Hello, I’m releasing a demo today. It’s not meant to be a finished product, but I wanted to test if a more complex stealth game would resonate with players before committing fully. I’ve done my best, and I’d really appreciate honest feedback.
Core Loop
Keep in mind this is the idea of what I’d like to do in the future, only a fraction of this is available in the game currently.
Start from the lobby, select a mission and settings like time of day, gadgets and difficulty.
Enter level and try to infiltrate some kind of base with the gadgets you picked and cool ideas.
Execute the route and adapt to overcome when things go wrong (or glitch out).
Earn money and XP: money buys and upgrades gadgets, XP unlocks new levels (possibly a skill tree).
Mechanics and stuff
Objectives, all kinds of them! You can steal, enable stuff, take a photo, go somewhere. And you’re paid for this!
Crouching, sprinting that all produce different sounds level and change the detection.
(somewhat buggy) Advanced NPC system. They can react to distractions such as rocks (Far Cry style), investigate, search, chase and kill of course! If I knew it was 1000+ lines of code I would have stopped, but I guess it’s too late.
Layered soundscapes based on zones that also affect effects such as reverb.
Good looking visuals, although not yet optimized (it’s fine for a demo I guess).
Analytics that tracks where players get spotted, where they stop and if they rage quit after a death.
Issues
This is my first game, I don’t have much level design experience (I watched some gmtk tho ) and stuff might seem unintuitive or oddly balanced… But I managed to make a Genshin impact player finish the level without any help, so I guess it’s ok.
Bugs, mostly due to the NPCs, I want to know if people actually like something like this before committing to a refactor. The bugs are usually minor but turn on replay clips if you can.
Thanks for reading this and possibly trying out the demo! Since this is my first project, any feedback is valuable to my, whether it’s about bugs, level design, or just how the game feels to play.
I’d love to hear if the stealth mechanics are fun, if the difficulty feels fair, and what kind of features or missions you’d like to see in the future.
What if a player could have access to the map layout, npc and player location and would act as the overwatch and guide players, would be kinda sick right? Especially with a voice chat radio thing.
im not sure if it’s intentional, but the game will put me in an already existing server while teleporting instead of making a fresh new one and putting me there
1 - you can drop stuff with backspace, this is mainly because you forgot to turn off a setting on the tools that allow the player to drop their my tools
well, there goes my motion detector jammer
1: Fixed
2: Fixed
3: I can’t reproduce it on Studio, my main PC, or my phone (no drop at all). A friend with a laptop did have the issue though. I’ll dig deeper later.
4: It’s intentional, some players in earlier versions of the map that took way longer would wait until there was 10 seconds left, get the lock back and use it on the same door. So I put a time maximum time limit before the lock wasn’t recoverable but it was too confusing and one just waited for the new limit. I’ll think of a trade off when I get the time.
Fixed the lag spike that happened during attacks. After some digging, I found out that AnimatorParallelManager:StepAll took way too long, but animations themselves weren’t the problem. Disabling player/NPC collisions resolved the issue.
Analytics show that only 30% of the last 15 sessions ended with a level completion. The toughest spots were the storage room and the rock “tutorial.” To address this, I made the rock throwing section easier and added extra tracking in the storage room (didn’t modify it too much as it was the largest room and it would be logical that it’s the one with the most detections).
Adjusted the window heights for better visibility while still being able to crouch behind it if necessary.
Added a free revive option (keeps the game state and spawns you back to spawn) to make retries less punishing. (it’s a new button, the old retry button still exists)
Improved dialogue and guidance for the second guard and for the backtracking part to avoid confusion.
Adjusted some NPC parameters and tweaked pathfinding thresholds for slightly better chases.
) and stuff might seem unintuitive or oddly balanced… But I managed to make a Genshin impact player finish the level without any help, so I guess it’s ok.
