Hey! Daniel here from Team Infection. Sebastian and I are both extremely excited about all the positive feedback we have been receiving on our jam entry Infection. We really feel that the game has a lot of potential and reading all that people have been writing about it (and saying while playing it on youtube and streams XD) has made us even more keen to develop it further.
We also thought it would be great to share our progress since the jam release, as well as our ideas for the future with you guys.
First though, we would like to thank everyone who has played Infection and left some feedback. We appreciate it immensely <3
I’ve experimented with the main antibody character, tried a more humanoid version (that ended up looking like Machop from Pokemon)
People didn’t respond so well to that version both on the blog and on twitter, and asked for me to bring old Fatty McFatterson back. So I ditched Machop and went to work on a new Fatty version. (Sketchfab version)
Some people also suggested I bring back the smile, so I thought would be cool to have multiple textures to reflect his mood. (I might make a facial rig for him for marketing purposes, but would be kind of wasted in the game since you see him from a top-down angle.)
We’ve been working on a “quick” PostLD version, to be released soon with several fixes. Sebastian worked a lot on optimizating the game and we’ve added various quality settings to try remedy the lag some of you guys were experiencing!
Sebastian also created a new (and temporary) UI, so you can see more relevant information like how many enemies are left and how many infections you have let slip past you.
In response to lots of feedback about the tower placement, we’re experimenting with having Slow Motion while placing towers, so it doesn’t pause completely, but you’ll have some more time to position your tower before enemies creep in on you. Another tower related problem is that no one from the videos we saw of people playing the game figured out how to properly place towers (Click and Drag towards the direction you want the tower to shoot). So we’re changing it to “Click once to place tower, click second time to set rotation towards the place you clicked”.
A couple of quick fixes based off the excellent feedback we’ve received from you guys: Enemy death animations are now faster and the enemy turns another colour the instant he dies, so the player receives “immediate feedback” and stops shooting at dead monsters. Cells (Currency) now float up and down to be more obvious pickups and not confused with level decoration. They also now have a larger radius of attraction so it’ll be easier to pick them up without having to run too much through the level. We’re also adding some camera animation and Effects to make more obvious that the enemies are trying to get to the door that leads to the next body section.
Aaaaand, for this quick-soon-enough post LD version we’ll be adding… ENDLESS MODE! 😀
Lots of people in the comments mentioned they wish they had more time to upgrade everything, but the game finished too fast, we’re fixing that by adding an alternative mode of play in which the waves get harder and harder until you eventually can’t handle anymore (or can you?). See how far you can go and share your highscore in Endless mode! 😀 (Of course the main mode will be expanded on substantially in the future).
I’m also working on a new level with a different objetive. It’ll be even bigger, it’ll have 3 enemy doors, and this time you won’t be protecting a door, but an actual part of the body. It’s still an early wip but this is the layout we’re thinking of going with: (Red in the middle would be the object, the Purple balls would be enemy spawn doors)
Alright, so these are all the plans for our next version… There isn’t much new there… But what is NEXT?!
The Future:
Ok, so the following things are some of the ideas we have for the future. As such they’re all very liable to change and much in need of YOUR feedback 😉
( /\ This was made in a collaborative drawing board as we brainstormed ideas for the game on Skype)
PERMADEATH
First things first, we enjoy the idea of Permadeath. You go in, you get cells you upgrade your character, you die, you rinse and repeat. And we would like to bring that to the Full game as well. But in a full game with lots of different levels, that can be annoying, Character Progression would be a nice thing to have.
SETS OF MISSIONS
So, we figured we could have Missions to different parts of the body. Each of these sets would could contain 4 levels, climaxing in an epic boss battle. The missions would take you to different areas like the Heart, Colon (Diarrhea Boss!) and the last mission would take you to the Brain. These missions would be played through as a story, and you’d get feedback about how your host is faring based on your play.
DNA
On the missions you would earn DNA (You’d still get cells for upgrades in-game that will be lost with death, but you’d get this secondary DNA currency) DNA would be used to unlock new GENETIC MUTATIONS for your Antibody in the Character Creation Screen.
GENETIC MUTATION
Genetic Mutations would be things like “+X Attack Rate”, “+ Defense”, “+ X Attack Damage”, “% of Chance of receiving part of your damage as health”, “% of chance of igniting enemies on fire on damage”. So you would be able to have character progression, despite Permadeath. And you’d also be able to pick the Genetic Mutations that better suit your playstyle. Do you like to Run and Gun and rarely get hit? Invest in some more Attack Rate and Damage! Do you like to be more tanky and jump in the middle of enemies and melee them to hell? (Yeah we want to add melee!) Invest in some Damage Mitigation/Health!
Alright, so Genetic Mutations are cool, but what about more towers? And what were you saying about melee? Well, we also want to give players another choice, and that choice is ISOTYPES.
ISOTYPES
“Antibodies can come in different varieties known as
isotypes or classes.” From Wikipedia
You start the game with one Isotype unlocked, and after you defeat a boss you’ll unlock a new Isotype (One for each boss). Your choice of Isotype on the character creation screen will define what kind of towers you’ll have available in game (And maybe playstyle, not so sure about that. Melee will either enter as an Isotype or as specific weapons you can pickup during the gameplay).
WEAPONS
Wait, did I just say picking up weapons during gameplay? Hell yeah! Another cool feedback we got was that people didn’t like some of the evolutions of the weapon (Mainly evolution number 4). So for the Full Version we want to have many different weapons each with it’s own evolutions. So evolutions 1, 2 and 3 from LD version could be it’s own weapon, but you could find what was Evolution 4 or 5 of LD version as it’s own weapon in the game, pick it up and upgrade it into a better version of it. We want to have many different weapon types for different play-styles 
Find your favorite weapon and try to keep it loaded!
POWERUPS & ONE-TIME ITEMS
Another cool things we want to have are Power-ups. Some enemies would drop buffs that would give you temporary advantage. (Temporary + Attack Rage, Temporary + Damage, Temporary + Explosions, Temporary + Speed.)
As another enemy drop we want to add One-time items, that wouldn’t be instantly in effect like powerups, but you would be able to use it whenever you want. (Landmines; Vortex that sucks enemies in for a little time; Decoy that makes enemies go to attack it for a little time; Confusion DNA Grenade or some name like that, that makes enemies get confused and attack each other; White Blood Cell Army, where you can summon a few White Blood Cells to fight enemies for you)
ENEMIES, MINIBOSSES AND BOSSES
We didn’t have much time to do variation on the behavior of the enemies for the LD version. But for the full release we want to have lots of different types of enemies! Explosive enemies, Tower-destroying enemies, Door-obsessed enemies, Parasite enemies that latch into your towers and turn them against you… So many possibilities! 😀 We also want to have At least one miniboss on each level which would have increased health and would be more of a pain in the ass, requiring extra attention (He would do massive Infection, being able to push you over the limit to a Game Over by himself if you’re not doing too well).
And lastly Bosses! We want to finish each mission with a different kind of level, less tower defense and more action game. So the last level of each mission you’ll only have to defeat the Boss of that specific disease you’re fighting, nothing to protect but yourself. (I want to do Diarrhea boss SOOOOO BADLY XD that would be an awesome gross/funny boss fight)
LOCAL CO-OP
We got lots of feedback asking for Local Coop and HELL YEAH we want to have it 😀 Up to 4 players, we’re already thinking about new UI solutions to have them all on the screen at once.
NEW STORE MENUS
With Local Co-op we think it would be really impractical to have players pausing the game to buy stuff all the time. So we figured we could use that kind of menus that expand from your character and you can pick the desired icon using your directional buttons, without disrupting gameplay much. We would only need Health, Bullets, Upgrade Weapons or Upgrade Towers, since we could have Towers mapped to specific buttons on the gamepad instead of requiring to open the store.
ACHIEVEMENTS AND COSTUMES
Because Achievements are fun! And Costumes are even funnier! We want to have several achievements in the game. (Can you pass the levels without placing any towers? How about without shooting? Can you pass the levels without getting ANY INFECTION? Without getting hit?) And we also wanted to have silly costumes to customize your character, so we figured we could mash both of those together and have Achievements unlocking cool costumes
Thanks for reading, and we’d love to hear your thoughts! Cheers
Tags: post-jam
