Dan Emmerson

Coinflip Castle devlog 07 : Re-invogorated

Welcome back. After a bit of a hiatus, let’s get caught up on what’s been happening with Coinflip Castle lately.

What’s new?

UI update

After showing the game to some friends and colleges, the main feedback was “I really liked it - once you told me how to play it”. The game had an issue with explaining itself, and players didn’t know what their choices were actually affecting. Not great.

New updated artwork, responsive animations, and some basic audio successfully help convey what the player is doing each time they tap a button.

Players now have much more information about each encounter - with every obstacle, trap or enemy having its stats displayed below its name. So far we have:

Strength - the attack damage they will do to the player.

Heal - how much health the enemy will recover .

Thief - the number of gold coins that the enemy will steal from you.

Armour - how much bonus defense the enemy has.

??? - more to come!

BONUS: Lore-like descriptions of each obstacle helps flesh them out and adds some nice backstory to the world.

Updated art

As well as polishing the UI, I’ve begun the process of updating the character and enemies’ designs, and will be replacing the old Blender models with Spine animations (see above).

The art will come in one huge pass once I’m pleased with the technical side of the game (so pleased don’t get too attached to this skeleton)

What’s next?

New areas

I think this gets put on every ‘what’s next’ section, but it’s always sitting in the back of my mind. I want to make sure the new areas of the game are interesting. I want to try and avoid well-trodden ‘’’videogame’’’ areas if I can. While this is mostly an art task, each area will have unique gameplay tricks to make them both look and feel different.

Refined generation code

It’s a little rough right now -  levels have a chance of being anywhere between 80 and 110 steps long, which seemed like a good idea at the time. I’m planning on locking it to 100 per level, with each ‘gene’ (see this post on the generation) being 10 units in size.

This ties into another gameplay feature I will be adding, where enemies have a chance to spawn ‘gilded’ - golden versions with much higher stats, but much higher rewards!

I’m interested in other ways to layer bonus ‘types’ onto the existing enemies, such as plated (bonus armour), powerful (extra attack damage), resilient (extra health), etc.

RELOAD (Quickly, now)

Keep your endless supply of pistols loaded to fend off the beast horde!

This is my entry for LOWREZJAM 2017. Please have a play, and if you feel like it, add a rating too. I’d be very grateful.