Hello!

I’m back with new monthly post. It’s the first post in 2017 and first post since November 2016. Sorry guys, it was busy winter!

First of all, we finally came up with a new name for the game! Please welcome, Oddinary Highway!

Since November 2016, we’ve made a large amount of updates, so I would like to cover the following main things in this post:

• Elite enemies behavior has been completely changed.
• New location has been added to the game – City. It’s a very important location, I will cover it below.

Changes in Elite enemy

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the Elite enemy is the crumble stone of the game. Players should encounter this type of enemy to get a new weapon.

Before the change, we were making special waves that included one Elite enemy surrounded by different infinite waves of enemies. Such waves could occur only one per level. When the elite enemy was spawned, it was flying around the screen and following some patterns of shooting and moving. One of the downsides of this approach was that the duration of the wave was unpredictable, and players could be stuck facing Elite for a while.

Another issue was that we were creating unique behaviors for each level. Everything started to look like we were overdoing things and elite looked and felt like a mini-boss.

After discussion, we decided to make the following changes on how Elite should work:

1. Elite still appears only one per level.
2. Elite doesn’t shoot at the player until it receives some amount of damage.
3. Elite is surrounded by some guards at first, but later on, following enemies waves start to spawn. So, you will encounter Elite together with ordinary enemies waves.
4. Overall Elite behavior is simplified.

New location – The City

During the winter season we wanted to move forward and apply to Greenlight somewhere during the spring. One of the things that the game is still missing is a complete game loop. In Oddinary Highway, the level is “looped”: once the player completes the first loop, they will proceed to the beginning of the game. A new loop has an increased difficulty. The endpoint of each loop will be the same location: the gorgeous City.

Like other locations in Oddinary Highway, the City has its own mechanics that are used in enemy design. One of the selected game mechanics is based on summoning other types of enemies. The main advantage of this mechanic is that it allows us to reuse already created enemies from previous locations (Sand and Ocean worlds), enabling us to create a gameplay slice pretty fast for the new location.

To make the level more engaging, Arseniy proposed to use additional mechanics. It came from game lore:

The City was once the capital of the Universe. But when the father of the main protagonist lost it to the head of the Debt Syndicate, everything changed. Now, the City is threatened by robots and mafia gangs.

So, some waves of enemies will consist of mafia gangs on hover cars.

Other things to mention include a light system. During the work on concept art for the City, Ksenia asked if we could “colorize” background objects more interestingly. After short research, we decided to use lighting together with normal maps. There are some other doubts regarding the usage of normal maps for other game objects, e.g., player’s ship or weapons, as this will require extra art-related work.

Besides these main updates, we were polishing, improving, and creating new content during the last months.