Kickstarter

With everything now set and approved, the Kickstarter campaign for Turnover will launch this coming Tuesday, 5/27.

The campaign will have a much lower goal (< $1000) than most other indie game campaigns. I took a long, hard look at the absolute bare minimum I needed to get Turnover to where it needed to be for the end of the year. The conclusion I came to was that a lower funding goal would do the job, since the funds will cover nothing more than upcoming administrative costs for developing Turnover.

Here’s a quick quote from the campaign.

Turnover is currently being developed by myself (Anthony), in collaboration with one game tester. Development of the game has followed a no budget, DIY ethos, thus the smaller funding goal of this Kickstarter campaign. Everything has been kept lean and mean.

This is the first time I have ever launched a crowd funding campaign and it has been both exciting and nerve wracking. I hope you’ll find the project interesting enough to lend your support next week!

Progress Report –

Enemy Hearing Improvements

Not too long ago, I rewrote the enemy Line of Sight code to use a more accurate ray cast to check for obstacles between an enemy and his spotted target. I went ahead and ported that system over the hearing routine of the enemies.

Previously, hearing was handled by nothing more than a radius. If a noise fell within a radius, the enemy would hear it and go investigate. Earlier levels handled this fine, as they weren’t very cramped. Lately, I have been creating more tight spaces, so it was quickly apparent that the hearing system wasn’t cutting it and it demanded a rewrite.

Now, each enemy has a hearing radius. That is the distance that they can hear at most. On top of that, a generated sound has a sound distance, so quieter sounds that fall into the enemies hearing radius will not generate any interest from the enemy. The sound has to be within his hearing radius and generate a loud enough noise before the enemy “hears” a sound. So now, on top of that, I use the ray cast system to check for obstacles between the enemy and the generated sound. So now, noises generated behind walls won’t be heard.

So, as of now, enemies have a truly robust sight and sound system. They see and fear dangerous things like fire, their vision can be obstructed by fire extinguisher smoke, their hearing can be obstructed, and so on.

Visual Timer For Cool Down Events

I went ahead and added visual indications for certain enemy cool downs. This will help the player be able to know how much time they have to act during certain events. This will mostly help timing situations when malfunctioning mechanical enemies and stunning humans.

It’s good to have to have the player feel out a sneak situation, but sometimes they just need to have a clear visual idea of what’s going on. I’m still working on striking that balance.

Media

Time for some Turnover media!

Here, Clea throws a wrench at a Sentinel and gets cut down. Some objects distract enemies, others can stun. An enemy can be stunned long enough to be snuck past, but if the player hesitates, they will hunted and killed.

A small GIF on a game mechanic. A fire can be put out by a fire extinguisher. This will make for some interesting situations later on in the game.

HUD and GUI designs are on-going. I’ve been pretty adamant about keeping the main game HUD streamlined, so I’ve been moving some information to the pause screen.

Above is a shot of the pause screen blocking. I’m just trying to get an idea of what the heck the layout will be.

Next

Next week the Kickstarter campaign launches. Now, work is going forward on the second half of the game. Things are humming along.