Belated Game Progress Update!

Hello! let me start out by apologizing for the lack of posts on here! I had to take a little break from development back in November/December as I literally had so little time during the holiday season to do so. 

January has been a great month for development however and I have a lot I'd like to share with you guys.  

As a little side note, I like to share the bulk of my progress on the patron discord just out of shear habit. If you want to stay up to date with what I'm working on, that's certainly the place to do so. 

Discord server invite: https://discord.gg/CBzmRfXNxx

𝗙𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗳𝗳: a big focus of this month--other than animating H-scenes--was on remaking Alyx' movement animations such as her walking and idle animations. As I was playing with her code implementing a jump mechanic, I accidently found a way to make her stick to platforms and that sort of led to a fully implemented a wall-climbing mechanic, which sort of happens to be very in-character for Alyx given how agile she is in HL2. 

So you will now be able to climb any wall or platform in-game at will. 

Soon after polishing player movement, I got to work on coding the Headcrab's AI. This is sort of when I figured out that I wanted the bulk of enemy AI in the game to rely on RNGs. Meaning that no attack patterns will be consistent and every encounter with an enemy with have a random outcome. 

In the case of the Classic Headcrab--yes I plan on adding several Headcrab variants--they will go idle, alert and jump left or right, and walkleft or right at completely random times. They even have random HP variables which I realize is a bit annoying so I opted to also make it so that Alyx can stomp and insta-kill them like Goombas if the player wants to risk attacking at close distance. 

Headcrabs when attacking Alyx will insta kill her upon collision as a trade off to them being somewhat easy to combat.  

Side-note: I have every H-scene for every enemy entirely animated with exception of the Houndeye so far, its just that the Headcrab H-scene is a tad out there for patreon--hence why I cut it out in the attachment--and also I'd like to keep most of the H-scenes as a bit of a surprise for when you all finally get to play the game!

I also dedicated a considerable amount of time making sure Headcrabs, and other enemies in the future, gib akin to HL1 enemies in a cartoonish manner. 😊

You'll see in the attachment as well that I've made it so Alyx has a limited amount of bullets to fire each time she aims. Ammo will likely not be a pickup in this game so I decided this would be a reasonable alternative and nerf to her for having infinite ammo. 

The last thing I was able to implement before writing this post was health pickups and chargers.

A small but very necessary thing for gameplay. I found it was actually very fun recreating these for the game. They really make this goofy 2d hentai side-scroller feel like Half-Life.😊

That's about everything I've been working on so far. Again I'm sorry for leaving you all in the dark on here. Like I said life's been pretty wild for me lately...

I wanna end this post by asking if you all would like a small sandboxy/arena type build to test gameplay and such with for me?🤔

It would be a very nice way for me to get some feedback on what I have so far before I start fully designing levels, campaigns, etc. in the future. 

I wanna thank all of you for your support thus far as well. I really can't wait to see what everyone thinks of this thing when it's finally ready to go public! 

Also, like I said earlier, I am more active on discord so if anyone would like to reach me on there, feel free to do so via the server or feel free to add me!