Written on 03/11/2022
Welcome! this is the third post for the game Foreign Body, so if you haven't already go check out the others! This post will be covering the work that I have done in the past few weeks on this project and some of the major changes and updates the game has gone through.
Elevator Pitch
Foreign Body is a single player isometric turn-based strategy game, where you play as a hostile bacteria invading a defensive immune system. As you move further into enemy territory, you must spawn bacteria, strategise and consume your way to victory!
Quick Catchup
Due to the project taking a lot of my time as well as other personal life involvements I have not been able to write a dev blog post in quite a while and so naturally there have been quite a lot of changes since my last post. Last week we started our Beta Milestone meaning that we are now officially finished with implementing any new features into the game. From here onwards our main focus will be on polishing the existing mechanics of the game and ensuring that all of the many various bugs and squished and squashed.
Major Changes
The game has undergone many interesting changes throughout the large gap time that has passed, I think the best way to summarise and recap them would be to show you guys the rush hours that our team has been doing these past few weeks. These rush hours will unfortunately not include audio and not all of the slides will be detailed with text so hopefully you will be able to understand through context what some of the slides mean.
Rush Hours
Without further ado, here are the rush hours from the past few weeks!
Coding
The past 2 weeks (as it is now Beta) I have been helping out with a little bit of bug fixing along with bug testing, logging bugs and helping the programmers to find all of the pesky creatures that need to be crushed. Because of this the team has logged over 100 bugs already and we are hard at work fixing them! I have personally helped to write some scripts to fix some of the bugs that arose. For example, one script I wrote allowed the introduction music for the game to be played first and then a second soundtrack that loops to be played after this. While the coding I have contributed is minor I am very happy to be of use in this bug fixing and of course in logging them all.
The Main Menu
Here is a screenshot showcasing the latest look of the Main Menu!
The Main Scene
Here is a screenshot showcasing the latest look of the main scene with all of its new models, textures and goodies!
As you may notice, there are many new UI improvements and additions to this scene. Things like the commander's health is indicated and how many turns until the player commander is able to spawn again is now communicated to the player. A round counter has also been implemented at the bottom of the screen allowing players to know what round they are on, what turn they are on and how many rounds they have before game over.
Along with some of these UI improvements we also have a diegetic highlight system that will highlight the squares that units have available to move to (green), where resources are going to move on their next turn (pink), what spaces player units occupy (yellow), what spaces different resources occupy (lime and blue) and what spaces enemy units occupy (currently pink but will be changed to a red to not confuse with the tentacle resource).
We have also implemented a tile colour variation to allow more visual interest in the board without clashing with the other important highlighted tiles.
Our amazing artists have also been creating all sorts of cool animation like this one to showcase how units can be absorbed/eaten and more!
Game Design Document
During the last 7 weeks the GDD has changed quite considerably from my last post. Here is the updated document! Many features of the game have been tweaked based on player feedback from the many various builds that have been done. Data from these playtests was collected via surveys that participants would fill out on completion of their playtest. In various circumstances players would also share a YouTube video of their playthrough and in some cases we would interview players and watch them as they played to get a more accurate idea of how they played. This feedback influenced many of the changes you will see and many balancing changes that may not be as evident such as the spawn rate of enemies, the exact movement patterns of the enemies and how they operate, the amount of rounds it takes for the game to end, how often the commanders should be able to spawn new units and more.
Final Thoughts
Our team has been working really hard on this project these last few weeks and we are all very happy to have made it to the Beta Milestone. I hope to bring you more updates hopefully with closer proximity to each other in future to get a better idea of what is going on. I realise that looking back it can be hard to remember all the changes the game has gone through and so this blog post might not be as detailed as some of the others due to my memory failing me.
A highlight for me recently has been my contributions to logging bugs, creating the surveys then testing participants and being able to help out with a little bit of bug fixing myself. Adding in the new fonts, animations for the credits menu and overall working with the team has been a blast and if you are interested in checking out our game, please visit the link at the top of the page to find the latest version of the game on our itch page!
If you have any criticisms, suggestions, advice or wish to get in touch, please Contact Me. Also, if you want to stay in the loop on future projects that I'm involved in please watch this space. Thank you for reading!