what's going on? - EXMs


Recently I had lots of stuff that was carrying me away from working on Tea For God. Some of them are still there (half of our house is sick a bit, including me), but I still managed to do the most of the work I planned to do on Extension Modules (EXMs). Actually, I did a bit more than I planned. I want to add a few custom EXMs and then I will be releasing a new build.

That new build will introduce EXMs. Pulling distant energy balls closer, navigation aid, were things that were just there. You had that functionality in both of your hands. You could pull energy balls with either of your hands. But since the beginning, the plan was to make it possible at a cost. That cost is taken slots on your forearm. When the game is more complete, when you start it, you will only have a few certain EXMs. There won't be that much you could do, so you should not care about the number of free EXM slots. To be honest, all of them will be already taken.

But when you find new EXMs, you will have to make decisions, which EXMs to remove from your forearm and which to put into free slots. In the beginning, it will be easy. Most of the people will remove a directional navigation aid from one of the hands and that will free four slots.

You can use those slots to increase the damage you do, decrease the amount of energy each shot costs, increase the transfer rate between main equipment's energy storage and the weapon, decrease cooldown on health regeneration, increase health regeneration rate and so on.
But changing stats is just the beginning. As there are other things you can do. You can have the buttons to transfer energy between different storages (health backup, reactor, main equipment) or have an EXM that does it automatically for you (with all of these modules installed, all energy is stored in the reactor - this means that each shot you take, decreases your life length, but then, each energy ball you grab, increases it). This way, you can increase the chances of survival and make each run as long as possible.

But then, there will be also EXMs that will allow you to place traps, control AI, deflect incoming lasers, create shields, etc. Everyone should find something that will suit their playstyle.

The new build will have some of that, enough to taste the customisation. There will be also presets showing different setups.

After that I will be doing VR scaling, headshots and a few other ideas I have right now. Followed by weapon crafting (and the first different type of weapon, currently all weapons are the same - laser guns).

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Comments

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When I install an EXM that's a button (to transfer energy from one place to another) - how do I activate or use these buttons?

Love what you're doing here, keep it up!

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For manual transfer buttons, you have to press actual EXM/button on your forearm (using a finger tip).

Active EXMs (shields, deflectors) are activated by pressing A/X buttons on your controllers.

These changes sound great!  Sorry that you’ve been sick but I’m glad you have been able to keep moving forward on the game. Customization sounds like a good idea. Having to make choices certainly gives the player freedom and also creates an element of puzzle solving which I’ve always liked in my gameplay and would be hard to accomplish otherwise in a randomly generated map. Such good ideas! Keep up the good work!

It's more about creating better builds than puzzles. Although I plan to have some puzzles in the levels - when you solve them, you will get stuff that you can either use immediately or parts for persistence. And that's the bit I have too many ideas how to approach. Unlocking stuff. I'd like to avoid the situation when the game turns into a slow grind. It may get a bit slower after a while but you should still be able to get new stuff quite often. Do you get that randomly or should you choose which one do you want to get. If you were to choose, then I want to have some of the stuff available to try out during a run - you can just find EXM module or a weapon part, check it out and decide if you want to go in that dir. Or maybe I should have things that are unlocked for a few runs for free.. I also like branching technology trees. And right now I had an idea about making it a maze. With things that are free for a while you see their location in the "technology chart" but to get there to unlock them permanently, you have to unlock other things on the way and there should be more paths to get there than just one. It wouldn't be a branching tree then. And also it is a kind of a puzzle. Wrote that down. Definitely I am going to try it for EXMs. For weapons I am thinking more about a persistent inventory. You have a lot of space but it is still limited. You will have to drop some of the stuff to get new one. But while there will be a well defined list of EXMs, weapon parts will be randomly generated. Even if you unlock all EXMs and other stuff, you still may be looking for the best weapon parts.

Thank you. I do believe that I could get to that idea eventually but it was much easier with the words that you wrote. Words, phrases, sentences trigger certain parts of the brain and new ideas are flowing then. Thank you :)

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Can't wait.  Keep up the awesome work

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Consider a next level game that is all designed in vr and non.Logan's run.The dystopian doom city,the escape and hunter becomes the hunted and final outskirts and wastelands in the doom as well as outer doom paradise.

For a while I will be working just on gameplay stuff. Then I plan to add a few zones. Although those will be just very different places. Then I plan to add actual levels. There will be something resembling wastelands - my vision is to have an enormous city in a shape of a ring with a smaller city with huge tower in the middle. And there will be huge, almost empty place between these two.

Wow sounds fascinating.