Intro

What you've seen in the video is something that you can download right now, with the link in the description bellow.

it's a demo/test build version, very feature limited, but it does have core mechanics working and ready to be tested.

If you wish to give feedback, then please join the discord channel, the link is also bellow in the video description, you can find updates, daily progress on the game and the link to this build as well.

But now, lets kick off the second devlog and lets talk about what has changed, and what's coming in the future

The last time I uploaded, we didn’t have a name, menu, abilities, gameplay loop, a UI, we couldn’t take damage, we didn’t have any scoring systems, no tracking of the data and so on. These two months of development have been a steep curve, all previously mentioned has been added, and a lot of stuff, invisible to the player, has been implemented, tweaked and tuned.

Oh btw, to leave a match, you have a chip in the back of your head, just take it out, that’s your quit button for now. And there’s sound, your guns actually make sound, bullets passing by, they also make sound, your hands…they make sound.

Can’t believe I even tested this without any sound previously.

The name

Sooo, I’m not going to lie here, I was sitting on the toilet, and this is what I came up with, it could have been much worse, but here it is. 21 Conduit. It will make much more sense once other features of the game are added, mechanics…story, it wasn’t just a random fart.

The Gameplay Loop

The gameplay loop previously was non existent, you would take cover, duck, dodge, shoot back, and that’s it. Right now, you still do that but you are also running out of time, time is your health, time is your armor.
Getting hit takes time away, eliminating enemies adds back time, this has to be tweaked, at some point I managed to farm up like 20 minutes in the infinite mode, but it is what it is, and I think it’s a fun concept.

The menu

In the menu right now, aside from standard play/quit functions you have a modifiers menu. In this menu you can basically modify various functions of the game, this came randomly from me having to add some bool values, to skip repetitive tasks, or ignore certain aspects of the gameplay.
That’s how the first 3 have been born.
Infinite - this mod lets you have an infinite repeating arena, basically a wave system, and this will for sure stay in some form in the game as a mod, for practicing certain segments in the base game, so that you can achieve a better time on the scoreboard.
Upgrades - this basically toggles if you want to have droppable upgrades in the game or not, pretty self explanatory, they are enabled by default.
And the last option for now is the laser, pretty self explanatory, so we’re going to talk more about the upgrades/abilities right now.

The upgrades

The upgrade system allows me to define which upgrades drop, and what the odds are, once the upgrade drops it has a certain lifespan, and it will go away from the level once it’s hit or it “dies”

At the moment we have health and armor drops, infinite ammo, invulnerability and slow-motion. They are pretty self explanatory, they all have different durations, their durations do stack, so picking up two infinite ammos will last twice as long for example. They are right now pretty dynamic, and can change the flow of the game, at the same time, once we add transitioning between arenas, we can also put them at certain parts, as collectables that you can shoot to heal, trigger slow-motion and so on. A fairly nice system that adds a lot of dynamic to each one of your runs.

The UI

The UI is really something that will go through iterations and changes, I had a radial UI at some point that was attached to the arm, now it’s this thing…and who knows what will happen. But it’s fun, dynamic, and does its job. But also, this UI needed to be attached to a body, and now we do have a chest, and we do have hips, you can holster the gun, pick up mags from your hip, and actually feel like there’s something other than virtual air there. I will work on adding a full body some time in the future, but at the moment, these floating hands, chest and hips are a decent starting point, certainly better than what we had previously.

Under the hood

So far, all of these things I talked about, they are visible to the player, but there are a lot of systems that are not. First of all, the way everything works in the game is by making pools, pools and pools and pools of power ups, bullets, enemies, magazines, particles and so on.
Nothing is ever destroyed, and nothing right now is added.

We create these pools every time you boot up the game, and we have them with now constantly. If we load a new level, well, we just loaded the geometry and level audio, everything else, well that came with us. The enemies, their bullets, our bullets, everything, we carry into the match, then we assign these enemies to certain spawn points, to certain groups, and we tell them what to do.

This ensures the best performance that I could milk out of this unoptimized project, and it’s working, it gives better results, and also lets me have a lot of dynamic interactions with these arenas. We can already have different enemy types, light, heavy, armored etc. This build doesn’t have them, I want to rewrite some core mechanics for the enemies first, but the stats dictate this, and we can load stats dynamically. So at some point, armored enemies are coming, tankier enemies, bosses etc. Finding out how to do this really made me happy. Same goes for the magazines, and for a lot of things, this really will speed up development in the long run, I didn’t really need to make it for this demo, but it does save time.

Closing statement

That’s about it for this one, remember to follow the channel here, join the community on discord, we actually do have some people already there and any thoughts you have about this, please, feel free to share them.

The future doesn’t look as bleak as it did for me when I lost my job, honestly, it looks much brighter as I’m finally working on something that makes me want to wake up and work on it every day.

I will keep you updated, be sure to follow and join all relevant links in the description and if you have a VR device, then have fun testing this, hell…have fun finding bugs, because I can’t test everything myself.