Hey everyone!
The Steam Game Festival is over, but work on Intravenous is far from over! I took some time off from working on the game after the festival, as I noticed hints of burn-out, and now that I've rested a bit it's time to get back into it.
So let's get on to the exciting part: the new stuff.
1. Dumping bodies in dumpsters
Pretty straight-forward: dump a body in a dumpster and forget about it. Knocked out or dead - doesn't matter, they won't be found.
However they're a rather big luxury. There aren't a lot of them and they're single use - dump one body, and you can't stuff any more in there ever again.
2. Night vision goggles (NVGs)
The recurring feedback that I got is that the player view cone clashed with the lights too much. So I've addressed that twofold:
1. reduced the intensity of the player view cone. It's still there, but illuminates the view area far less.
2. added NVGs.
I never intended to add NVGs since the player's view cone was meant to be sort-of the NVGs - it illuminated the view area without giving the player's position away. Still, the recurring theme in feedback was that it was too intense. So to remedy that I added NVGs.
Initially I was going to make the NVGs increase the overall visibility everywhere, making pitch-black areas no longer pitch-black. However that came with a big caveat: NVGs making everything visible meant players would opt to always use them, and so the game would end up looking green for everyone, all the time. It also meant that they provided a huge advantage to visibility.
Naturally this led to the following compromise: while the view cone provides far illumination, NVGs illuminate the surrounding area in a shorter radius. Perfect for pitch-black areas when you need to be aware of your surroundings. Looks nice, too!
3. Tranquilizer rifle
Given that it's a stealth game, any additional tools allowing for more stealth-related scenarios are always a nice addition.
The tranquilizer rifle is sort-of the tazer's bigger variant, with several differences:
1. it uses the primary (rifle) weapon slot
2. it weighs more and makes more noise when holstered
3. it has greater projectile range
4. it puts enemies to sleep after a short while, as opposed to the tazer's instant KO
The timed effectiveness is both a positive and a negative.
Negative because it means you can't just dose someone with sleepy juice and have them fall to the ground instantly.
Positive because it synergizes with the tazer - you can take out two nearby guards by dosing the first with the tranquilizer, and following up with a tazer shot to the second guard after a short while - stealthy ranged takedown of two guards at once!
4. Throwable knife
Wanted a semi-quiet ranged weapon that kills on impact, but don't want to carry a weapon with you? The throwable knife is what you're looking for.
It can be just as easily used as a melee weapon, and it's quite effective at that, too!
However, given that it's a lethal weapon, that means it will leave blood and dead bodies everywhere. Not good if you're trying to leave as little traces of your presence as possible.
The back kill now also requires the presence of this weapon in the player's inventory.
5. Motion sensor mines
If you don't care about stealth and are all about combat, these will be perfect for you.
They explode and send shrapnel flying everywhere upon explosion, sort of like frag grenades, except they're straight-up death traps.
Don't get caught in the blast, and DON'T go running around next to one!
If you place one of these and decide that this isn't what you had in mind - have no fear, you can pick these up at any point! ...provided you don't trigger the motion sensor.
That's it for this devlog! I hope you're excited about Intravenous, because I am!
Thanks for reading, see you in the next devlog!