Daedalus – SitRep #1

This is the first of a weekly update detailing the state of the current build and changes that have been made since last week. It’s early days at the moment but the game is in a basic enough form to start showing what we currently have:

Player Controlled Quadcopter

My main focus at the moment is creating a Quadcopter that feels intuitive and fun to fly. I’ve also added a first person camera to help in tight spaces, or for edging around blind corners. Whilst the default camera is third person, players can play the whole game in first person if they prefer it, it is definately useful as shown below:

Hacking

We’ve also added a remote hacking ability to the drone. If the player aims at a camera in a given range (as long as it hasn’t detected the player) it can be hacked and disabled for a short period. Hacking will form a major part of the game as the drone has no offensive weapons. This will cover cameras, terminals for lasers/doors/lifts etc, and computers (for accessing information/emails/passwords):

Surveillance Cameras

In addition to hacking, Tim has refined the camera behavior and tweaked it so it follows the player more accurately, returns to it’s rotation after losing the player, as well as several performance optimizations.

Objectives 

We have a basic form of objective marker at the moment, if the player collects them all in a specific order without being detected for too long, it’s mission accomplished. We aim to flesh this out to include hack objectives and objectives that cannot be completed while the base is on alert.

Laser Triplines

We have a very basic laser tripline in at the moment that will fail the mission if the player touches them. This will be expanded to group them with a terminal which can be hacked to disable the lasers. It is possible to nudge objects between the lasers to disrupt them, allowing the player to fly through without setting off an alarm.

We will eventually set up complex moving laser patterns, and link specific cameras to be triggered by the laser grid. So in the example below, the camera would look at the player if they tripped the lasers:

More to follow throughout the week…

Thanks for checking the game out! It’s all very bare-bones at the moment but things are progressing well. There will be an update like this every Wednesday (provided I am available to update the blog), so stay tuned for more developments.