Development Log Week 8

• Ground Combat Gameplay

  
  

  • Ground AI Switching Behaviors - Enemies will change their behavior based on the conditions of combat. For example, they will fall back into better positions if losing, or pursue the player if the player tries to do the same.

    
    

  • Enemy Groups Move to Cover when Revealed - to make fights more challenging, enemy groups get a free reaction when revealed by the player, diving to nearby cover

    
    

  • Utility Slots - As detailed in the game design document, every character now has two utility slots for equipping items like grenades, medkits, scanners, etc.

    
    

  • Utility Items for Grenade & Medkit actions - grenades and medkits now depend on having the relevant items equipped in utility slots rather than being hardcoded actions

    
    

  • Limit use of certain actions - some utility items can only be used a certain number of times before being exhausted (no more unlimited grenades!)

    
    

  • Armor & Accessory Slots - Characters now have slots to equip armor, clothing, headgear, and accessories that affect their attributes and provide bonuses in and out of combat

    
    

  • Outfits - equipping different outfits to a character changes the physical appearance of the character’s model to reflect it

    
    

  • Prevent certain actions if elevation difference beyond threshold - with the addition of multifloor, actions like melee and medkit can no longer be used on adjacent units if there’s a large difference in elevation between them (ie no more hitting someone two stories above you with a sword)

    
    

  • Injury & Death - Instead of dying outright, player units with no injuries who are reduced to zero hitpoints enter a downed state, and will bleed out if not stabilized by a medkit in a limited number of turns. After combat, downed units are revived with an injury, which gives a large penalty to their combat abilities. The player then has the choice to risk them carrying on and dying, or evacuate them back to the ship for treatment

• General

  
  

  • Research Best Approach for Mod Support - What separates games with a 5 year sales life and a 20 year sales life is a healthy modding community. To ensure our game is ready for Steam Workshop integration and modding without requiring major refactoring of our code, we devoted some dev cycles to exploring the best approaches to Unity modding, the findings of which will be used to inform our code architecture going forward.