The probe

The bat can bite anyone in this town. It cannot bite this.

Everything in this game grows out of the bite. The bat infects people, the infection spreads, and you steer an outbreak across a town over a run of nights. Which means every threat so far has secretly been a future victim. The soldiers shooting at you are just people who haven’t been turned yet. The probe is the first thing in the world the bite does nothing to. It’s a machine. You can sink your teeth into it all night and it will keep doing the one job it has, which is watching you.

It’s a flying surveillance drone. It patrols the air, it tracks the bat in full three dimensions so climbing doesn’t shake it, and when it gets a clear look at you it does the thing that actually scares me in this build: it calls the soldiers. A siren goes up, and it fires off a noise event that paints your location for every military unit in range. Then it keeps painting. It re-broadcasts where you are right now, not where it first saw you, so the soldiers converge on the gutter you’re currently in instead of the rooftop you already left. The bat has spent this whole project being the thing that hunts the town. The probe is the town hunting back, and there’s no biting your way out of it.

That was the design. Most of the day was the part where it refused to move.

I had the whole chase in my head: the drone peeling off its patrol, climbing after the bat, herding me into the soldiers. On screen it hung in the air, slowly rotated to face me, and did absolutely nothing else. It spun in place to track me like a security camera on a post and would not travel an inch. Flying mode was on. The direction to the bat came out correct every single frame. The velocity stayed at zero. I tried every method I know to move a character, from normal movement input to direct velocity requests to finally just shoving the actor through the air by hand, and got the same nothing every time. Spinning, never moving. It made me a little crazy.

Here’s what it was. The drone’s actual body, the sci-fi mesh you see up there, was attached as a separate object with solid block-everything collision, sitting right on top of the invisible capsule that does the moving. So every time the capsule tried to take a step, it walked straight into its own chassis and stopped dead. The probe was its own wall. I had built a flying enemy that physically could not get out of its own way. The fix is one line telling the capsule to ignore its own body, and after an afternoon of that, watching it finally unstick and come across the rooftops at me was worth more than it should have been.

There was also a crash, the good kind of stupid. Die, hit Begin Again, instant lockup. The red damage flash runs on a little fade timer, and when you died and restarted, the timer from the dead run was still ticking and tried to update a screen effect that had been thrown out with the old session. Two small fixes: the timer dies with the thing it belongs to now, and it checks the world still exists before it reaches for anything. Begin Again begins again.

Playtest, and it landed. I was crossing a lit rooftop and the probe found me. Siren, and within a couple of seconds two soldiers I hadn’t even seen were walking straight at the exact ledge I was tucked behind, because the thing overhead kept telling them. I dropped off the far side to break its sightline, the siren cut out, and I held still in the dark until they lost the thread and wandered off. I have spent this whole project making the bat the scary one. This was the first time the build made me feel watched.

Still loose. The drone is a solid object right now, so the soldiers it summons will cheerfully walk into it, and I’m not sure a flying camera should have a body you can bump into at all. The zap it does up close still has no visual on it. And it doesn’t patrol on its own yet, so before it spots you it’s less a roaming spotter and more a very alert statue bolted to one patch of sky. Next session it gets a route, and somewhere to be.