I just added several things to the current build to make the first version of survival mode completed. The game now has weapon pickups, spawning enemies, health pickups, and death screen when both players are dead.
I've tested the game with one player, and tried it out in two-player mode briefly. I still need to run through with both players to see that there are no bugs left in. The game is now also available for Mac and Linux too, so go grab it!
If you have either Mac or Linux, I would love to hear your feedback on how the game runs on your computer. Every bit of feedback helps! I have tested the game on Windows 7 and Windows 10, and it ran well on both systems, but it's always tricky to create a game for multi-platform release.
The game has two monsters at the moment, the first one being the placeholder wolf monster borrowed from Kalaban, and the second is the new frog man "Mangler". I'm not planning on bringing the wolf monsters back as a stardard enemy in Hybrid Children. They might be included as an easter egg, or some special NPC like "Puppe" was in Kalaban.
One of the things I would still like to add to the survival mode, currently, is making it even more fast-paced. I did up the monster speeds as I got all the essential code running. You generally want to make it easy and relaxed when you're first adding all the stuff in. Some even make the enemies disabled when they're building the basic block of a game.
The effects could run by faster, player could be faster and bullets could fly faster, etc. That's my take on creating a good survival mode like this. The game does get exponentially harder now, as it counts the number of enemies that have been spawned overall, and now tries to top that number by spawning more enemies constantly.
The pickup spawns required some extra work that had not thought of before. In Kalaban the random items drop from monsters, and that is much easier to code. And maybe I should've used that method for this too, but now the items spawn to specific locations. I've always been intrigued by deathmatch maps, and that's the sort of feeling I was going for, just in a really contained arena.
Next up I think I'm going to start developing the actual map design. This first survival map is just a test run for the visuals, so it doesn't give you full picture of what the game is going to look like. Not to mention important things like scripted events are completely missing from the game now.
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That's it for this week! Stay tuned for future updates, and go our game at Itch.io or Patreon and support our development.
Have a nice weekend, everybody!
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-Harri J.