February 06, 2020
More weapons, levels, and ideas
It has been two weeks since our last devlog but that does not mean we have not been busy. We have been preparing for our next major release which adds 3 new weapons, 10 new levels, and many fixes!
As we mentioned in our last post, weapons had been a key area we focused on as a result of feedback. This was an area where the code had been written quickly to get the game going, but not a huge amount of thought had been put into how we would add more weapons easily. So before adding in any new weapons, an overhaul of how Dead Spread handles weapons was in order. During this rebuild, the concept of melee weapons and unarmed attacks was added meaning we that adding in non-projectile weapons is now possible. Having completed this rebuild, adding in new weapons is now relatively easy.
The new weapons are:
- Unarmed Not really a “weapon” but I’m counting it! 😆 Now you have a last resort of punching the dead… though there’s a high risk of being bitten.
- Baseball bat The first real melee weapon. Similar to unarmed, you will have to get close to the dead to hit but the baseball bat does a lot more damage and has better range.
- Machine gun Pictured in the header image of this post. The machine gun has by far the fastest rate of fire, but is a lot less accurate.
We are happy with the progress on the weapons front for now. Looking ahead, we plan to add more weapons with the flamethrower slated to be next.
The other major focus we have had is taking a look at all our levels and improving the difficulty progression, playability, and adding in our new weapon options. This release changes the ordering of levels quite a bit, and we are adding in 10 levels throughout to pad out some of the hard levels which we really wanted to keep. Some of these new levels are also in a new location: the “hospital”. We will be showing off screenshots of those levels in the near future.
The level select screen now supports dragging/flicking gestures to move between screens.
A result of going up from 15 to 25 levels meant a second screen of levels! Originally we had thought just arrow buttons would be fine, and they probably would have been during the alpha, but adding in the swiping gestures makes the menu feel a lot more fluid. We are quite happy with the result.
Finally, we have put a lot of thought into the short-term roadmap and have a better idea of what is in and out of the open beta. Previously we had thought that the Survival mode wasn’t needed in the beta, but considering we see it as a key game mode, we thought that excluding this from the initial offering would do the game a disservice. So Survival mode is coming out in the release after this one, which should be the final release before the open beta.
We will talk more about Survival mode in our next devlog. Until next time!