SHRL Proto V3

This one's a pretty straightforward drop! As always, the zipped release is available on my itch page (here) for windows. (Still having UI issues with Mac, sorry!) And, as also always, my devlogs are originally hosted on my personal blog (here).

Unfortunately, I've only been able to get what is on average 2~3 hours a work done for a handful of days every week, which hampers the momentum of it all a bit, but I have some other things in the works right now life-wise.

So the new enemy type still needs more work before I properly put it into anything I release to the world, but there's a new weapon I've played in the (currently only) level. Between that, some important fixes to the enemy behavior, and some item and enemy placement, I think there's enough here to merit a release.

The firegun and enemy, even though they didn't take a ridiculous amount of effort, did a lot to complete the feel of the game. I'm still not sure if having a weapon which just out right one shots enemies is the right design choice in the long run, but at the moment it comes with very little ammo and the player has no way to obtain more. Plus, as the player nears the end they tend to get swamped by boatloads of enemies, so in the current iteration it helps things click.

The placement of items across different quadrants did a lot to also help smooth out the play experience. Levels still feel like they're more or less different every time, but it feels less like whether or not you make it to the end depends on the luck of the draw with item placement. I still have qualms about the experience being too predictable, but I know what the underlying logic is, so playtesting it with a few friends who didn't design the levels would probably help me understand how confusing the map is, or up to dumb luck their victories felt.

At the end of the day, one would want the "true version" of the game to rely more on leveraging your wits and figuring out the exploration puzzle of it all on the fly rather than over-using a priori knowledge of the level design, but the amount of predictability the level has right now would actually feel right for an introductory experience.