Demonstrating the latest in Vampyr tech and design with the first two stealth puzzles I’m prototyping.
I fixed an issue with the camera not properly handling tighter spaces. As a stealth game, the player will be moving through confined spaces to sneak around. So this was at the top of my list after I noticed it messing up in the previous encounter.
Next up was visualizing the AI vision cones. For a stealth game, I feel that it’s really important that the detection mechanics are really clear to the player. Ambiguity leads to frustration. As a vampire with extra sensory abilities, I think we can come up with a cool rationale and styling for these. However, I’m not totally sure yet how it should look and how to pull it off. So for now, I just did something simple and created a particle system which approximates their vision system. Once I incorporated world collision on the particles, I was pretty happy with the results. Functionally anyway - still the art leaves something to be desired. 😅
I had a great time designing and kit bashing these two stealth puzzles. For the first one, I took some inspiration from the indie stealth game, Volume. One of the early puzzles, In Circulation, has multiple guards circling around the center. The first encounter is a very simplified version of this. The Colonial Graveyard kit seen there fit really well with our game, but it didn’t feel like it made a lot of sense for a stealth puzzle.
So I did a bit more digging on the asset store and found a few asset packs I could use to build a small army camp. Starting with the same basic footprint, I put only one guard on the circuit and took an iterative approach to the level design. There’s some timing and hinting aspects to improve, but I feel pretty happy about how it flows for a first pass of real gameplay, as the first encounters are more tutorializing than actual puzzles.