Infestation (October Update)

After realizing that the main game play is really flat, I decided to work into the game structure more. Before, you spawn, grabbed weapons, press the radio, and you killed Antlions until you die. Not really the thing that someone is going to look at it and go "WOW! THAT'S FUCKING AWESOME!". It was more fun playing it, but not much watching someone else. I'm not much of a programmer, the most I can do is take existing material and morph it into my own. And with this, most of the game rules are map logic.

I decided to take a whack and use a system like the Nazi Zombies system with the weapons. Since Survival games are more 'arcade' games, I thought that this system will at-least help develop my own ideas. Again, using map logic, the player "buys" weapons, health, and others with his or her "points". But I could not get it to prevent purchases if the player was short. So, the game_score entity just makes a negative value instead. I thought this can work and the game can be a battle for points, investing in weapons hoping they pay back, etc. But a flaw in this is that players can grab the best or favorite, (For me its the shotgun) and cheaper weapons (Like the Carbine) gets totally ignored. I may put all the weapons at the same power level, and the reloading and how it fires be the variable. And again, its about personal preference, that's why in Left 4 Dead, there was two Tier 1 weapons and three Tier 2 weapons.

Another attempt to increase the excitement of the game was to add the worker Antlion to the mix. Sadly, the worker is not really compatible in non-episodic code. I thought commenting out "#ifdef HL2_EPISODIC" functions would enable the worker, but like always, things can't be easy. The worker runs away and looks at you without the content in the episodic code. What a shame. Instead, I threw the Antlion Guard in, spawning at random intervals, And let me tell you, its awesome, heart racing and intense until he gets stuck in the house. . . .

Finally, I decided to add "Super Weapons" to the mix, with its own special ammo case. (Which you have to buy) I hexed the models, and made it use the Team Fortress 2's golden wrench vmt for the weapons. The Carbine fires faster, and kicks back less, while the Thompson is stronger, and fires more bullets in the burst. I've been meaning to add a "Super Shotgun", but I'm working on getting it to be automatic, and fire faster.

In the end, the mod got a tad more enjoyable over the month, and I'm dying to test this over online. I'm just not sure how the npcs will work with lag compression. Here is some older screens.

For those who wish to see more Portal stuff, don't worry, I should have something by this fall. And hopefully it will be releasable. I only started to work on it yesterday. . .