The aiming system has been updated to make it easier for the player to make shots. Before, the aiming offset would increase depending on the distance the player is aiming at from where they are standing. Now, the offset doesn’t apply when the player is standing still, and only comes into effect when the player shoots or starts moving.
This ensures that the first shot the player makes is always on target where they aim.
GDC 2023
Most of this month was spent on creating a polished build for GDC (Game Developers Conference). This polished build was used to pitch to various publishers during the conference, and I got mostly positive feedback from everyone I met, and some are even interested in the game. This is good for TACTICAL BANDITS, and I am going to continue talks with them for the next few months and see if they lead to anywhere.
Summary
As planned, this was a quiet month regarding development of TACTICAL BANDITS. Next month I am going to fix some bugs I saw in the GDC build, apply some of the feedback I received on the game, and most importantly continue with the levels.
By the end of next month, I should have over 15 new levels ready for the game. Most of these will be singleplayer levels, but there will be a few multiplayer levels for players to try (for players who have been given early access).
This month I spent most of my time creating levels for singleplayer mode. The first two weeks went slow, so I decided to speed up my process by buying and creating some tools to speed up my process. One of the tools I created was a simple building generator. This saved me a lot of time for levels set in the city region, allowing me to customize a building with just a click of a button.
Now with my new tools, I have been creating levels much faster while still keeping the high-standards I have for them.
I have also been going back to my singleplayer levels I created at the beginning of the month and have been updating them. This is because as I have created more levels, I have learned what works and what doesn’t work. This will lead to a more coherent experience for the player when playing singleplayer mode.
Multiplayer Levels
I have spent this month also testing out some multiplayer level ideas and see what works and what doesn’t work. Multiplayer levels will be much different compared to singleplayer levels, mainly due to how the camera works (camera cannot rotate in multiplayer mode but can in singleplayer mode).
I will start focusing on multiplayer levels in a few months, but I felt it was good to get some ideas in the editor now and test them out, to see what works and what does not work.
Summary
This month started slow but I managed to pick up the pace with level creation. Next month will be much quieter as I will be focusing on creating a polished slice of TACTICAL BANDITS for GDC, so I do not expect myself to be very productive. My goal for the next few months is just to keep creating levels, primarily for singleplayer and multiplayer modes, before moving onto creating levels for the other game modes (Challenge and Horde modes).
I created the tutorial mode this month, and then re-iterated over it four times from the feedback I got. The tutorial now shows all the core gameplay elements a player will see in the game, which will be important when onboarding new players. This should lead to less players being turned away from the game when they first start to play it. Depending on if I add any new features to the game in the future, the tutorial mode is ready now.
Camera
I have also updated the camera for singleplayer game modes (I still have to work on updating the camera for multiplayer game modes, but that will be done within the next few months). Some of the changes I have done is placed the camera little further back so the player can see the level more, make it rotate more top-down when the player has started aiming or shooting to give them a clearer view of the area, and I have made the camera rotate in increments.
The last change is the most important as I always wanted to keep camera rotation in the game to be less restricted with level design, but I also noticed that rotating the camera was more of an annoyance for players trying to set it right perfectly and then going into fight. Now, when the player presses a button, the camera will rotate in a 90 degree clockwise or anti-clockwise direction. This feels much cleaner and still allows me to be less restrictive with my level designs.
Focus
A feature that was hard to showcase to players was the focus ability. Focus allows the player to slow down the game time so that they have more time to react to what is happening in the level.
To help it stand out, I made a visual effect that shows focus has been activated. This allows players to immediately see it is working. To ensure that the player knows that focus is still active, I decided to darken up the borders of the screen to give a more "focused-on-character" view. Both these changes put together makes the focus ability easy to stand out and understand.
Another change I made to the focus ability is that it now slowly refills itself over time. Initially, it could only be refilled by killing someone, which I now find too punishing for players. I decided to still fill the focus meter fully when the player kills someone, but also slowly fill the focus meter by itself when the player isn't using it. This gives less inexperienced players a chance to still enjoy the game.
Weapons
I decided to make the weapons a bit friendlier and less punishing for players. The first thing I did was decreased the aim distance offset increase amount of all ranged weapons. The aim distance offset is how much offset of the aim will increase the further the player aims at something from where they are standing. It’s a simple change, which already feels like a big change the gameplay.
Weapons can also now be holstered (which is done automatically) when a player decides to carry an item, such as a fuel canister. This allows the player to immediately fight back if they get pushed into a tight situation instead of a certain death for them.
Aim Assist
This is the most recent change I have made this month, and I am still working out some bugs with this feature. The basic concept is that if the player is aiming over a character, the cursor will automatically lock on that character's position.
This is great because players do not have to be 100% accurate with their aiming to ensure that their aim cursor is over the character. This is especially important since this game has an isometric camera, which makes it already hard to be sure where a player is aiming.
GUI
I have made slight changes to the gameplay GUI, which was just moving stuff around. But the biggest change I made with the GUI is that there are now in-game prompts when you are playing to show you what you can do. So far, prompts come up in-game when a player is in front of a door to show that they can knock or open it. This will be especially good for new players when they first start playing the game and are still not accustomed to the controls yet.
Singleplayer
Most of this month was spent on coding and fixing bugs in the singleplayer mode and working on creating new levels. This is a big task but I feel like I am making good progress on it, and I feel like some of the levels I have designed can be repurposed to multiplayer levels with a few changes.
Summary
There was a lot of work done, and re-done, this month. The project is still on-track to be released early next year. The game is looking and feeling better as I spent more time with it, and I will be soon looking forward to bringing the game to some events and showing it to more people.
I created most, if not all, stats that will be tracked in TACTICAL BANDITS. This wasn’t a big task, but it would have become an annoying the task the longer I left it, due to the code-base getting bigger as the development goes on. With all the stats being tracked properly meant I was also able to complete the stats menu show that players can track their own stats in the game.
Summary
I did not do much this month and I already planned not to, mainly due to the holidays and me having some time off. Apart from the stats, I also cleaned up the code and fixed minor bugs.
I started worked on the tutorial mode this month, and that should be complete early next month. After that I will be solely focusing on the singleplayer mode and its levels for the next 2 months.
I tried to keep this update short and sweet so that everyone can continue enjoying their holidays, and I will be looking forward to making bigger updates in the new year!
After playing uncountable number of versus matches, I noticed a pattern after playing hundreds of multiplayer matches (against bots)… it is near impossible to create long kill-streaks. This is mainly due to the limited non-regenerating health every character has. So I had two options in this case: either create a health system that regenerates when the player takes no damage, or create a healing ability. I decided to go with the latter.
In this case, there are various health packs scattered across a level that a player can go to and heal themselves at. To stop spamming, the health pack disappears and re-appears after a while.
So far, it has allowed me to get much bigger kill streaks and it has not modified the core-gameplay loop, which I am happy with.
Ammo Pick Ups
Similar reasons to me creating the health pickups. Players struggle to get large killstreaks due to the limited ammo every weapon has. So I had another two options in this case: either create weapons with more weapons or create a reloading ability. I decided to go with the latter.
Similar to health pickups, players can find ammo pickups scattered across the level that they can go to reload their weapon at.
The combination of health and ammo pickups feels right, like it should have been designed since the beginning of the project. But you learn things as the project goes on, like what needs to be modified or added to make the gameplay loop feel good.
Aiming
This was a big one. I noticed aiming issues coming up over time and thought it’s better to fix this sooner than pushing it back and fixing it later. I think I have fixed it, I still am not 100% sure about that or what even was causing it in the first place.
One of my fixes was calculating shots from a fixed height, instead of calculating it dynamically from the muzzle position. The muzzle position always moves because the animations it plays. This meant sometimes the shot calculation came from a different height 1 frame than to the next.
Another fix was rotating the character’s middle spine to face the shot constantly, to make sure the weapon sways less while the character moves. You can see that from the GIF on how less the weapon sways while it is moving around.
Summary
I planned to finish challenge mode, horde mode, and singleplayer mode this month, but I pushed them all back. I was struggling to make them work without knowing what will be in the levels in those specific game modes. Instead, I will create the code for those game modes when I start creating the levels for them, which should make it much easier for myself.
Instead, I focused on updating and fixing the gameplay-loop issues, and fixing a serious bug with the aiming.
It does not feel like I got much done this month, and next month does not look much better. This is mainly due to the holidays and me taking some time off to relax and play some games. The good thing is that code-wise, TACTICAL BANDITS is getting quite close to complete. This means after next month, I will be focusing solely on creating content for the game.
Capture the Loot (known as Capture the Flag in most other games) is a multiplayer game mode I created this month. In the match, there will be two teams who will be trying to steal loot (which are generators) from the opposing team and trying to bring them back to the team’s base to score a point. The first team to reach the designated score wins the match.
Another thing I did was reduce the number of teams in the game from four to two. The main reason for this is because the multiplayer mode is small and will only have a maximum of four characters playing at the same time (excluding the zombies). This means having four teams did not make sense.
Hunted
Hunted is another, and the last, multiplayer game mode I have created for TACTICAL BANDITS. In Hunted, one character is chosen at random as the hunted and the other characters have to kill him before the round is over. If the hunted survives until the end of the round he gets a point, and if the hunted dies in a round, all the other characters get a point.
The winner is the first characters to reach the score limit. If there are multiple characters who reach the score limit at the same time, then it will be whoever reaches the highest score first.
To keep the game interesting, the hunted has 1 life but can hold and use ranged weapons, while the hunters have unlimited lives but can only use baseball bats to kill the hunted. I feel this will be one of the better and more interesting game modes, and I can’t wait for players to try it out.
Civilians
Civilians were been in TACTICAL BANDITS for a long time, but I haven’t had a chance to update them since the earlier prototypes. So I decided to spend a few days just updating the civilians and making them work with some of the new game mechanics. This was quite an easy task and should lead to plenty of exciting levels and missions in the future.
Art
The first logo for TACTICAL BANDITS was made a long time ago by a talented artist (Ya Wen Huang), but it was made with a very short turnaround which meant the artist only had a few hours to create it. It was good enough for me at that stage as I just needed something ready for the Steam page.
Now that I have the schedule planned out, I decided to update the art, and I must say that I really like it. I feel like the art really shows of the feeling of the game and should hopefully attract more potential players to check out the game.
Summary
Multiplayer versus is now pretty much complete code-wise, which means I can now focus on the other game modes. I would have liked to have it done a few weeks earlier, but sometimes you have to iterate stuff until it works as you vision it.
Next month I will be focusing on Challenge mode, Horde mode, and continue working on the singleplayer mode.
I created 3 new levels for the multiplayer game modes for the test builds. These new levels were simple levels with some interactivity (look both ways when crossing the road). I found these levels good to play, but I am biased since I have been playing my game for nearly a year now. So I sent the build out to a few people and got some feedback to it.
Most of the feedback revolved around these 3 points:
The camera zooms in too fast when a character dies
Bots are too good
There needs to be more open-space on the levels
I have managed to fix the camera zoom in speed and stopped the bots from being terminators (slower shooting reaction, worse aim), and that has fixed these issues. The last feedback point I will not apply to these levels, as they were only for testing and pitching. Instead, I will apply the last feedback to future levels, and build upon the good points of the level design and fix the bad points.
I also fixed Photo Mode (yes, TACTICAL BANDITS has a photo mode!). This bug must have been in since I started creating multiplayer game modes, as I originally designed photo mode to only work with singleplayer mode. This wasn’t the biggest bug, but it does tell me that I need to design game controllers that handle new game modes more easily, instead of me creating new code for every new game mode.
Apart from that, I have created and updated my builds several times thanks to all the feedback I have gotten so far in this month alone. This was quite a short monthly update, but a lot of the work was bug fixes. Next month, I will be sending out the game to publishers (publishers can reach out to me if you are interesting in trying the game) and I will also start working on the base of the singleplayer mode. This will be quite a big task and I should have it done before the end of the month.
It was a slow start this month as I said in my previous development update, but I managed to get a lot of work done, including local multiplayer, new game modes, GUI, fixes and steam builds ready for early players!
The main priority this month was getting local multiplayer working. This included new bots that understand the game modes, zombies that will chase players AND bots during local multiplayer matches, and new controls for players during local multiplayer matches.
The bot logic was quite simple to create and I used a simple finite-state machine to ensure the bot always knows what to do, including attacking opposition characters, defending itself from zombies, and picking up weapons when its ammo is running low. All this was important to create a tough, but realistic, opponent to play against, or with in multiplayer matches.
One thing I did not manage to do was create bots that have personalities, which is something I will do later in development. What I mean by personality is a bot that could prefer to shoot from far, or a bot that prefers to use melee weapons over ranged weapons. This will create more unique bots that players can eventually identify and learn how to play against properly.
One great thing from creating bots is that I can create matches using just bots and they can all play against each other without my intervention. This was great for testing different scenarios and weapons and see how they play in a normal match.
I have so far created 3 different local multiplayer game modes, which are Death Match, Stock Match, and Hardcore Death Match. Some fans of my previous games will remember these are similar game modes from my previous game called Akuto: Showdown, and they would not be wrong. These were some of the most enjoyable game modes in that game, and I am hoping it will be the same in this game. I will be creating more local multiplayer game modes in the future so that there is at least one game mode that everyone actually enjoys in there.
The local multiplayer player controls have changed compared to the singleplayer player controls. This was due to me not wanting to have up to 4 aiming reticles from all the players on the screen at the same time. This would make the screen too busy and players will always be aware when someone is aiming right at them.
I have instead opted to place the aiming reticle under the character, with the health and ammo of a weapon above the character. All GUIs for the player are only shown when they are being used or a value has been changed.
But losing the aiming reticle on the screen did make it harder to kill characters from a long-distance, so I decided to create a simple aim assist that rotates the player slightly if a character is within sight of the player, but not directly in line with their reticle. It is not noticeable at all that there is an aim assist, but it greatly made shooting from a long distance more enjoyable.
Another underrated thing I added was slow motion visual effects when someone dies. This creates a greater emphasis on a character when they die. I had a similar effect like this in Akuto: Showdown, but it slowed down the game which was quite annoying for players not involved in a fight where someone dies. To overcome this, I have created a local slow motion visual effect that only affects the character who dies. This means the game doesn’t suddenly slow down for every player in the game, but just for someone who has died.
You can see the difference between having a slow motion visual effect and not having it by clicking the link at the bottom of this announcement.
Apart from that, I fixed plenty of weapon, GUI, and gameplay bugs. Next month I will be creating a new levels, updating the Steam build, and asking players to try out the game on Steam. This will hopefully get me some good feedback to see if I am going in the right direction with the game or if I should be focusing on something else.
A text-light update this month for the development update for TACTICAL BANDITS, where I talk about new weapons, updated zombies, new GUI, and a CONSOLE platform that TACTICAL BANDITS has already been approved for. You can read more about it here: https://lovepreet.com/2022/08/july-2022-update/
Since this was a short update, I have also embedded prototype development footage of TACTICAL BANDITS from mid-2021. back when TACTICAL BANDITS was going in a different direction.
THE NEW GAME FROM HUT 90
We are proud to announce our next game in development called TACTICAL BANDITS, an extremely challenging top-down action game where the player travels on a journey to the West Coast to reach the Last Settlement, the last known human survivor camp.
Join us on DISCORD to follow the development of TACTICAL BANDITS and more news about our other games!!
