Hey, What's up here? 

Today's update will be about the Core Combat mechanics

Development

This week I've been working on the Combat system, at least on the core mechanics.
By core mechanics I mean the basic features and logics that will drive the gameplay through the whole game.
In game dev, at least in my vision of game dev, the core mechanics should be deep and well constructed enough to be a game by itself. 

Let's take Mario for instance, the core mechanics is jumping on the  moving enemies before they reach you and kill you.
You have here an objective and a mechanic that the player can master to complete its objective. 
Here, in Embuscade 2, the core mechanics is moving smartly to avoid the chasing enemies hits' and hit them to kill them all before they do.

So I went by creating the enemy's horde, their movement and stuff. 
They are as powerful as you are so be careful, the combat won't be that easy to win! Of course, health and damage values will evolve and be tweaked in the future, there will also be variantes and complexity added to the core system.
But in the current state, I ended up having some fun already with the prototype, that's a good sign! 

Here's some in editor screenshots :

That was short! 

I couldn't make it this time ...

As you can see the fights are pretty rude, and you can loose a lot of your guys!
5 Hp for each units and each damage is -1 every 1 second.  Later on I'll add various units such as distance units, zone damage units, and so on... 

Organisation

Already two Milestones accomplished so far !!

The advancement is on a good way. for the next Milestone I need to achieve the Mutation of the humans into Zeds as well as the eating mechanics. There's still need to be done on paper, the mechanics design isn't clear enough already to jump on programmation yet. But it's on its way...

Here's the next Milestones that need to be achieved until the end : 

• Finish the Basic Player Controls on the horde
• Finish the Basic Combat system
• Finish the Mutation and eating mechanics
• Finish the Basic Ai (Basic enemy behavior, wandering zombies, mutation)
• Finish the Full featured Player Controls on the horde
• Finish the Combat system with all features
• Finish the Gameplay (missions, stats, menus, etc...)
• Finish all the Assets + sounds
• Wrap up the game with the assets + FX + sounds + level design
• Optimisation and bug tracking

This list is exhaustive, I can split up some of the milestones into smaller chucks to make them more reachable.

Forecast

Human sucks at prediction right? Last time I told you that I'd show you more horde control like charge attack, leader selection, recruitement, etc ... But I judged that those features weren't part of the Core Mechanics. If you don't have a good enemy to fight with, what would you do with a charge attack?  
That's why I preferred making important things first and add secondary mechanics later on. 

For next week, I can assure you that I will work on the mutation and eating mechanics. The gameplay still needs to be designed and, those two mechanics take a big part in the core Gameplay, finish tose will help with the advancement of the Game Design then I could tell you more about it. 

See you next week, stay tuned!