insight EXM

I mostly kept working on insight EXM for the first week as there were a lot of things to be added and tweaked. The slight problem with this EXM is that it takes some of the mystery away. But as it is optional, I hope that people who are into exploration and experimenting will ignore it. Initially, I wanted insight to be passive EXM but it required some input - why not use the active EXM button then? Changing it to an active EXM had one more thing I consider an advantage. Active EXM spots are limited to two. Using one for something that just gives you information, means that you can't use it for something offensive or defensive. You can unlock passive EXM slots (up to 6 total) so it could be just squeezed in there.

improvements for Scourer, the pineapple robot

Anyway, the last two weeks were pretty busy and I couldn't work as much as I usually do, so there's less to talk about. I managed to fix some bugs (maybe I finally nailed reversed surfaces bug that was making odd triangles appear on the floor and the ceiling) and I sat down to improve Scourer's AI (that's the big pineapple enemy).

Scourer was meant to travel through corridors and use its ricocheting projectiles to attack enemies beyond corners. It also has a defensive mechanism - the repeller that bends projectiles to sides (or not, it switches on and off at random). The problem was that if the player encountered it if Scourer was just standing there at a very close distance, it was an easy target. You could throw a bomb, shoot at it with all you had and at close distance, the repeller was useless.

Recently I thought that if it has ricocheting projectiles, why couldn't it retreat behind a corner and shoot from there? Use ricocheting projectiles to its advantage. I also realised that Scourer could damage itself, hence no self-damage rule has been added for it.

There are also other changes, particle effects on Scourer when deflecting projectiles, slowing down incoming projectiles, activating deflection on damage (besides doing so at random).

what's next

Now I want to add those new EXMs. I don't want to spend too much time on that as I finally want to use the ceiling-crawling enemy that I added so long ago. It only requires the melee attack to be implemented. And of course, a new level where it could crawl.

But before I do that, I want to test the game a bit and upload a new demo build.