Level Design, New Interactions and Climbing

The next build of Sombionic will mainly focus on level design, new tasks and dialogues. Here's what I've been working on recently.

Expanding Level 2

The main goal is to improve the level’s flow and not force players to go back and forth between a few objectives on the same environment.

There are a few cases where such back and forth happens:

1. When you interact with the slime → Go back to pick up the gun → Go back up eliminate/scare away the slime.

2. Find an egg and a rope inside the cave → Go backwards to escape.

3. Go backwards again to hatch the egg.

I’ve decided that in such a game like Sombionic, its best to mostly push forwards and rarely go back the way you came, so I've improved the quest flow and level design on level 2 by adding new models like trees, houses and rocks

Cutscenes

Another big thing I’ve been experimenting with and something that turned out really well is turning cutscenes into real-time gameplay. I want to avoid having too many moments where you’re completely locked out of control and just watching a cutscene play out.

For example, inside the cave, when the spider spawns, it used to be a traditional cutscene. Now the spider actually drops down from above and “crushes” the floor underneath you while you’re still in control and watching it happen.

Quests

I’ve added new dialogues to better fit the story and now it doesn’t feet like you are doing random things, but the story is pushing you forwards.

The quest markers that show you where to go will now show an approximation (lead to an area) and you have to explore it to find the quest item needed. If you don’t like the quest markers at all, then you can turn them off completely form the Settings > Gameplay > Hide Quest Markers.

Interaction System

This is the improved the interaction system, when you hover over an item, it will show its icon, name, stats and a color based on its rarity.

The interaction box will automatically expand horizontally and vertically based on the length of the text (see the example above with Adrenal Gland). Currently there are 2 ways to trigger an interaction – key press and hold, but the system supports all kind of input and if needed there might be more triggers like double tap and more.

The same interaction prompts are used for normal actions like “Climb”, “Ride wasp” and more, but with a different color and some special objects can have custom colors like yellow for the in-game currency.

Climb Ledge Ability

The climb ledge ability allows Melany to jump over obstacles tall up to 5 meters, there will are different animations for smaller ledge climbs like 3.7 meters, and maybe something in between in the future if its needed.

Terrain

There’s a big improvement to the terrain shader, the meat now looks like real meat, the shader has support for rain and puddles (which will be used in the Swamp levels) and the performance is better.

Next, I will be working on expanding level 3 with new tasks, settlement and terrain.