Creating My Favorite Arena

In the last few months I’ve been doing more media for the project, recording videos of combat encounters to show off changes to AI or new enemies. While I’ve been happy with reception overall, doing so revealed some of the causes of my frustrations with parts of the game.

Video Link here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/charger-combat-85395977

Going just off this video, I noticed three core issues

• The player is not incentivized to go forward
• Enemy visibility was incredibly poor in shadowy areas
• The exit from the arena/the Charger’s entrance was very awkward, just a door on a very boring flat wall

This motivated me to take a big swing at a specific arena which features our new heavy enemy variant, the Charger, and it’s now currently my favorite arena in the game.

Tackling issue number 1, the player’s incentive to go forward, necessitated the biggest changes. The old arena suffered from this largely due to the player and enemy team meeting at a fairly small pinch here:

I wanted to keep this big cover piece on the left that largely created this pinch, so instead I made a route around it. What’s fun about this hallway is it’s totally possible for the player to not notice it, but they’re often clued into it when an enemy soldier decides to use it to flank them. The amount of enemy spawns at the very start is limited, so even if the player kills all of the initial enemies they still get a chance to make use of this flanking route themselves.

Improving the arena’s exit made this layered approach much more feasible. What was initially a flat wall became a wide open space with varied cover for the enemies coming through it. This serves as a much nicer entry point for the Charger to come through and start forcing the player backwards.

This section is also where we’ve been figuring out the right balance between moody lighting and effective highlighting for combat. One aspect of lighting that I feel gets underused by Source engine mappers is playing around with the 50% and 0% falloff distances for lights. By setting these ranges, we can have less intense lights that cover much more ground.

Level design isn’t the only thing I’ve been busy with though. The Ordinal, the captain type Combine who can deploy manhacks, has gotten a facelift inspired by some fan designs from The Parry God. He now stands taller than the regular soldiers and is about twice as durable.

While it’s not an extremely new enemy variant, it does make them a more distinct target to be mixed in with the grunts. In general we’re trying to get at least one of these three heavies in any serious encounter. In the past they were treated a bit more like a miniboss, but players have responded well to how they telegraph attacks. Ironically despite being the bigger and scarier enemies of the game, they’re probably the most “fair” in terms of the player’s ability to be aware when they’re about to start shooting.

We're basically at feature lock status with the game, meaning we have no plans for no weapons/mechanics, however I am doing a final pass on a bunch of code related to AI. I've realized I've put a few too many band aids on things, so my goal for the next build is to have AI whose actions have very clear goals/outcomes at all times. Once I've got this done I'm gonna be doing a write up on how the AI is structured. This will be far more on the technical side than design, but the two intermingle more than you might think. Thanks to everyone who has been supporting me here, I'll definitely be aiming to get more content up this month.