About KOTOR, it is the way I played it the first time, and wasn’t able to finish it. Problem is the players have their value systems different of those belonging to the designers of the game, so if you choose what you feel is right, you will end up somewhere around the middle point, maybe a bit north or south of it. What I think the designers did is to split the “holy trio” of tank-damage dealer-priest along a line. If you were playing as a Jedi, you get to be the healer/buffer/tank character playing in the back or front of your party. If you go the dark side, you will be the single target dps or AOE dps character spreading havok between your enemies. If you play a balanced route, you end up with a well rounded character which is fine for simple encounters, but cannot fit any of the three roles in a more difficult encounter.

There is this interaction between team members resembling more of a RPG or MOBA game than a shooter. There are tanks (gunner), healers (medic), DPS (sniper), AOE DPS (engineer) and crowd control(spy) and they need to support each other in order for the team to prevail in a much more “tight” way than say Unreal Tournament games and the like. Then there is the fun, cartoonish style of the game that adds up to all this, but I think that the team mechanics are the ones that make the game so enjoyable. 

As a bonus, I think the spy’s disguise mechanic is a game changer here, compared to other shooters. It creates a feeling among the team members that you have to be all the time on your toes and that while you must help each other, you cannot fully trust your team mates to watch your back, as one of them might be a spy. I can credit this mechanic with loads of adrenaline fuel into players’ blood, and that adds up to the overall feeling of the game. 

I have changed the lightning a bit throughout the scene now already based on feedback, it is much easier to spot the “walls”. Some changes to the ground texturing are also planned to make it more easy to differentiate from the tree areas.

Now I’m working on concept design for some of the power-ups I have in the game, and after that I’ll consider making a video about what I have so far.

Since I moved my development to Unity and I no longer work with Box2D I don’t need it just now, but I’ll keep it in mind as a useful tool. For Vortex Arena I used a custom shape editor for doing that, but not as flexible as the one you linked.

Cheers.