The Snap, development log: Day 37

Mac build (r199)
Windows build (r199)

Status: Rushed one last feature in: Health drops. At periodic intervals, if the level is set up for it, there will be a flash in the time bar up top indicating a health container has just appeared somewhere on the timeline. If you get the health container, you restore some health. The health container is subject to the ravages of time travel like anything else in this game, so if you get a health container, and then the other player goes back in time and gets it first, the extra health is deducted from your bar and transferred to the other player.

The original idea with the health/ammo drops was, since the incentive is to grab them as close as possible to the moment where they spawn (to prevent someone else from retroactively grabbing it “first”), as soon as one appears on the timeline it should create a race across time where all the players dash to jump back to the point where the spawn was marked to occur. The health/ammo drops were supposed to be an incentive to move around the timeline and the map, and create interesting “moments” in time, instead of just plodding forward in normal time or camping near time 0 around the other player’s spawn point. However as things have developed I don’t think the health drops are enough of an incentive for them to really change the game much– play just moves too quickly in this prototype, and picking up the health packs is mostly extraneous to winning (if I got ammo drops in, there were going to be levels where taking advantage of the ammo drops was required because you actually just weren’t given enough bullets to kill the other player without reloading at least once). So you probably are better off just ignoring the ammo drops. However maybe this will give some sort of sense of how things might work in a slightly more complex version of this game.

In the end I put health drops in exactly one level, and stuck it at the end of the list with the other “experimental” levels.

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