Dev journal - beefier melee, quality of life improvements

Heyo! We're in the home stretch before the Steam Game Festival (ICYMI: it's been postponed until June 16). As such, the last dev cycle has been focused almost entirely on bug fixes and quality of life stuff.

Beefier Melee

One thing that's always felt a bit weak to me was the melee attacks, so I recently took the time to beef them up x100. I checked a number of references--including the classic Condemned: Criminal Origins--and modeled the new melee based on these. I sped the animations way up, added the requisite trail renderer, and also took the opportunity to greatly improve the collision detection and hitboxes. Here's how that's looking:

Note that this only applies to plank and pickaxe so far. I do plan to go back and do the fist at some point, although definitely not to the same extent, as it's meant to be a very light/weak attack.

Interact Dots
The interaction points for some objects--in particular, exits--weren't super obvious since they didn't have outlines like other items. To make this a bit easier, I've added "interact dots" (thanks to God of War for the idea, heh).

This should make them much easier to interact with, especially in the heat of the moment.

Along with this, I've also added proper interaction outlines to the upgrade stations (workbench, dark altar).

Quick Restart
Previously you would have to pause the game after dying in order to restart (inspired Half-Life 2, but I could see how it might not be obvious to some). With this change, you can now press any key to restart (a prompt will appear after 5 seconds).

Thanks to my new collaborator, Lukas, for his help with this.

Better Spawning
The hallways connecting rooms are cluttered with props, but over time, the spawning logic kind of got away from me, and you'd end up with barrels falling over, blocking passages, etc.

I've taken the time to clean this up, and you'll now see much more consistent clutter. As a bonus, it creates these neat little hiding spots between rooms:

Bug Fixes
Whew, lots of these! With the extra week, I was able to fix pretty much all of the bugs I wanted to, including a few that were really nagging me! 🙌

• Only allow shielding from limited angles
• Improve mutant miner AI behaviour (minimize likelihood of them walking intro each other)
• Hide beacon launcher on death
• Fix for beacon impact projector disappearing after pausing
• Fix for beacon impact projector rendering when no beacons
• Fix for enemies not always finding a random wander target
• Fix for debris culled with room, causing it to disappear in some cases
• Disable interaction with lockers (until they actual contain things, heh)
• Fix some missing colliders (was making some crate drops difficult to collect)
• Replace Windows NT screen with something less likely to lead to legal issues 😉
• Fix for rats spawning outside of level

Edit: spoke too soon, captured this choice GIF while prepping this post! 😅

"I have to go now, my planet needs me."