The main game play for each of the levels in our campaign mode goes like this:
- Nests spawns enemies at intervals up to a cap
- Players are tasked with going around the level, destroying the nests, thereby lowering the amount of enemies being spawns at any given time
- Once all nests are destroyed and all enemies in the level are defeated, the level is completed
It's fairly simple objective-based game play in which the enemies function as inhibitors to the main objective, with the focus of the level still being defeating these enemies.
The overarching "story," however, is to clear corruption in the whole area and defeat the final boss that is spreading all this corruption. As such, nests are linked to certain corruption, and destruction of these nests will destroy nearby corruption.
With all that said, what happened this week is we got the nests working and got some of the corruption meshes. This week, I focused on implementing the corruption into Level 2.
Above is the view of the player when they first walk into the level. This is the first pass at implementing the corruption, in which I tried to make it feel organic.
In the environment, there are corruption like this connected to nests. In this case, it is a piece of environment that functions with game play. It is a bridge that allows the player to more easily get from one area to another area.
On destruction of the nest behind the player, the bridge is destroyed. This is largely meant to show off an evolution in the environment, both aesthetically and game play-wise, as the player progressed through the level. There will also be procedurally generated corruption, which should be coming next week, that will also build pieces of environment over time as well.
Since the creation of this, we have decided, however, that we don't want to the corruption to feel organic. Part of it is that in some places it doesn't look the greatest, but a large part of it is that the club environment is very organic already, and we want to better juxtapose the corruption by making it not organic at all. It will make the corruption feel even more out of place the less organic it is.
These changes to the look of the corruption and the procedurally generated corruption will be likely implemented next week.