Logan Devlog - 10/26/23

Alien Upgrades The alien got a speed boost to make it more challenging for the player to escape when spotted. After the speed boost, the alien was a bit too powerful once it had caught up to the player, so I added a 10 second cooldown after an attack where the alien is slower to give the player an opportunity to escape. The alien would continue to track the player while they are hiding in a locker, so it is now hard coded that the alien should not be in hunt mode while the targeted player is hiding.

Beacon This is an unused feature that did not make it into the final game. The vents have a glitch that causes the alien to be unable to attack a player in most cases when the player is standing nearby. This issue did not correlate to any collision in the vent blueprint and I have still not found a reason for this occurring. One of my ideas to work around this issue was to turn the bug into a feature by creating beacons, which would prevent the alien from entering the area surrounding them. These worked functionally, but they took up more space in the level than I would have liked and they were not as fun to use as the lockers, so I decided to just keep the lockers the way they are.

Tutorial Level This game depends on many different mechanics, so I created a tutorial level that loads before the game starts to explain everything to the players. This level is totally white with each mechanic lined up in a row and text describing how they work. The players can press Y to start the game or B to reset the tutorial level and keep messing with the mechanics.

Bug Fixing Most of my time during the last couple weeks was fixing bugs and making sure every mechanic would work with two players. There were several mechanics that were somewhat broken for player 2, such as any interactable object. The way I approached finding bugs and issues was by trying to play the game from start to finish and seeing if there was anything that stopped me from being able to complete the game.

HUD Once the game was fully playable, I added a HUD to the top of the screen so the players could see all the information they need. The HUD is simple, just a black bar with text showing the amount of scraps you have, the number of panels left to fix, and your health, as well as icons showing which key cards you have in your possession. Widgets are added to the whole screen even while the game is using two player split screen, so I had to create two full sets of elements in the HUD that would look for information from either Player 1 or Player 2 depending on which half of the screen they were on