So, I won. 4 Speed, Triple Cannon, Range 30, 8 layer shield. Little anti-climatic, yes?

Wish you all the best.

In The Scanned of The Blind.

This is fundamentally a stealth ambush game with an arcade action failure state ala AssCreed or Hitman. Stealth ambush games, once the difficulty gets spun up, are about isolating an enemy. Right now all enemies are pretty much already isolated except by chance, and the game would fundamentally change anyway in transitioning out of short-form.

Datalinks. A datalink-equipped bot monitors the n nearest bots to it for alarm or death, within range x, down visible radio beams; it’s a friendship gun like the Medic’s healing ray. It could choose n targets randomly instead of the nearest n if that leaves more fun gaps. There is one second(?) of hysteresis on switching targets, so it won’t flicker to your target by surprise and it doesn’t cause crazy race conditions. An alarmed bot that spots you alerts any bots monitoring it and communicates your location in real time as if they could see you. I imagine both n and x could vary – a number of little dish antennas, of indicative size, pointing at the target bots at all times.There’s not as much fun on the loot side of the equation, I admit; presumably the number of bots whose links you can see and the distance at which a bot’s links appear would correspond to what you’ve claimed, depending on whether we’re willing to tolerate seeing only the dishes until you’ve claimed a datalink. I imagine the networks would rapidly and smoothly increase in size as you raise the threat level, until you inevitably get forced to bite off more than you can chew. I thought about a push datalink, where a bot that spots you would always alert n nearest/random n, but that seems to me to have less Far Cry planning stage and more boring waiting for random wandering to present a favourable scenario.

Ambush games tend to benefit from a way to kite a chosen enemy. Still thinking about whether that would be worth introducing another mechanic, or adding some hard-to-communicate functionality to the datalink like firing at nothing while maneuvering so your datalink range encompasses only one bot.

Unrelated to that problem, I think scanning a living bot, whether you’ve scanned it before or not, should replenish your shields to minimum(yourmaxshields, botmaxshields). More vampiric functions on the Scanno, yes. Actually, maybe you should be able to dominate and drag a bot backwards out of safety with the Scanno in some way?

Movement – It would be better for me if the movement could be done through the W, A, S, D keys instead of left-mouse button holding/clicking. And speaking of movement, NOS for a limited amount of time having discovered it first, would be great by holding down the SHIFT key. (Super Meat Boy! hahaha)

Aiming – This is perfect. Reminds me of Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light.

Firing Frequency – If this was a little frequent on my robot’s part it would be helpful. This is because when I’m holding down the right-mouse button it feels like the gun has fallen asleep after firing the first round. I’m not asking to change the enemy robots’ firing frequency, hehehe.

Fleeing(Exit) Strategy – I need to be able to flee from my pursuing enemy robot. So, if I get out of its field of vision and remain out of it for say 5s, then the enemy robot should lose sight of me and should call the search off.

Tutorial Text Bubble – The bubble should float and follow my robot. Because if I move too far away the bubble gets left off screen and so I have to go back to read it.

Good luck and hope you kick *** with your game!

The reason I like this is that it recreates the good bits of Metal Gear Solid in condensed form plus ‘discovery’ and loot lust. The next step in that theme is for enemies to react to each others’ deaths – I imagine having a ‘fresh burning hulk’ state – since they’re obviously all on the same side. I can imagine that adding some fear to special bots and driving you subtly away from your nice comfortable hulk wastelands, or I can imagine it making the game unpredictable and fiddly…

And then slapping a real endgame/death state on it is super difficult. All I know right now is that if there’s a beautiful answer, it will come from thinking like Chris Park. These are not humans, they’re tools. They may actually be one mind! But when you make them angry their response will not just be an individual bum-rush.

Got better pointer placement by using another, closer, resolution.

Still couldn’t see own initial shots unless passing over something dark.

Shield seem weak: many many enemies with big guns causing instant-kill.

Control still really difficult after more practice. Option for keyboard control, with mouse aiming?

Thoughts:

A regenerating first-level shield would be helpful. Don’t know how many times I died simply because the enemy was aiming in my direction as I entered the screen.

My display resolution (1600×900) wasn’t on there, and I found that the bot went some distance away from where my mouse was located. This made control difficult–many times the enemy got me by my overshooting their position.

Possibly related: I couldn’t see my own shots. Should I have been able to?

I totally agree with some environment–just square that block sight and fire would be more interesting. Although implemented that would take a lot more time.

It was overall enjoyable, and amazing what one can do on such a time limit.

Kind of a joke thing on the internet spam idea.

Actual resolution is 1680X1050, anyways, so it’s not a huge deal, just one wrong string.

Once saw a ten layer shield. Broke into a Michigan J Frog quote on running into that.

Fun how seeing any lone tough enemy, the thought is “Jackpot” and any swarm the thought is “Crap.”

I did try to add physical boundaries to the space at the last minute, but when I tried to convince the AI not to go through them – hnng. Rapidly aborted and submitted it without.

Glad you like the progress bar, it took about SIX HOURS. Thought it was going to be simple, but it’s been the buggiest thing in the game. Very satisfying to have it finally work right in this version.

One thing that could have been added is some additions to the environment; structures or rock formations that block movement and line-of-sight. From a visual point, it supports the discovery theme and landmarks make the player feel as if they are traversing a world, rather than a plane. From a design point, it would make maneuvering into enemies blind-spots more challenging, and combat more tactical.

I’d guess this was on the feature list but got cut when you thought about how much time you had for collision and AI :P

The scanning link that was also the progress bar was hot :)