At Studio Bhibli, we've been hard at work to make our vision come to fruition. In this devlog, we come to showcase all the new nice stuff now available in the game. So, let's get right into it, shall we?

Weapons

As an FPS game, weapons are the at the heart of the vision. They must look good, and feel good to shoot. Inspired by the classic Doom games, we sought out to include 2D weapons in a first person setting. Designing a simple pixel art gunshot, and using it to implement the bullets and basic shooting. We did it in a way that would make adding more weapons easy: a modular inheritance system, with the ability to easily add new sprites, customize weapon behavior and even change the type of bullet.

However, we quickly found a bottleneck in our approach: We would have to draw and design all weapons in the game, due to the lack of available resources for such a specific requirement. That alone would take a lot of development time, and it's not our main focus. So we decided to shift to 3D weapons. It wasn't exactly straight forward, and we had to learn about collision and visibility layers in the engine, but we didn't have to change the core behaviors we had already implemented. After we managed to make it work, we noticed how simple it was, now with a 3D model, to add small features that would make the shooting feel good: model animations, recoil, camera shaking, FOV changes, etc.

NPCs

Hostile enemies are at the core of the tactical layer of the game. It's one of the major features we had to implement, and now, we have a semi-functional system in place. But first, let's talk about design.

Each "faction" has a unique NPC, with different weapons and a different sprite. For the Angel side, we took it easy: The NPC of such faction is a crusader with a shotgun. Crusaders are universally loved for their stylish clothing and their conviction on their struggle, so having them with a modern weapon that reflects their raw power, was the natural decision.

When it comes to the demon soldier, it was more difficult. We thought of making a generic demon with a machine gun, but quickly decided against it. In the Book of Revelation, the Devil fights Saint Michael in heaven, and loses. After that, he comes down to the earth, and rallies the kings of the land for one more battle, at mount Armageddon. This tells us that, canonically, the demon soldiers are humans who were convinced by the Antichrist to fight for him. As such, the sprite is meant to convey a "modern looking soldier" from the military of a country; but he was corrupted, and now carries the mark of the beast (originally "666", but we took the liberty to change it to a pentagram, for aesthetic reasons).

In terms of the game, the NPC were implemented in the same way as weapons. So, when we had our first NPC, which was the crusader, it was quite straightforward to add the next one. There's also the possibility to add NPCs that are hostile to both sides, our system allows it with no problem.

As for their behavior, right now is quite simple: On their Idle state, they do nothing, but as soon as someone from the opposite team approaches, they start to shoot them, trying not to get too close. They still need polishing, specially after the new re-spawning mechanic, but the core features are there, and they are easy to extend.

Other Features

Aside from that, we've added:

• Skybox and World Environment, with dynamic lightning and volumetric fog.
• Damage mechanic. Now bullets actually damage other players, but not NPCs yet. Thus, NPCs can kill players, players can kill other players, but players cannot kill NPCs.
• Re-spawn mechanic. The system works fine, but the NPCs still have a hard time detecting the death of a player.

What's Next?

We want to polish what we already have before going further into development. The plan is:

• Add more weapons: a shotgun for the angel player, and maybe an extra weapon that can be picked up by both, like a Rocket Launcher.
• Improve HUD:
  • Make the crosshair reactive
  • Make the screen shake and turn red when damaged is received
  • Add a Health Bar
  • Add more animations for the guns. Right now, there are only shooting animations, but a walking or jumping animation could be nice to have

• Fine tune NPC behavior.
• Extend NPC behaviour, to be more realistic and fun.
• Fix re-spawn issues.