Bounty Hunter III Update #3: Area (near) completion + New character

Hello there!
Here is some more Bounty Hunter III progress.

Preface

Some progress has been going on in Bounty Hunter III, I've implemented most of the main areas into the game, progressed on the story and added in a new main character. There are also a few ideas that have been bouncing in my head about gameplay.

Implementing the environments

I've included almost all the environments that will be in the game. The way I will go around doing this will be similar to how I implemented the environments in Bounty Hunter II which is all at once, albeit with horrible and rushed textures.

Recently, I have created a map to help me envision the environment and the general direction characters may go. It looks like those overworld maps in classic RPGs like Final fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Shin Megami Tensei, etc. I have tried doing world maps on paper, but it felt much harder to do since I would easily make a mistake and I would need to constantly rub things out. I think it's easier to make maps on something like Tiled (which I used to make the levels of Bounty Hunter 1 and 2) because I can easily erase things, stamp tiles rather than having to draw every single detail from scratch.

With some of the environments, I would like them to be very spacious, allowing for open combat rather than the closed-in environments from Bounty Hunter II, where you had to fight a bunch of enemies in order to progress. Of course, I still plan there to be fights like these, especially if they are relevant to the plot, but I want to allow the player to feel more free to leave some enemies behind and maybe fight some but keep moving on.

This can give the game a faster pacing and feel less repetitive. Although I do feel that there can be some challenges in implementing optional combat like trying to not have enemies go where they are not supposed to go. I also want to make it so that the player can't just waltz out of certain areas - otherwise the immersion of a dangerous environment would be lost.

Story progress

I've been working a lot on the story of Bounty Hunter III, the specifics are more mapped out than before although they need polishing - this was achieved with the help of the aforementioned map. I used this map to jot down numbers representing the order of where the main story will take place, with squiggly arrows representing the route that the main characters will take to get to the next point. As of writing this post, I'm implementing bits of the main story into the game using a flag named "story" so that different events can happen at the same place depending on the value of this flag. This would have been impossible with Bounty Hunter II's engine, since the game is very linear. There was only one time in that game where you go back to somewhere you went before. A pretty crude method was used for this: Making a copy of the map and creating different events for it. 

Although I do write some scripts of certain interactions between the characters, I do this with the intent of seeing how the story plays out, when I write them in the game - I pretty much improvise.

Last time I mentioned about creating two endings for the game, that's now 3. Without any spoilers, there will be a bad ending, normal ending and good ending. The way you get them depends on what you do in the game, usually relating to exploration and talking to other characters. Through these I would like to reward the player for exploring with some lore and word-building, this would fit the less linear style of game I would like for Bounty Hunter III. If you have played Othermind, you will get a snapshot of what Bounty Hunter III may be like. Since I've said several times that Bounty Hunter III will be a conclusion to the series' continuity, multiple endings only seem fitting to this and I can avoid the issue of cutting multiple branches that some sequels have to their originals (like Shin Megami Tensei II).

Another bit of progress to the story lies in a new character...

Introducing Beth the hacker

For those of you who have played Bounty Hunter 2, the major characters were Peast and Milbert. I'm adding in a new character called Beth. She came from an NPC who appeared early on in the game who advises Peast where to go next. I thought that this character could play a larger part later on to give the player a surprise. A few mental brainstorming sessions later, I came up with the character Beth who is a hacker that plays a large part in the story.

Unlike Peast or Milbert, she's not going to be directly playable - because she doesn't specialise in combat. She's more of a pacifist than either of them, relying more on hacking things and communication than violence. I've had ideas of her operating snipers like Alyx Vance does in Half life 2 episdode 1 and 2 where she helps clear some enemies, Beth wouldn't operate the snipers with her hands, she would operate them using special software on her laptop.

New game mechanics?

I have implemented the code for swimming mechanics for the main character to give some variety to the gameplay. The player cannot attack whilst swimming, they have limited oxygen (if they drown, they will go back to their last non-water area like Zelda: Breath of the Wild) which could give the player a new layer of challenge as they calculate how far they can swim and try to avoid any projectiles if there are ranged enemies nearby where the player is swimming.

Another mechanic I have thought up of (and partially implemented) is rock-climbing, where the main character can scale rocks. Like the swimming mechanic, the player cannot attack and have an oxygen meter (yes I have tried rock climbing myself and it can be quite tiring). The player can jump off by pressing the jump button, they won't take fall damage so don't worry.

I don't know if any of these will be in the final game, but they seem like good additions of making gameplay have more variety. Just need to be careful that I'm not putting too much on my plate, since I also have implemented puzzles with locked doors as well so I should do something with that too. Perhaps this should be a focus that I should have with the game's design -  a mixture of combat, puzzle solving, jumping from platform to platform, swimming and climbing.

Art progress

Quite a bit has been going on in the art side of things, I'm working with my friend Joe to animate the sprites of the enemies and the main characters. I'm giving him more control here to design his own enemies, for example this one on his Instagram. This approach to art can put more bargaining ideas on the table.

He also helped me design the soldier enemies where I asked him to sketch out some concept designs which I would use to draw as a sprite. I used a combination of his concept art to come up with the final design.

Most of the game's graphics still look like utter rubbish, but I want to prioritize designing the areas and implementing the story. Thanks to the fact that I'm no longer a 1 man team, I can have some artwork done by the time the game has all the main story implemented.

Conclusion

At the moment I'm trying to implement the game's story as well as refining the it. I'll also think about coding in some of the enemies into the game. I'm hoping to get the game in a rough "playable from start to finish" state by the end of this month or somewhere around March. That way I can have more time to focus on art, sound and polishing.

In other news, later on this month I plan to post another installment to the Selfish Altruist series I've been working on for over a month now - the subject will be regarding Bitcoin.

That's all from me!