Polishing up levels + Dealing with Burn Out

Over the last few months Inhuman has been receiving more intensive testing, and as I went through playtest footage I noticed an old arena had become a bit of a problem child. I observed players who felt uncomfortable moving up in the arena opt to hang back and gun down soldiers who ran up awkwardly close to them one at a time, leading to an uncomfortable fight that mostly took place at the very start of the arena. Initially, I used a lot of mark up to influence their positioning, mainly zones they'd prefer to move to and a battle line entity they were not allowed to move past. This all felt a bit arbitrary though and after improving their ability to find a position to attack from, I tackled this problem child head on.

The arena suffered from a classic door problem, with the door in this case being an elevator which takes the player into an active fight between Combine soldiers and zombies. I hoped the distraction the zombies would provide would be enough to get players move into the fight, but some found the strong cover and sight lines at their starting position to be too enticing. The soldiers only had one way to get line of sight on the player in this situation, basically abandoning the high ground awkwardly getting right up in their face.

I decided to address this by actually making the player's starting space divorced from the rest of the arena with a wall. The fight became divided into two parts with this, an introductory phase where the player is safe to just camp in a simple protected area, and then the real fight following them jumping through the window. I could be certain now that the player had at least some sense of what the room's lay out was like before they were thrust into danger while also giving the soldiers much cleaner ways to attack right away. The fight was now playing out how I wanted, with players interacting with far more of  the arena than before.

Video here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/some-arena-74612883

(This area's still in the process of getting a visual overhaul btw)

A lot of the mod has gotten little overhauls like this over the year and overall progress has been really good. However as we get closer to 2023, its become obvious that shipping the project isn't  happening this year. This was honestly a tad demotivating, but I think it was a good wake up call for me to take a break. For the last 6 months I've basically not had a single weekend where I didn't feel like I should be working more and it probably has not been great for my mental health! I'm letting December be my lazy month to compensate, and hopefully going forward I can be a bit more healthy with my work/life balance. 

Honestly this is an issue I've noticed for a lot of people I know working in game development or other creative fields. When your work is on your schedule, breaks feel like they need to be earned. I think this is a mentality I need to actively fight, and if I'm gonna give that advice to my friends I need to set an example myself. We all do better work when our brain isn't exhausted, and regardless, you've got a life to live. 

Before the next year I am hoping to get some more media out to get more eyes on the game, and then hopefully we can stick to shipping in about 2-3 months. I think the extra time the mod has gotten has all been worth it, but ultimately the judge of that will be you. Thanks for reading and I look forward to sharing more with you in 2023!