DevNotes #3 | First internal test

Long time no see huh ?

No worries, I'm still working hard on the game !

This post should have been published over a month ago, but I've been busy elsewhere. I'm posting it anyway, and other posts will follow with the latest news 😁

Steam Next Fest

Very important news: I asked for a review of a stable build to Steam team. So if everything is ok, a demo of the game will be available at the February Steam Next Fest 🥳🎉

🥊 New Fighting Systems

I'm glad to introduce you the new fighting system with fresh animations, VFX and sound design.

There is still some polishing left, but it should be enough for the upcoming demo.

New mechanics have been introduced such as :

• 🎯 Hit zones: your hit direction, type (jab, hook), and target location (head, torso) now trigger specific impact animations and affect the damage you deal. Pro tip: always aim for the head !

• ⚡ Low stamina effect: if you lack stamina, your damage can drop up to 50%, and your movement speed will also decrease

• 🤩 Feedback system: stamina is indicated through sound design (your character will breath loudly) and through visual effects (your vision will be less clear). Player's health is shown via a basic red vignette that intensifies when you're low hp

• Added💀 Player's deathdying animation has been added where time will slow down and your character will close its eyes slowly
• Removed🧠 AI fighting logicEnemies now react to your health, stamina, and other variables to adjust their aggressiveness. They can coordinate movements to avoid blocking each other while attacking you. They’re also capable of surrounding you, but I disabled that for now because it’s completely unbalanced. Fighting is meant to be difficult, not impossible. I need more time to tune this correctly

• 😱 AI Fear level: during fights, enemies now have a fear value that can cause them to back away or flee when things turn bad. This system still needs some tweaking

• 💪 Players hit combo: All your attacks can now hit multiple targets. Be careful not to hit the wrong person unless you want to make the situation worse. Front kicks now apply knockback, and your combo speed increases depending on the fighting classes you’ve purchased in the shop 💲

I added a lot of safe guards in their behaviors to avoid most of soft blocks. I'm currently still hesitating to add a similar teleport fallback to NPCs similar to Half Life 2 to avoid soft blocks in their movements. I'm pretty to sure to add it in the official release of the game, but for the demo, it would be a waste of time.

Dialogues

I spent a lot of times to add more dialogues lines in the game. And it still not enough to cover all dialogue cases.

This is one of the biggest headaches I had in this game development. It has been designed to almost fully works via a json file containing most of lines and conditions to be triggered. Most of the necessary code is done via the player choices that must trigger specific things depending on the context (show ID card, show customer pockets, etc).

Also, the UI/UX has been revisited to make the lines more visible and readable.

Menus

The main game menu is simple for now. I prepared a basic ambience for the demo, and I hope to polish it later.

Most menus are now functional: You can access the shop, select jobs, and manage your expenses through a simple and clean interface. It’s a bit dark visually, in my opinion, but everything works properly. UI polishing will come after the demo release.

Musics

New musics have been added and everyone of them have been composed by myself ! It's a mix between techno basses and synthwave. I hope you'll like it !

Settings Page with key binding

The settings page is now available both in the main menu and during missions.

You can edit graphics quality, rebind keyboard controls, and change the language.

Dressing System

I've never talked about this system before, but it exists since a long time in the game source code. But now that I've added more clothes models and textures to the characters, we are starting to see how it works. There is colors flagged as "atypical" (pink, purple, ...), some flagged as "typical" (black, white, dark blue), and the others. It's capable of addressing a number of color the ped will use to dress. The probability to wear a specific color type, or a certain number of color is evaluated depending on the club event. I'll add more detail about the probabilities in the section below 👇 This feature has been developed to force the player to analyze peds clothes and reject them if it does not fit the club policy.

📊 Statistics and balancing

An important feature incorporated in Physio is procedural events. This section is very important due to the trickiness of procedurality. It can quickly be a pain in the ass if it's not balanced correctly. You can't just put a percentage of chances to occur and pray to have a balanced game. You need to evaluate them to keep some control in the chaos. Otherwise, the game can be unplayable by having a lot of bad events chained too quickly, or it can be boring because nothing happens for a long time. To avoid this situation, I had to use a fabulous concept in mathematics, statistics and probabilities. I've made multiple excel sheets that evaluate the probabilities of multiple events and parameters to occur. Most of the calculations are quite easy to evaluate due to their consistency or linearity. For the dressing system, each time we spawn a ped of specific gender, skin color and other parameters, it determines a precise percentage of chances to have x color of pants. But some features increase the complexity of probabilistic assessments such as the ped spawning logic due to its rush hour system. [Insert ped spawning curve] In the picture above, this is a curve representing ped spawning frequency over time. By looking at it, it's immediately clear that the frequency of appearance is not constant, or linear because the curve doesn’t looks like a straight line. It looks like a bell and it’s more commonly called a gaussian curve, or a normal curve. It respects the normal distribution logic. In order to estimate the average number of peds that will spaw during a game session can be calculated thanks to integrals. It’s quite easy to do it on paper, but less for me to do it on excel due to my lack of knowledge of this software. So, to avoid spending days to understand how to use gaussian error function in excel, and still have a quite good estimation, I simply estimate dx by using the trapezoidal rule. Because Physio is not a massive multiplayer game with the ambition to be a competitive game, I can tolerate the lack of precision this calculation method have. Now that I have the estimation of ped spawned per game session, I can easily calculate the frequencies of other parameters (gender, clothes, peds characteristics, …).

A lot more is coming very soon! 💪 I look forward to hearing your feedback in a few weeks at Steam Next Fest 🎉🎉