Hi!

The following is a more technical discussion of the release notes for v1.04 of The Swarm, seen here.

Weapon Penetration

I've modeled a semi-realistic weapon penetration system where each round has an amount of total damage it can deal and a maximum amount of energy it can impart on a target which interacts with the target's hardness, which is the amount of energy it can absorb before the bullet passes through. What this means is that something like a crate with thin walls will allow a round to pass right through with minimal damage (besides entry and exit holes, not shown in-game :P ), but a canister, with thicker walls and internal contents will provide more resistance to a round, and thus transfer more of that energy internally. This does make balancing a little tricky, but it's worth it.

Player Damage Screen Effect

This uses the new volume-based post-processing stack in Unity,  every time the player takes damage, the weight of the Damage Effect Volume is increased proportional to the amount of damage taken, that weight is set to constantly cool down, so we get an attack-release style visual effect.

I use a similar method for the players health feedback, the Death Effect Volume weight is set by 1 - (current health / maximum health). So much simpler than the old methods we had to use with the old post-processing stack.

Container Gibs

Let's hear it for Blender's Fracture Operator! There's a cool feature in fracture modifier that allows us to keep a non-destructive workflow, so we can define chunks, modify the containers as we see fit and the chunks update automatically.

NOICE!

The Future (where I ramble on a bit)

I'm still keen to tinker with The Swarm, though I will probably have to move away from the very obvious Alien / Xenomorph homage, I may even branch future updates to a completely different game, The Swarm is not a very inspiring name :P

After some advice, I may even be moving away from the pure action aspect of the current game (who needs another standard twin-stick shooter), to something a bit more survival horrory, where the focus is on modifying your environment to keep you alive. The current idea is to play the game from a technician / engineer POV where you have to lock/unlock doors (including welding and cutting :D), lay traps, build, upgrade and maintain turrets (a fan favourite it seems) to keep yourself alive in this hostile environment. Think Dead Space / Half-Life without their "devolving" into near pure shooter territory (PS not dissing Half-Life, I just want to try something new-ish).

Any thoughts?