October 2024 Progress Report

Hey all, its been far too long since I updated this page so I figured I'll start with an update on Inhuman's status. The last 3 months of work have honestly been more productive and focused than any other time in the game's development. Meeting more professional developers and talking through things has been a big boon for figuring out how to properly scope and plan things out.

So currently we are grinding to get the last level of the game playable from start to finish. We’ve been focusing on getting really basic rough drafts of work testable as soon as possible, which is a break from our old (and bad) work habits where we’d get something as pretty and functional as possible and then continue to iterate on that. The point of getting all this stuff testable is getting feedback on what matters at an earlier state and also forcing us to really look at how much work it’s going to take if we want a decent amount of content in a realistic time frame.

My personal goal is having basically all of our content playable by the end of the year, and then we’ll see how long polishing all of that takes. In the meantime, I need to get back to sharing progress on development here, so let’s get to it.

Chapter 4

Adopting this new test focused work style for the final level has had a bunch of effects on the game. For one thing, I’ve been forced to just bash out content I really strayed away from in the past, and I’m realizing some of this has been what the game has been sorely lacking. Primarily I’m talking small bits of combat in what is effectively a hallway. Inhuman’s big focus has always been dynamic soldier combat in arenas you can move fairly freely around, and while I’m proud of my results with this, I think in some ways I got a bit trapped. 

I realized a few months ago that my npcs were not functioning super well in simple spaces without all the bells and whistles of a fancy arena, so I’ve done some backend reworks to allow them to get the job done a little more effectively. Soldiers are still cover based, meaning they only try to attack near a cover position and retreat when cover exposed, but what they consider to be “cover” has been generalized, so they don’t need a specially marked point by a pillar or chest high cover. We use a special utility scoring system so they can still prefer all this stuff, so in our older arenas all this behavior will still be in effect while allowing the Combine to not get totally lost in a basic space. 

I also realized hunters have been sorely neglected, and desperately need testing and retooling to effectively fit into Inhuman. This is my top priority outside of getting level content done and is definitely something I want to show off once they’re fully functional. 

While Inhuman is a Half-Life 2 mod, no npcs from the base game can just be dropped in without some work. We’ve got three main considerations when we implement an npc in the project.

• Getting the npc on our utility ai system

• Getting the npc properly interacting with our new sensing systems (mainly reacting to our new interest sources, a replacement for the old npc sound system)

• Redesigning certain behaviors/traits of the npc to fit Inhuman’s gameplay.

Hunter Gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRXeINWqoPk

The good news is 1 and 2 are effectively out of the way. Figuring out how hunters fit in our current combat is the main challenge. Inhuman is a good deal slower than Half-Life 2 and much more punishing, so a tanky enemy that flushes you out and gets right in your face is a very high level threat. We also don’t use the gravity gun, so we don’t base our combat design off of Episode 2’s hunter combat. 

One change I’ve implemented is using a different main movement animation for hunters. I’m actually not sure if this walking animation gets any use in the main game, but it’s there and I think it has the cool upside of making them look more like they’re stalking around coming after you.

This video shows off a bit of what I’m going for, but there’s still plenty that could change. Finding the right balance to make them seem aggressive without being too frustrating will be tricky. 

So to round things out, progress on Inhuman has really picked up and I’m committed to getting this thing done. I have recently applied to get on Steamworks, so I’m hoping to be able to announce a steam release in the near future. In the meantime, enjoy some footage from Chapter 4 here:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/playing-around-4-114600604