---

Howdy,

I have finally returned to the blog! Although I have not blogged as much as I had originally intended to, I have been working a lot in the background. I've spent a lot of time the last month or two playing around with concepts and mechanics to see what felt best, and I think I finally have the vision of what I want this project to be (and I feel like knowing me, as soon as I say this I'm going to change directions again in the next blog post 🤷).

Using some of the mechanics I talked about in other posts, I now have created a simple stage that has two "rooms" of enemies. I think that the combat is simple but fluid, and I want to build around this and actually complete this thing. My hope is that I can get random rooms to generate at the end of the previous room, so it creates a long hallway of different subsets of enemies to fight.

I added a lot of mechanics since the last blog post, but just to highlight a few:

• The player can now both "knife" enemies in a melee attack and throw knives at enemies from a distance.
• Only a certain number of enemies can fire at the same time, so that way there's not a million overlapping gun noises.
• I have added multiple different pitches for gun sounds, also for the purpose of presenting audio overlap.
• I made "taking cover" less of a random experience; enemies used to just pick a random cover or cover within an "optimal band", but it felt better to just have enemies move to set covers instead.

I think in terms of mechanics, I'm satisfied for now. I want to put this thing together and actually have a full (but reasonably-sized) game that you can download and play. If there are any tweaks to be made, I'll come back and do those later. Check out a little demo of what I have so far in the video below!

--Josh