Silo

A somewhat significant change came over the map the recently. Can you spot it?

That cool-looking cylindrical nuke silo has been cut out and replaced. I'm sorry to see it go, as it was probably the most distinctive feature of the map in the large scale, but when I started laying out the AI stuff in there, it just didn't work on a gameplay level. Navigating the space wasn't interesting, and limitations of the Assassin enemy AI made implementing them in the space unworkable. In other words, the silo seemed like a good idea at first, but it just didn't work out in the end. So I'm replacing it with what you see here:

All in all, I'm much happier with the design of this room than the last. Less striking, yes, but more interesting in practice. The player must fight his way up a set of metal catwalk stairs to a suspended control room, engage the drawbridge across the large gap, then fight back down and across the newly-extended bridge to the exit.

Like the silo, it focuses on exploiting the vertical axis of movement, which is nice. There's also a lot of uphill and downhill battling, and the moving bridge. The falling hazard under the drawbridge is actually a room that the player later traverses, which is nice in that it unifies the overall space a little. I guess from those screenshots the space is kind of hard to comprehend. It'll be more clear once I start dressing it up. The stuff in the shots is so placeholder that it's not even close to funny.