comfortjones

2024 Lessons Learned + Going Forward

2024 was a year of a lot of ups and downs for me. The project progressed more than it has in years and I got a promotion at my job, but this came along with me burning out pretty badly in the last quarter of the year as my country backslid into fascism. It’s a dark world we live in but I guess that makes for decent creative fuel for a game abo...

October 2024 Progress Report

Hey all, its been far too long since I updated this page so I figured I'll start with an update on Inhuman's status. The last 3 months of work have honestly been more productive and focused than any other time in the game's development. Meeting more professional developers and talking through things has been a big boon for figuring out how to pr...

Playing around in Chapter 4

Trying out this arena set for our final level.

Revisiting Mission Improbable

As I’ve worked to get myself out of my modding slump, I’ve revisited Half-Life 2 mods which had a big impact on me when I was first starting out with Inhuman. Half-Life 2 in my eyes is a game that’s greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve never loved the feel of the guns or how most combat encounters play out, yet there’s something und...

Quick update

Hey all, sorry about my silence here. I honestly hit a bit of a slump with my work on Inhuman, which in turn kinda killed my ability to feel like I was able to produce anything of interest here. So to get out of that funk I've been reevaluating what motivates my mod work and I'm hoping to bring that same energy this page soon.

I'm r...

Dev Thoughts 2 - 9 - 2024

So in a bid to start doing more generalized articles on game design I foolishly thought tackling the subject of shotguns in shooters would be an easy win. Well, I was wrong! So while I’m still getting my thoughts together on that, I figured I’d get into the state of Inhuman’s weapons and some challenges I’ve faced over the course of last...

Quick Progress Sneak Peek

Exclusive look at some stuff I've been playing with, I'll have an article on what's going into these changes in about a week. 

Changing the focus of my Patreon Content

So you might have noticed I've had a massive delay on my latest post, and honestly I think it's coming from a place of low motivation. Progress on Inhuman has been a bit slower and its made it harder for me to really get into writing articles for Patreon exclusively focused on it. So, going forward, I'm going to start doing more public facing wr...

One more look at this arena

Sorry I've been dragging a bit on the latest article, it went through some revisions as I've been juggling that, work, and working on the mod. In the meantime enjoy this peek at the current state of the game. I'll have an article on the overall state of the game and what's left to do sometime in this next week, and another on specific balance de...

Moving and Shooting: A Game Design Nightmare

I am in no way exaggerating when I say I have probably spent more time thinking on when the soldiers in my game are allowed to move and shoot than any other aspect of the game. Over the last 5 years how and when soldiers were allowed to shoot has changed, and as things changed the list of weird band aid fixes and very specific if else statements...

Showing off an updated arena

Pics on my last post seem to be showing at a smaller size than they should, so hopefully this addresses that. 

Creating My Favorite Arena

In the last few months I’ve been doing more media for the project, recording videos of combat encounters to show off changes to AI or new enemies. While I’ve been happy with reception overall, doing so revealed some of the causes of my frustrations with parts of the game.

Video Link here: 2023-09-11 02:41:05 +0000 UTC View Post

The Combat Loop of Inhuman

In my last article I promised to do an overview of our heavy soldier AI. However as I wrote it up, I realized I was basically doing a piece on the combat experience I’m trying to achieve with Inhuman as a whole. So in this article I’m gonna cover both how the standard enemies of the game enforce a certain playstyle and then how the new enemy...

Charger Combat

Showing off the latest iteration of the soldier squad AI mixed with our new heavy enemy variant.

Level Design Thoughts 4-11-23

We're in what should be the last month of Inhuman's development and the focus lately has been getting each major arena feeling distinct and polished. In doing so I've had to grapple with old mistakes that were getting in the way of letting the game's combat be the best it can be. 

Adding verticality is a great way to add some visual d...

Another Revamped Arena

Little showcase of an arena I've reworked recently.

Small Charger Showcase

Showing off the current progress on the Charger. The effects on his flashbang are all super temp and he needs more flinch/death animations, but otherwise he's pretty much functional already!

His animations are mostly from HLA, however we had to get his movement/aiming working ourselves and there's also some retargeting from HL2 ...

Showing off the last WIP section of the game

With this basically playtest ready, Inhuman is now content complete! It looks pretty rough but it'll become pretty decent looking quickly I'm sure.

Apologies for the silence

Hey everyone, I hope 2023 is treating you well so far. I wanna apologize for the month long silence and explain where I'm gonna try to go as a content creator this year. 2022 was a really big year for my game as well as myself. I'm really proud of what's been accomplished, but I've also become more aware of some of my own shortcomings which have...

Polishing up levels + Dealing with Burn Out

Over the last few months Inhuman has been receiving more intensive testing, and as I went through playtest footage I noticed an old arena had become a bit of a problem child. I observed players who felt uncomfortable moving up in the arena opt to hang back and gun down soldiers who ran up awkwardly close to them one at a time, leading to an unco...

Some Arena Gameplay

An arena featuring some of the improved AI mentioned in the most recent article. I'll be doing a write up on my thoughts with this level soon.

Recent AI Thoughts and Accomplishments

In August I wrote an article here about how I had recently given far more control of AI behavior to level designers. While this did allow me to fine tune fights, it incentivized me account for lots of potentially bad outcomes in subpar levels with mark up rather than creating levels that help the AI look their best. Combat was starting to feel "...

Little peek at Chapter 1.

Obv still WIP but I'm enjoying how this is turning out.

Finding the balance for Inhuman

Last article I outlined 3 core goals I've been wanting to solve for the game, and I think I'm pretty much happy with my results after trying a couple of things. These goals were:     

•     Clear tells when an enemy is about to attack you
•     Finding more ways to show...
  2022-10-23 01:59:58 +0000 UTC View Post

Reacting to recent online feedback

Making the changes to my game’s AI something players can actually notice and react to has been a consistent challenge since I started the project. While they certainly felt the difference in gameplay overall, reception to the soldiers themselves has always been a bit mixed. A key issue here has generally been a lack of any new visuals that rea...

Level Design is Exhausting lol

Sorry for being gone for so long! The project has not been on pause at all, but trying to get everything done for a failed release date was pretty draining. I'm going to try and balance that a bit better in the coming months so bear with me.

Map progress has been going well, but unfortunately not fast enough hence our unfortunate delay. On...

The Battle For Control in Shooters (Part 2)

(This article is a follow up to an earlier work, I suggest reading that first: https://www.patreon.com/posts/battle-for-in-1-64101416 )

So let's say we've got a combat space that mostly works, but we're looking for ways to improve it. In this...

Some BTS Stuff

Progress on Inhuman has been going fairly smooth, with a combination of work on improving old existing stuff and brand new content going by pretty quickly! I'm still tweaking this area using what I've learned from my work over the last two months. I'll get more into the whys of that in an article soon, but basically I'm really trying to give npc...

The Battle For Control in Shooters (Part 1)

One core challenge level designers often face is getting the player and their enemies to move through a space in the way they intended. Maybe the player is running right at the enemies and mowing them down rather than methodically sneaking around and making use of side paths, maybe enemies are bum rushing the player rather than intelligently hol...

LD Progress Sneak Peek

A combat section that I started on earlier in the week. Gonna be doing a full article on it with a video preview soon!