More Demo Levels

[Redmoth27]

We have all been waiting for Early Access and I think we need a distraction, a demo distraction! You could make levels for the demo that reuse a lot of assets to save time. You could use a few beta assets to tease us a bit. For example, you could make a level called Big Mamma where the only thing to eat is weevil larva. There are a few babies but don't put up much of a fight, but when you clear 60% of them you here a roar. Calling all of her young in 3 waves, first having just babies, second having more teens, and third having Mamma an extra tough adult weevil having twice as many weevils than the second wave. When you kill her, you are instructed to follow the tunnel mamma dug to find an exit.

That was one of the bigger levels, here are some smaller examples. Digging deeper, survive for a certain amount of time for an exit to open, so you can go deeper. Above ground life, survive to nightfall with only 25 workers and 400 larvae, no queen. (Customize for balancing) Free build mode, Make the player build their own nest with unlimited food and let them take a picture of it.

 

[Liam]

I love the crazy weevil larva map idea, I would like to have some funny scenarios like this.

I had exactly the same thought about easing out another demo with beta & EA being pushed back, but it would really be a significant diversion of time. While I do still want a demo update, I think it will come after EA (with the demo levels being accessible from the main game anyway).

If it was just a matter of taking 1 day out to set up a scenario and releasing that to you guys, we might go for it (even though a day is very precious to us at the moment), but it's never that simple.

There is only one 'current' set of project files that the group shares which represents the game as we have it today. A lot of things that we need to produce a working game are currently disassembled (stuff like the menu screen, parts of the interface etc). There have also been graphical changes which are likely to throw up a couple of issues in beta that we will need to iron out - (some of these components are still being tweaked so releasing a demo now might produce problems that we are already aware of and about to solve).

An alternative option would be for us to temporarily "roll back" the project to the date of the last demo, and work with it in its old state. We would then be limited to the tools we had at that time (for example, ants wouldn't be able to pick up the dead weevil larvae as we hadn't coded that functionality).

The way I feel about it now is that we have a nice chunk of content that is almost ready to go out and releasing it is within our sights, and the best outcome will be met if we charge toward that at full steam.

 

[Serafine]

I'm currently also working on a list of mission designs because let's be honest the standard everyday "kill everything that moves" mission is kinda boring and gets old quickly.

 

[Planemaster]

Just keep working on the full game rather than releasing a new demo. I'm sure we can all wait a bit longer. Not every game has the opportunity of a demo level so keep that in mind.