??? - Working on Ai. Stuff left to do

I've been getting a lot done with few updates to avoid spoilers. Especially because I'm working on Ai stuff and combat and figure it's best to keep that secret.

A few of the standout features I've added

Weapon damage. The wounds are actually drawen in the spot that somebody is hit: https://youtu.be/hBpLvwCooag

Fixed camera crosshair. I realized it's almost impossible to tell where you're aiming in fixed cam view. So I though a crosshair would help things out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyfL0vGIqeA

New weapon animations. Not shown because I don't want to spoil the chase scenes but I custom animated the killer's attacks. It took a full day but I think they came out good.

Hand pose system. Your hands actually hold objects now. You may be able to see that in the gun video. Before they kind of just floated in your palm. Subtle but it's actually needed because some animation clips I have twist the character's hands in weird ways.

General AI stuff - chases, attacks, etc. This game is going to be similar to Babysitter bloodbath or PDM as far as how the ai works (rather than the stealth based system of MCM). I think it's better balanced so it's tense but not overwhelmingly difficult.

Unfortunately working on all the little details are holding things up. I didn't think AI would take more than 2 days total, but when you break everything down it becomes a lot of work and design choices to consider. I'm still expecting the game to be finished this month.

Main things I have left to do:

• Main character death scenes
• Finishing the AI - boss fight &  some navigation stuff I still need to sort out
• Music system. When to change tracks, fade to silence, go to a lower volume, etc.
• Final texturing and furnishings for the levels
• Finishing / polishing the rest of the cutscenes
• Puzzles and item placement - this part usually gets overlooked, but the way the world unlocks is actually really important to the gameplay. Locked doors need to be in the right spots. You need to obtain items and solve puzzles in the correct order. This game isn't totally linear (you can tackle a few different things at once) but it's still something I need to consider. So while the puzzles are programmed, they may need to be adjusted so you can't get to certain rooms or areas before you actually should.
• Writing. Still have to finish this up. The dialogue is fairly easy but I usually hate the documents.
• Save system - this I'm on the fence about. Not sure if I'm going to have a 'find the tape and save at the vcr' system, or a simple auto save and continue.
• Skippable cutscenes - this one is actually way more complicated than it sounds (also on the fence about what extent I'm going to support this). Goes along with the save system. I probably need to create a central set of graphs or scripts that change the state of the game as you progress.
• vhs intros and bootup stuff.
• Any optimizations and bug fixes

So it's getting done but I'm expecting to put in at least a couple hundred more hours to get this fully finished. Good news is I've got a pretty robust system built that I can use to pump out future stuff. MCM is going to run on 80% of this code (needs it's own custom stuff too but the games will share most of their core systems)