Release and Reflection

The third game in a sort of informal trilogy of space games, LILAC-93 is an immersive sim doom-like. Really it stems from wanting to work with Crocotile 3D to try developing 3D spaces out of a 2D tileset, then stumbling onto a set of space assets with a relatively high degree of wall variety and detail.

Of the games I've made so far this summer, this feels like the most promising one to continue developing. Thanks to a last minute weekend visit from an old college friend, a lot got left on the cutting room floor - another enemy type, inventory items with more variety of use, more billboarded furniture in spaces, a slightly more dynamic AI for the one spoilery enemy that does exist, and frankly most of the juice.

I'm pretty proud of my modeling here as a first timer. Script-wise, I think the FOV, billboarding, and 8-directional sprite scripts I put together work really nicely. I was satisfied with the pure C# system I was using to store item data as well. I also really enjoyed dressing the level with objects!

Growth-area-wise, I'm not super satisfied with the sheer variety of movement systems I have going - a character controller on the player, a navmesh agent on the astronaut, pure transform movement on the doors, rigidbodies on the items. I'd like to homogenize those so they can interact with one another better. I've also noticed a few other minor graphical issues and slight misplacements of doors. Small stuff to tweak in a future update. For now though, pencils down.

At some point I'd love to expand this project into a sort of scruffy scifi zelda. Overworld map movement with a ship and fuel costs, satellites to explore with more puzzle-y floor plans, inventory items that carry over from ship to ship, the works...