Ian Cuslidge
Ian is working on the game for at least the next month, doing some level design and general consultation. Say hi to Ian! He's already put together some interesting new designs.
Movement cooldown
There have been nothing but complaints about the movement cooldown. Ian suggested replacing it with a "charge" system similar to Tracer's "blink" ability in Overwatch.
I thought this was a good idea. So now, instead of a single cooldown, the player has three "charges", each with a separate cooldown. Here you can see me burning through all three charges in quick succession, leaving me vulnerable at the end.
I also nearly doubled the crawl speed. Another common complaint.
More health revisions
Another problem was the fact that the game started players with no health. This gives them something to do right away, namely run around the level capturing health, but if players ran into each other early on it was usually game over much sooner than my target match time of 10 minutes.
At first, I tried starting the player with the closest health pickups to their spawn already captured. This made them less vulnerable in the early game, but without any health to collect, players would start looking for each other immediately, again ending the game sooner than I'd like.
I ended up increasing the health cap from 4 to 6. I also start players with 3 "free" health points, i.e. they are not tied to a physical health pickup on the map. This means that once you lose those points, you can't get them back unless you steal the enemy's health. Basically, the overall amount of health in the game goes down over time, which is exactly what I need.
I think this is about the 8th version of the health system. We'll see if this one sticks.
Sanding down sharp edges
This is a constant process, but I thought I'd share one simple example.
Normally, the ability spawn buttons are edge-triggered. Meaning, if you hold down the button, it won't keep spawning. You have to release and press the button again. This means that if you happen to press the button while it is deactivated (for example, while you are in mid-air), the button will not recognize your input. However, you might press the button just before it becomes active, maybe just before landing on a new surface for example. The button will never register your input because it's edge-triggered. This is frustrating.
I put in some code specifically to handle this case. Things are less frustrating. The end.
AI work
The AI can now spawn rockets and force fields. It has a very basic concept of saving up money for upgrades, and it compares the priority of each purchase with the possibility of future upgrades.
I also noticed the AI making jerky crawling movements, so I made the nav mesh generator connect diagonal points as well as adjacent ones:
