What's New?

We're in the middle of a big hustle and bustle. Still, it’s time for another update on CACTUS.  

First thing’s first. We originally planned to publish the demo in February, but now we have to postpone it to the end of March.

Of course, a demo doesn’t have to be perfect, but technical issues should be reduced to a minimum, and there are still some aspects that we’re not quite satisfied with. Therefore, you can expect a fully playable level with around 30 minutes of play time at the end of March.

The demo will contain the following features:

• 1 fully playable level (± 30mins of play time)
• 3 enemy types and multiple major wave arenas
• 3 special abilities (Detonation, Blast Shot and Frenzy State)
• 5 mighty booster pickups
• Innovative reload mechanic

Until then, there's still a lot of work to be done. So let's dive right in...

Game Design

With regards to  game design, Oliver is still stepping in as a backup artist, diligently troubleshooting some remaining lighting issues. Technically, all key lighting systems (lightmaps, light and reflection probes as well as fake lights) are in place and functioning. Now it’s mostly about tweaking the values to get the right visual impression.

If you want to dive deeper into our lighting process, you can drill into the topic with this Devlog: https://bit.ly/3kSmyFX

Next week Oliver will take on balancing the Blast Shot. He’ll have to wait until Nils has written the code for it based on his design spec. To contextualize, the Blast Shot is the third ability you can use in the demo. It’s a powerful shotgun shot that deals massive knockback, for which you have to gather enough Frenzy – the global currency to execute special skills.

Coding

Nils, our coder is currently implementing a save/load system and menus related to it. The game will save automatically at checkpoints, but the player will also have access to a save/load function in the pause menu, and to a handy quick save/load function. Unfortunately, it’s a tough issue. Our game is, like many others, way too large to snapshot the whole program state whenever a player hits the save button.

That’s why every relevant object’s status – let’s say the state of a door as opened or closed, or the exact current action of an enemy – must be saved and loaded individually. Considering the many individual properties of such diverse game objects, it comes as no surprise that this is one hell of a task for a not-so-fancy, but expected feature.

Once these issues are taken care of at the end of this week, Nils will turn his focus towards implementing the Blast Shot ability.

Digital Art

As illustrated in depth in our last Devlog (https://bit.ly/3y0huCI), Pierre, our artist, is preoccupied with the textures and animations of our enemies. Once all assets are ready, he’ll work on their implementation and make last tweaks here and there in-engine.

His most recent area of focus was prepping up the Collared Lizard. The goal here was to alter it's appearance into a more melee-type enemy. That's why it now features stronger arms and a grim facial expression.

In the upcoming two weeks, both the Dragon and the Armadillo lizards will receive the same treatment. After all, these enemies usually appear in groups, so visual consistency is very crucial.

In other words: expect more news on this topic soon...

Audio

Regarding audio, Alex is working on player-enemy-interaction sound effects in FMOD. This step will not only make the game more pleasing for your ears, but also adds more juice to overall game feeling. In addition, many sound effects also serve gameplay purposes, such as positional 3D audio to warn you about an approaching enemy horde.

Did you know? All character voice overs were recorded by the team. That means when you play the game, you’ll hear our voices all across the enemy crowd. Distorted and processed, of course...

Later Alex will set up the sounds in Unity and hook them up to the game logic, to make them change based on context. For an example, a weak hit from an enemy will sound less painful, than a heavy, high-damage hit. Of course, nailing this is a tough feat that takes a lot of fine tuning and testing, but we're confident about this one.

Outlook

As you can see, there is still much work to do, but we are diligently on it. Step by step we get closer to a wonderful, polished experience in the demo. Thanks for being a bit mor patient with us. We’ll keep you posted. Until then have a great week! See ya.

Free Demo

We will release a free demo in Q1 2023, so stay tuned.

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