State of Decadence - Collection of progress reports

[Majestic XII]

Hi everyone, I don't know how many of you watch the frontpage, but we had an update up a few days ago going through some details of Decadence. I have another update for you (and many more coming) but instead of spamming the frontpage with them (They would probably just be ignored by staff) I thought I'd post them in a thread on the forums. I'll keep this thread updated with the latest stuff, and it would be nice to get a discussion going. So if there's any questions, just ask them!

The first progress report talked about our capture system and you can read about it here. This next update is more about the characters and weapons.

The characters are one of the most important features in Decadence. Not only do all the characters have a back story and in-game voice acting, but they will also decide how you play the game. All together, there are four characters in the mod with their own unique appearance divided into two teams. The character you pick will decide what kind of weapon you get. There's an offensive and a supportive weapon both with a secondary fire mode, and these weapons is featured on both teams so there won't be a balance issue.

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Let's take Zoe and Echo as an example. Echo was the first character announced for Decadence and he serves the purpose of being the aggressive character that always goes first into battle. Echo's weapon is a fast firing heavy machine gun built from scrap lying around the city. You can do a lot of damage if you're up personal with your enemy but the spread of the bullets makes it very hard to kill enemies at long range. If you're not happy with the amount of damage it can put out, the Harley as we call Echo's weapon, has a secondary fire mode which allows you to load up as many as 15 bullets and release them in a very short time frame into your opponent. You don't want to turn around a corner to find Echo with his loaded up Harley in your face, that's for sure! The secondary fire mode is only useful at very close range since the spread is even worse and you'll have to get used to handle the recoil.

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Zoe on the other hand is best if used at long range. She is able to fire bursts of bullets with a steady hand into her target, and if you're sneaky enough, the enemy won't even know where it came from. Even though she has the upper hand when it comes to taking out enemies from afar, if she runs into someone at close range there's usually a problem. There are situations like this where her secondary fire comes in handy. Zoe is able to fire a poison dart which will slow down and confuse her opponent. This allows Zoe to outmaneuver for example Echo in a face-to-face encounter. Not only is this good in close combat, but an excellent support weapon for you and your team mate when storming the water node.

For more information, visit us at www.decadencemod.com

 

[Majestic XII]

Time for another update The first one can be found here.

With characters and the capture system being the most prominent features of Decadence, it's all the little things that tie the whole experience together. As I mentioned in earlier State of Decadence articles, this is a rundown of features that are complete (except for a bit of tweaking of course) and in-game.

One of our promises we speak of on our website is that we will not feature a HUD in Decadence. This is somewhat still true today; it just depends on where you draw the line. As of today; we have no HUD elements in first person view. The damage information has been taken care of by a damage shader which blurs and darkens your vision. The same technique is used with Zoe's and Nikita's poison arrow. When you get hit with the arrow, the screen will get a green tint and blurry to disorientate you, not to mention the changes to your movement and mouse speed. You'll know when something happen to you, that's for sure.

Another feature that just got finalized the other week is the ammunition indicator on the weapons. Every weapon has unlimited clips, so the only thing you need to keep track of is the amount of bullets in your current clip. While there's no way of saying exactly how many bullets you still got in your clip, a warning light will come on the weapon when you're running low. This light can be anything from a LCD display as we got on the more advanced weapons, to as simple as a reused Christmas light on another weapon. When you're low on ammunition, the light will start flashing alerting you to the problem.

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We have been play testing Decadence since pretty much day one, and testing is something very important to us and the way we work. To us, iterations are the way to go. Decadence has been in the state of tuning for quite a while now. This means that no big design changes are being made and we try to present the features and gameplay we got in a polished state. We have had some students and teachers come over and visit us at our little office at the university, and the feedback we got from these tests were positive while there were a couple of things we needed to address. Many of these comments were player feedback related, such as problems with knowing where the capture zone was, player identification, the ability to revive and so on. Some of these can be solved by information represented in the game world, such as a yellow and black warning decal on the ground to indicate where the capture zone is. Others were not as easy to solve, and this is where we will probably ignore our no HUD rule a bit. We want Decadence to be easy to learn so using some on-screen information is necessary. We're talking about adding a small icon above your team mate to indicate that the character is friendly, the same with the capture console. You don't want your players to be confused when they start a map, but at the same time, you don't want to use too much graphics and interface to interfere with the immersion. However, a bit of abstract graphics to convey information won't break the immersion and we believe that this is going to solve many problems for new players. However, if you do like the no HUD approach you can rest assured that we like it as well, and we won't go overboard with information on your screen; just the right amount to help you out.

As always, more information can be found att www.decadencemod.com