, allowing the player to take a few hits before taking "permanent" damage.

Enemy AI

After a short break following the GMTK-Jam (which I will discuss later), I jumped straight back into action and started working on the enemy AI. With the AI, I wanted to create a versatile system similar to how weapons are handled; where a basic template can be altered to create a large variety of different enemies through simply altering a few stats.

One of the ways I decided to implement this was to incorporate an aggression and caution stat to each enemy type. This stat will help determine what action the enemy should take in any given situation, and along with weapon variety, should allow even basic enemies to feel wildly different from each other. This isn't to say all enemies will be the same but with a few stat tweaks however, as I already have plans for some more unique attributes to assign to certain enemy types.