"Antibody" on Beta Branch - [July 25: Volume Render]

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We're starting to use the beta branch to transfer builds internally while we work on Antibody to get it ready for its initial release (Observatory v0.2). If you'd like to come along for the ride, you can opt in and see how it goes. Sometimes the build will be broken while we're actively testing stuff, but I'll try to keep it generally stable when I leave it alone for a while.

To opt in to the beta program (Hamster Slide and Phantasmagoria are not affected):

1. Right click on Observatory in the Steam Library games list
2. Pick "Properties," then go to the "Betas" tab
3. Switch from the default dropdown option to "unpolished"

To change the video quality in the current version of Antibody, hold the Alt key while the application launches. This brings up that Unity startup window, where you can switch the video preset (resolution only affects standard monitors, and don't bother looking at the input section).

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Here are some current plans for three enemy types in Antibody:



(Note that every aspect of this is subject to change.)

1. Petalman: Large sawblade-looking enemy, charges forward to attack, potentially smashing through scenery (if implementation constraints allow it). If they hit you with the ramming attack, you die. Petalman is seen in the trailer, but in that version they're swarmy and shooting pellets instead of having a more appropriately intense attack type.

2. Squiddie: Attaches to walls and reaches out with twisty tendrils to grab ships and latch onto them. Once attached, the Squiddie leaves the wall and acts as a heavy/awkward "ball and chain" until knocked off or shot. If they stay attached for too long, they destroy the ship.

3. Mimic: Turns invisible. Can possess objects like obstacles, pickups, or allied ships to disguise themselves (think TF2's Spy + something from Prop Hunt). If they possess the player, they creep inside the ship and the player is killed (after a spooky GOT YOU type of sound, directly behind your head).

I'm still trying to figure out a good baseline enemy - I'd like it to be dangerous enough for a one-on-one encounter to feel tense, but it can't be so obnoxious that it's a pain in the ass to be encountering them regularly.

Generally speaking, my goal here is to get a "cinematic horror feel" out of a purely dynamics-driven game. I want the game mechanics to do the stuff that the horror movie writers usually do (careful pacing, ambiguity, fake-outs, etc), and I want them to do it in a way that's not pre-scripted - this seems difficult, but it also seems feasible.

To put it another way: Getting better at playing the game shouldn't completely stop it from being scary.

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A short video clip of the game's new petalman behavior, described above in the spoiler block (the rest of the spoiler is a few other potential ideas for enemy types). Feeling good about the change so far!

Turns out I've already dropped one of the planned ideas in the above post, but it's not anything major (no more "everything is one-hit-kill-all-the-time" - it was feeling like it'd be awkward to balance the game's difficulty with that constraint).

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Gameplay demonstration (about two and a half minutes with some commentary)

Little clip of an updated bubble-rendering method[gfycat.com]

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We're starting to test out a second enemy type now - it's not one of the three listed above, but those are still planned.

So: why do we need a new enemy type if we already have those other two that aren't implemented yet?

This new enemy type is being added in response to a new feature that might seem completely unrelated to the gameplay: an upgraded Level-of-Detail system. If you're not already initiated in vidja game lingo, an LOD system is responsible for making sure that distant objects are drawn with fewer triangles and less detail than nearby objects. By doing this, you can get away with using higher-detail geometry up close, and you can also create larger scenes.

So, once we had bigger gameplay spaces, it became clear that the existing enemy types weren't designed with large arenas in mind. This is okay, though - we can introduce a new enemy specifically to help with this problem.

I don't have any official names for any of these enemies yet, so for now I'm calling him the antiscout. He has a flashlight which shows his vision cone, and he uses some kind of vague sensor that can detect the player from a distance. They're gradually sniffing you out all the time, so you can't wait in any one place for too long. If they find you, they sound a loud horn/alarm/etc (David's making a sound for this soon), and they call over all the other enemies in a very large radius to deliver some justice.

We'll record a video of some gameplay with these guys soon, but for now, here's the placeholder art with a lights-on animation, and {LINK REMOVED}here's a screenshot of some antiscouts looming in the distance.

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I'm starting to work on an allied mothership, which will eventually serve a few different purposes in the game. For now, it's the spawning area at the beginning of a round.

Here's a clip of what it looks like to take the jump into hostile territory.[giant.gfycat.com]

Image of the (early WIP) exterior of the ship.[i.imgur.com]

This stuff is up on the beta branch, but there's no tutorial for the game yet, so if you want to play it, you'll have to show me you're here and ask how!

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There's now a simple progression of five levels to play through (more once we have more mechanics to mix together). Return to the mothership after completing a round's objective (either activating a few energy pellets or destroying all the enemies) to move on to the next level. We'll have tips and stuff as you go before Antibody hits the default branch, but for now it's still pretty cryptic.

I also managed to get some basic 3D volume rendering working at speed on our DK2 (we're getting our release-version Rift soon, which will likely require a bit of extra optimization for the higher screen res). Here's a clip from before it was re-implemented in a faster manner (the new method looks the same, but is substantially more efficient). I'd definitely like to add some lighting from the player's headlights, and possibly the allies, too? Volume lighting is beautiful and adds a really great feeling of modernity for me. Might just use some simpler approximation for the allies (like a cone mesh with a fresnel shader), like we're doing for the red antiscout lights.