I can feel the end in sight for the Taskforce development, although it might be a few weeks yet. I spent yesterday making a few gameplay changes:
1. Creating a new cursor when units might fall onto another unit. Accidentally falling on top of a team-mate is sometimes a problem. I want to keep the feature so you can deliberately fall on enemies, a true commando-style move.
2. Shooting from underneath. Amazingly, this has been legal since v1.00, you could aim at the ceiling and injure targets on the floor above. Aiming up is now impossible, although you still might clip the underside of a floor when aiming upwards at an enemy on an edge.
3. The body part hit during a melee attack is now dependent on the angle of the victim, eg. the head, body, right arm, or right leg when attacking the right hand side. Before it was random. This makes knives a little more deadly as there is a 1/4 chance of a head shot vs. 1 in 6. This helps. Knives need to be a bit more deadly.
I also stayed up until 11pm fixing a distressing save bug. I've never had a save crash since installing the new saves, but this one did crash. It turned out that I'd saved the game while in fire mode rather than move mode, and I'd not prepared for that. Fire mode needs to store a lot more information, like the weapon held, the shot type selected etc. None of that was saved. Now it is. Blessed be testing.
Again I'm at the stage where I think most things are complete. Of course, I felt like this 4 weeks ago and SO much has been added since.
My next step is the music and I've already created 27 possible tracks for the game, many are variations on the main theme. There is a definite rock feeling to this music, with a wailing blues guitar for more desperate parts when you have one unit left. The Zombie theme has sweeping chords, a little like the Arcangel music, but I've used odd notes to create quite a lot of dissonance, especially for the 'last unit' and 'last target' variations. Last Target tolls a funeral bell.
I have 5 in-game tunes now: a main theme based on the title music, an urban, more dance/hip-hopish orientated one for the spider levels, one fast-paced tune in 5/4 time inspired by Lalo Schifrin, complete with a hard flute (the essential lead instrument for jazz), and a heavy rock track called Clone Patrol which sounds like something Led Zepplin might have written, plus that epic Zombie music with rich strings, something like the Sabbat from Symphonie Fantastique. I still need something for the robot spiders and the turret levels.
