Development Blog - Updates, Combat & AI

Heyhey Scientists!

We have been hard at work this month with character designs, control rig, sandbox animations, combat and AI design, loads of voice recording and so much more.

Updates & More

This month we also added 3 New Full Time Team Members, Badguy, Dilly and Bennett. Dilly has been especially hard at work, helping Chaotic Dreams our lead programmer with some of the most fun tasks in his department ... code clean-up!

Since bringing in so many new people often also creates a fair few hours of extra things to debug, we will push back the next release containing 5 additional animations for the sandbox. This will help with sorting out the remaining issues we found during the clean-up.

That way we hope to prevent another one of those 10GB Hot-Fix builds a week after release. Its not that we don´t like hot fixes ... but ... ~

With the recently released Kagura Survivors we learned a whole lot about Steam Releases and also new Unreal Engine Features, including how to properly localize a game. We have dreamed about being able to translate A Nut Between Worlds to many different languages and are looking forward to gradually move towards a translated version!

Don`t forget to give our Steam Developer Page a follow <3

Which languages would you like to see?

Combat!

Disclaimer: We kept things as rough as visually possible in order to make sure everyone understands that the concepts presented here are not final look :)

We originally started with designing a third person combat system. Throughout the exploration of that system, we found that third person needed simply more and also more intricate animations to visually flourish. To avoid the scope creep we ended up designing this simple but unique first person slash & shoot combat system.

Above you can see a basic layout of skills and abilities the player will have. The weapon itself is a transforming weapon, that uses corruption energy to transform into its various forms.

Using your transforming and living weapon, you will attack or cleanse enemies. Cleansing is achieved by attacking corruption elements on their bodies, instead of the bodies itself. A successful cleanse can pacify lower class enemies, fully removing their corruption. Cleansing higher class enemies will reduce their health to zero immediately.

After reaching zero health any enemy will be "wiped from memory" eternally.

Your weapon can transform between two major modes, shooting and slashing. The transformation can be triggered at any time, but in order to shoot, the weapon has to have energy stored. Energy can be gained by interacting (slashing, shooting) corruption blobs in the environment or on enemies.

The weapon has different shooting modes, which range from short range PIUPIU!, over wide open arrays, focused multi-shots, fanning out laser blades and finally fully charged up fat corrupted laser beams.

To make creating boss stages for this system a bit easier for us, we decided to split combat into two types of regions - The Overworld and the corrupted system.

Enemies spawn in a section of the "physical" parts of the virtual world. Together with enemies, virus energy blobs also spawn and regenerate after a time, when being used by the player to charge their weapon.

After defeating the first batch of enemies in the overworld, you can move into the system that's underlying all of the virtual world. 

These sections of corrupted systems resembles the training area from System HQ, but with heavy corruption infestation. Imagine the training areas from any Metal Gear game and you should have a good idea on where we plan to take this. To leave this area a puzzle has to be solved to clear the corruption.

A puzzle can be anything, from an enemy boss, to some more headache inducing logic puzzles.

Next to combat we also have been working on ideas for our WAIFU-AI which addresses both their behaviour out and inside combat.

This is going to be the topic of another dev-blog though, since we need to clean up some animations before showcasing those elements.

What would YOU like to see when it comes to our WAIFU-AI?

Let us know in the comments <3