Into the Dark - Damage System finally 100% finished! news

Greetings fellow Indie devs and Indie Games fans!

Homegrown game is proud to announce that our Damage / Health / Sanity system is final and working, ready to give you some adrenaline pushes this summer.

So, what`s so special about the system?

Let`s start with something that is not special, but important: We have no Damage / Health Percentage shown to the player, and we have no Autoheal. Both is in no way "realistic" in terms of the situation the players char encounters in this game. Instead of that we show blood on the screen. This wouldn`t be a special thing for itself, but let us show you something.

basically, our game evaluates the Players current health, the amount of damage taken within the last seconds, the "freshness of wounds" and sanity. All of these factors influence visuals and gameplay HEAVILY. We`ll show you how:

Here is everything fine. No damage taken, the hands are steady, the players chars obeys all player actions and movements, the sight is clear (although dark, as the game is). But when the fighting begins...

...the player will get damage soon. Here it is a slight hit, a little bit more than a scratch. However, the game recognizes the player got a hit to his weapons arm. Fresh Bloodsplats on the screen ocurr, but...

...they dry in and get darker the more time elapses or a new fresh wound has been taken, like in this image. Old wounds -> dark blood. New wounds -> light blood. Untill...

...it gets pretty messy.Now you need a first aid kit to treat your wounds desperately. Why? Because every wound slain into your precious body affects your steadyness. The more untreated wounds you have taken, the more you are shaking and stumbling around, making aiming and wiring of electric circiuts really hard. As this is a movement effect, lets show a video.

But that`s not all! The game also recognizes "critical hits"- Critical hits can be inflicted by melee and heavy weapons only, Falling damage and pistols won`t do it, except the player got a critical wound before and hasn`t patched himself up yet. If the player has got a "critical" hit that also brought him below a certain health threshold, in addition to blood on screen and shaking sight / hands, the vision gets blurred and darkened even more. In addition to that, the moment of going below the crit threshold is accompanied by extreme loud heart beat. This is important, as other conditions like radiation, gas and insanity trigger a similar effect.

Ingame it looks like that:

Note: This almost dead. We don`t want to tell the player what represents exact % values, but in this case, you are really almost dead. Jumpimg from 4 metres would finnish you off.
What? You can`t see anything?

Well, here is a video with a fight in which a wound went critical, a health pack has been picked up and another critical wound got inflicted...

...all of that in less than 20 seconds. Still this situation was survived by the beta tester. Unfortunately, he blew himself up with C4 a few minutes later.