🕹️ 📝 :: DEV DIARY #003 :: 📝 🕹️

Hey Everyone, 

Welcome to another (slightly delayed) dev diary. this week I thought id move away from mechanics slightly and discuss something that is incredibly frustrating to us and I'd imagine most devs if they were being honest.  I like to call it the "huge amount of effort for very little payback paradox". This is basically where you spend a ridiculous amount of time to implement a minor mechanic but the player will only ever see this as something minor in the game.  This is illustrated perfectly in the following examples of Cover and Vaulting. Now, on the surface this can seem very minor. You have a character controller that can hide behind and vault over various objects in the game world to avoid enemy fire. You would think this ability would be easy to implement and you would be half right. Simplicity isn't the problem though. 

The problem is that you have to instruct the character controller as to where EVERY SINGLE cover location and vault interaction is located. Yep, in a city where there are hundreds of cars, walls and objects that could be used as cover or there has to be a trigger/zone and cover points. Here is a picture below to illustrate the cover mechanics.  The orange wireframe box is the trigger that tells the game to go into a cover state and the two tall orange wireframe boxes are the cover points.

The next picture is for the vault mechanics. Its basically the same principle as as the cover mechanics except the vault point will on top of objects such as low walls and car bonnets.  Now just imagine in a city district like the Eros district there are maybe thousands of places the character could possible make cover or vault and every point has to be placed by hand. So, its this sort of exact task in game development that can really suck up the hours in the working day and this is exactly why we make this diary. We want you folks to see what we do month to month and give you an insight in to some of the tedious things you have to overcome when making a game.

Before you ask!...Yes we did think about making a procedural system that could do the work of placing cover and vault points all over the map but there are just so many variables to take into consideration when doing that such as height rules, whether objects are in front or behind something, is the object moving etc and to be honest, by the time we designed, made and implemented a system like that we could have just got the lowest skilled and lowest paid member of the team (Me) to place the items by hand!

Anyway. like i said last week, we have introduced some more goodies in the next build (Demo Build 0.3) that I wont spoil by mentioning them here so look out for that definitely within the  week, as well as a new picture set for Patreon supporters. Ok, that's a wrap for the third Dev Diary but as usual, If you have any thoughts, suggestions and feedback please use the ⁠⁠general-chat or ⁠⁠cyberpunkxxx-chat channels, we would love for you to get involved.

The CyberpunkXXX Crew