Polishing

This past two weeks has had me working on cleaning up the game, tracking down bugs, fixing issues and generally just polishing the heck out of it.

Progressing nicely

There's something really satisfying about actually finishing up UI elements that've been in the game since nearly day one. I cleaned up the intro sequence, added some transitions and boom, it now feels like a more professionally made game.

One of the major changes made to the game was to add a concept of Adaptive Difficulty. I play a lot of Hunt: Showdown and one of the core things I really love about the game is it's player-star-ratings. On its surface it's a six star rating, players start at two, and go up or down depending on who they kill and who they're killed by. If a three star takes out a four star, the four star's rating will drop drastically, maybe even dropping them to three, while the three star player's rating will increase a little towards four. It's a simple representation of an MMR system that tells you just enough detail at a glancable level. At art school they alway encouraged us to wear our influences on your sleeve, so, here's Exoloper's Pilot Rank system. Its functionally the same, successfully complete a campaign and your rank will increase, unlocking more difficult enemies, and more enemies in combats. Die or run out of fuel in a campaign and your ranking decreases. Is this a system that's designed to make it easy to drop ranks? Yes. That way, you have some control over how difficult the game is.

Why didn't i just implement a more traditional singleplayer difficulty system? Maybe a difficulty slider in the menu? or the ability to choose easier or harder fights in the campaign map? Two reasons. 1 I want players to show this off. For interloper we had players in our discord showing off crazy strategies for cheesing endless missions, players intentionally taking rubbish loadouts on the most difficult runs, and more. This should be a bit of a badge of honor for players. "I've been 6 rank for 20 campaigns now." (ps: I just added a 6-rank streak indicator as a todo item). 2 Having difficulty be both Adaptive, and Interactive gives the player a reason to strive to do better. Once a slider is set in a menu it's rarely changed, and I learned in Unstoppable that if you constantly provide an easy / medium / hard option then the players will almost always take the easy one. If you know you're not quite at the rank you can handle, then you're encouraged (forced) to give it a go anyway. Worst case scenario? You lose some gear.

There's so many other things I've added to the game during this sprint: Quality of life tweaks such as torso twist rotating your movement facing to match your look facing, instead of it's previous behaviour that reset the torso rotation to match move rotation. UI tweaks like actually implementing full paper dolls for all possible units in the game for allied units. (And making the whole panel a little more legible, there's a whole tangent I could go on about making UI feel right for desktop, but awful for mobile and vice versa.)

To Gameplay tweaks like finally improving the autoaim functions of guns in the game. This is something I feel like I nailed with Interloper, its an incredibly generous amount of autoaim, but it's totally necessary given the speed and complexity of the core control systems. Somehow I hadn't added this to Exo, despite its control scheme being more complex?

There's a lot of polishing and bugfixing that still needs doing, but oh my does the game feel like it's coming along nicely. Fairly soon I'll start opening up the beta to non-interloper players, and I think thats when it'll really start getting real.

Exoloper Tasks completed: