Hi everyone! Here’s the usual monthly update about the "The Gate".

This month has been more complicated because of some health problems with a family member (not yet resolved), but I still managed to add five new rooms, in fact, I’ve just finished room 29 (which I renamed room 60 because on my planning sheet I inserted TWO room 29 🙃).

LET'S START

I received new feedback from people who played the demo, I also watched some video about the demo being played, and I noticed that many players get lost navigating the menus, especially the in-game menu accessed with the ESC key.

Let people struggle with controls is bad, really bad, so I decided to add an area at the bottom of the menus where the player can see which keys to press to scroll through entries, which to activate them, and which to close the menus, as you can see in the screenshots.

ROOMS

Within the latest added rooms the story unfolds a bit, I don't want to spoiler anything but the player should be able to get an idea of what's really happening at the Raw Cell Institute, but nothing is clear because ambiguous presences come into play.

I've also added optional dialogues and sections that could add more lore to the adventure.

There are some branches that could change the upcoming events (mostly dialogues and addons availability) depending by the player choices.

MUSIC

I've prepared a couple of new tracks that I need to add into the recently added rooms, but they are on my Yamaha MOX6 keyboard: I need to sample them and create the modules.

This is what I will do next as soon as I've completed this report 😉.

TRIGGERS

In some rooms, I thought about adding tension by simulating faulty and flashing lights; this effect alternates the normal color palette with a darker (or lighter) one at irregular intervals.

This feature was already present in the room's initial configuration, but it can now be linked to triggers: when the player passes through a certain area, this effect can be activated or deactivated.

Where I added it? In a place with 2 bad buddies but it's TOP SECRET! 😀

ENEMIES

In the rooms I recently added there will be new, fearsome enemies: they’re not large for obvious performance reasons, but they’re dangerous and have their own personal behavior scripts with no preset patterns.

Below are some screenshots showing the some of the new enemies.

CONFIGURATION

I’ve moved some variables into a configuration file (config.txt) for two reasons: first, it lets me do quick tests without recompiling the program every time; second, it can help players to tweak parameters on the fly to improve performance.

Here is what it holds now:

doors:<value> → process doors every <value> frames
triggers:<value> → process triggers every <value> frames
enemies:<value> → process enemies every <value> frames
vbline:<value> → used to sync the screen, at the end of every frame the main loop performs a Wait Vbl <value> command to synchronize the screen.

FIXES

Here are some fixes at the engine:

• When entering a door that leads to another door in the same room, all destination door's flags are removed (lock, event). For example a door that is locked and the player exits from that door entering from another one, the destination door is then unlocked.
• I fixed a bug I may have introduced lately without noticing it until I used again the function to print images into the terminal screens. Easy fix, but the caused glitch was pretty ugly.
• I updated the builder program to include in the build package the config.txt file I've mentioned above.
• From time to time I recompile the game to see if everything is okey: not problems has emerged so far.

QUESTIONS

⚠️ Now it's time to hear your voice: some players who have tested the demo has reported that the controls are a bit hard to learn, especially because of the combo keyboard + mouse.

The point is that I have no other idea about how to implement an alternative control.

The player have to aim and use the left mouse button to shoot and/or use the right mouse button to activate the equipped secondary device, while he moves using the classic wasd keys + Space (to interact with items) + Esc (to enter the game menu).

Someone suggested to offer the opportunity to replace the keyboard with a joystick: do you think is it worth? I mean, you prefer joystick + mouse over a keyboard + mouse control?

Let me know what do you think, and if you want Joystick + mouse I will add support for it.

IDEAS

Since a few days, I was thinking to add the possibility for the player to fiddle with terminals like if they were typing commands into a shell prompt. The intent was to increase immersion with some more hacking sessions with real commands.

The good news is the finally I figured how to add this feature to the terminal's script system without rewriting the code, the bad news is that I haven't started yet to implement it, but I'm pretty sure it should work just fine (unless AMOS Pro explodes in my face!).

What do you think? Do you like the idea to type commands into a terminal shell to find secrets and resolve mysteries?

That's all for now! I'm going to leave you with this little bastard running on a rail 😬

Operation Steel Sword? 🤔