Devlog4: Week 3 of post jam develoment

Now was the time to create some opposition for player and also taking smaller systems (like last weeks hacking minigame or this weeks scanner) that are universally used and making them prefab objects, so I can just add them to NPCs or other objects as needed.

• Added risk system
  • I didn’t have any threat of risk of failure, so this was next in line. I don’t like possibility to die/fail by one mistake so I wanted to create system that gradually adds dangers as you risk-level rises, until there is actually a risk of death. 
  • Idea of risklevel is that it adds enemies going through train looking for you, passengers becoming suspicious etc. 
  • Also I feel that punishing starting players too much makes it harder for them to learn the game, so I kinda made risk system backwards: you gain more risk as you succeed, so as you become more accustomed to game systems, game becomes harder. For failure I think that time lost is big enough punishment and later I’ll probably create cooldown system for actions.
  • At the moment, only thing that happens as risk goes up, is that it adds scanner drone looking through traincarts. Oh, that reminds me...
• I also created first threat: scanner drone (or scanner that I can add to any objectives that I need)
  • Enemy moves and stops to scan part of train cart, thus forcing you to move and pick your time for hacking/stealing. If you get caught in its scanner, it raises your risk level quickly, but isn’t instant game over, as I want raising risklevel to be constant source of stress that you can’t avoid fully but try to manage as best you can. Later I’ll add days to have breather and get a checkpoint.
  • I try to achieve some synergy between codes and I already had waitTime variable made for my NPC waypointbased move system, so when they reach waypoint they wait for X time before moving forward. I made the scanner so that if NPC has waypointMover script (I actually use the same script to move my Station objects) and NPC stops to wait, it also activates scanner. I made exeption so I can also have scanner on all the time, but this made it easy to have droid fly to window and scan area, then move forward to next window. 
  • One of these is not hard to avoid at all, if you don't have something else going on, but again the idea to have limited time window to succeed in actions and scanner droid brings some morevariables to take on account. Do you have enought time or low enough risk if one is closing in to where your target is? Or do you wait and take risk of missing your opportunity window?  
  • Also if Player only stays for little time in spotlight, risk rises just a bit for that time, but if Player stays too long, scanner activates alert mode and adds 50 to risk (In future idea is that it leads to spawning hunter enemies to next station, but at this time, I don't have other enemies)
  • Visually I used URP 2D light that only lights up my foreground layer that has NPCs and traincart. This brought nice effect and feeling of depth as drone doesn't scan ground behind it, only inside of traincart, like it was behind window scanning inside. Still I wanted to add something to make connection between spotlight and drone so I added particle system that draws lines from scanner. I also feel that this makes it feel like scanneris more than camera and more like its reading biometric data, that is part of games story and reason why player can't just change clothes and leave the train.

Notes and ideas for later development

• If scanner spots Player after scanning a short while, it goes to hunting mode and just focuses on Player and follows movements (but slowly so Player can try to escape or hack it)
• Hunting enemies that can actually attack player
• Multible effects for risk level 

Goal for next week:

• Upgrading NPCs to addmore chances of risk