Dev Blogs

February

19th February 2019

With the additions of the workforce and integration with the base upgrades, the game felt more strategic than before. An improvement worth taking, but not enough to call it a game yet. Creating the catastrophic events was an opportunity to emphasize existing base attributes to the player.

Events like reactor meldowns, fires and turret malfunctions added more intensity to the game play. In terms of further shaping gameplay mechanics, there were many options. The core gameplay still needed work, but how to progress?

To find answers we needed to create more monsters, more unique battle scenarios. With the crew we brainstormed two dozen concepts, along with behavioural traits that sounded good in theory, but in terms of energy and time some ideas were too ambitious. Nonetheless, variation is critical. Variation can be used to improve the viability of various strategies, which empowers the player to find their own style and see how far it takes them.

By now there were about forty traits or skills that an enemy could have. It sounds like a lot, but when enemies have four or five traits they are repeated in time. More enemies were created, and the nature of battles could be better planned out. Slow, behemoths that absorbed immense damage created suspense. Fast flying horrors that created pressure. The fast encounters punished cooldown recharges. The building blocks were coming together one by one.