August 16th - New ability update
Hello! So, I've been working on a new ability, Mind Control, for the past three weeks.
I knew the new ability was going to be about possessing other types of characters, and those characters would be the player's enemies. Basically, the enemies would act as dynamic traps in the game. They would move around specific areas, and if you time it right, you might be able to pass by them. I'm not sure how to balance this right now, as no playtesting has been done yet.
But as Yolings are always moving around, it was important for the enemies to be able to catch them in groups and kill all Yolings that are within close proximity to each other. To keep the implementation fast and easy, the first enemy became a spellcaster of sorts that walks around with a mage's staff and shoots electricity to electrocute anything in its path, including destructible objects.
Enemies controlled by AI, however, would never target destructibles, only Yolings. But as the new ability's name suggests, a Yoling can Mind Control an enemy and attack whatever the player wants.
First Mind Control iteration
In the first iteration of the ability, you first had to target the Yoling to sacrifice, and then you had to target the enemy you wanted to Mind Control. This required me to put the Yoling into two different states:
Play an animation showing that the Yoling is ready to start mind controlling
Either
Begin the Mind Control process or
Abort
But when trying out this version of the ability myself, I was always confused about what to target and when. I always tended to press the Mind Control button and then target the enemy, but that never worked, as I first had to target a Yoling.
Second Iteration
I removed the second state of the ability, so instead, all you have to do now is target a Yoling, and the Yoling will automatically find the closest enemy when the ability starts to charge up.
This behaviour follows the already established design pattern of the game: you only ever target a Yoling once, and they do the rest themselves. Choosing which enemy to Mind Control didn't feel like an interesting choice, but I still needed a way for the ability to behave consistently.
Another part of this iteration had the Yoling be "alive" while mind controlling. I found a cool possess animation where the character floats in the air and makes spasmodic movements.
Another part of this iteration had the Yoling remain "alive" while Mind Controlling. I found a cool possession animation where the character floats in the air and makes spasmodic movements.
It was, however, really hard to justify what it meant for the Yoling to still be visible and "alive", and to somehow communicate to the player that the Yoling had been "sacrificed" in this state. The end goal was for both the Yoling and the enemy to explode in gore when the player was done Mind Controlling the enemy.
Third Iteration
In the third iteration, I simply removed the Yoling when the Mind Control process begins. This also lined up better with how the game has communicated sacrifices so far, so this looked better, felt more intuitive, and was more in line with the other abilities.
Mind Controlling an enemy
The last thing we need to address is what the player can do while Mind Controlling an enemy. The end goal was to sacrifice one Yoling to kill an enemy, but by controlling an enemy, you have now disguised yourself as an impostor and can kill the other enemies. So, by planning which enemy to Mind Control, you might be able to solve a puzzle differently and more efficiently.
In the next video, I show myself controlling an enemy, destroying some destructibles, killing the second enemy, and finally unpossessing and killing the enemy I'm controlling.
For now, that is all! Thanks for reading!
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