90% of the past month was spent working on one level. However, that includes level design, art, AI, game mechanics, optimization, and everything else under the game development sun.
So let’s get into it.
Level Design
This palace level has a fairly straightforward design: two main corridors, a foyer, living areas, a balcony, and a lot of side rooms, all of them filled with enemies. Work with your fellow troops to get everything cleared out.
Art
I figured out I’m not necessarily bad at art, I just never wanted to set aside the time to work on it. Once I did though, everything started to look way better overall. It’s now more than just a few scattered props and blank walls, it’s an actual level. Amazing.
AI
I didn’t want to just make a bunch of mindless drones that stand there and take it while you gun them down. These are trained soldiers, so they’ll be fighting back, taking cover, running from grenades (or throwing them back at you), and trying to kill you as hard as you’re trying to kill them. Luckily, your comrades are all doing the same to them.
Game Mechanics
Just about everything else was rewritten or looked at from the ground up to make it easier to work with and more fun to play. The UI received a complete refactor to make switching weapons more intuitive and give immediate feedback, nodes were broken down into other scenes and instantiated only when needed, and mostly making everything else easier for me to work with in the future.
Optimization
I put this off until I couldn’t take it anymore. However, this ended up being easier than I thought it would be. For Godot, the biggest things you can do for optimization is to minimize the usage of process and physics_process as much as possible, enable them only when needed, and connect and disconnect signals when they’re needed. The framerate is now much more stable and playable on modest hardware (Radeon 2700, Radeon 5700 XT) at 1440p. It should run just as well on most other machines.
The level is now very much playable and mostly complete, just some more polish and details to add once everything else is made in order. As for a demo, the release date is still when it’s ready for now. So I’m going to get back to work now so that people can actually play this thing I’ve been working on.
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