Streus

Now a dungeon can have any number of subdungeons (which can, in turn, have subdungeons).  Basically, a tree of graphs.  What do you mean that’s disgusting?

There are still a few edge cases I need to clean up where generating a subdungeon fails due to insufficient space (i.e. it gets pinned inside its parent dungeon or between two different dungeons).

Took a break from my other side project for Sketchtroid to work on something else: dungeon generation for the infinite gamemode.

Above are three 100 “room” levels generated using my current algorithm (colored lines are traversable paths, the green square is the start, and the red one is the end).  The generation itself if purposefully lengthened so that the algorithm can be seen in action.  I’m not going to talk about what’s going on under the hood quite yet; there’re still some major modifications that need to be made.

Until then, here are some 2000 room levels I generated.

I’m gonna go ahead and ignore the fact that I haven’t posted here in awhile.

Wait.  Shit.

So I’ve been taking a break from Sketchtroid to play with shaders a little.

Pretty cool so far.

Tumblr's annoying so here's the first gif on Imgur.

Still chipping away at things here and there.  I ran into a few issues with what I was planning to do next that have forced me to rethink how I want to approach it in the future.  While I’ve been mulling over that I started to work on the HUD, specifically these fancy little abilities status things.  The color of the cooldown bar is determined by the currently equipped damage type.

Hm... this post is feelin’ a little short.  Take some of this art off my hands.

Not a whole lot of functionality to show off today; instead, I’ve got a load of art assets I drew up.  Drew down?  Drew.  I drew them.  Yea.

Now, these are organized into sets here, but, really, none of these parts necessarily belong with one another.  Each part (cone, engine, wings) corresponds to an ability the player has equipped (with the core set, the default, corresponding to an absence of abilities).  All the abilities can be swapped out for another at any time.  Often, different situations will require that the player do so in order to progress.

Some of this art is definitely going to be redone at some point; the tier 2 cone and the tier 3 wings really irk me.  But I’m kinda sprinting to a demo-able state, so I’ve just noted them as things I’d like to revisit once I hit that point.

As a side note, if you’d like to keep up to date on my progress, check out the github for this project.  I keep it more or less up-to-date.

Today we’ve got a New Game menu, with all the relevant options for the primary game mode in and functional, as well as a little flair for the player in the form of a little icon that displays their current damage type.

Both of these are technically in-progress.  The New Game menu has a section for a planned “Infinite” game mode, which will be a kind of rogue-lite, make-it-as-far-as-you-can thing.  And the flair will eventually include all the visual parts of the player.  The wings, cone (front), and engine (back) will change depending on the abilities the player has equipped.

Which means lots more art tomorrow.  Which isn’t a bad thing.  After all...

...I’m not short on code.

Still chipping away at stuff for Sketchtroid.  Here’re some gifs of the beginnings of a savepoint and the Load Game menu (with some art for the difficulties thrown in for free).

There might be a lot more of these smaller posts in the pipeline over the next couple of days; keep an eye out!

Till next time!

EDIT:

Tumblr doesn't like this gif, so you get to visit Imgur to see it

So I’ve been working on and off for the past couple months on Sketchtroid, a top-down arcade-y metroidvania, and I’ve finally gotten to the point where I feel like I’ve got semi-interesting things to show off.

The obvious thing demonstrated by the Imgur gif is scene transitioning, which, yea took a bit to get working properly, but it’s more of a representative of all the stuff that is happening behind the scenes.

And this is that super-fancy, behind-the-scenes stuff.  See, I wanted some data persistence in Sketchtroid.  Having enemies respawn every time a scene is reloaded gets old really fast, so I made a system that tracks relevent data and saves/loads it as needed.  Doing so took quite a bit more work than I initially thought, but I’m really proud of what I ended up with.

I can’t promise regular updates on this project, but I’ll try to post whenever I cook up something for it that I think is cool.

While I wasn’t working on Vagus directly, I was keeping it in the back of my mind.  I tried to solve some of the glaring problems I was running into, but the only viable solution I found required that I start again from scratch.  As much as I like the idea behind Vagus, I really didn’t feel like restarting the whole thing.  I’ll most likely return to it eventually, but for now I’ve decided to move on.

So for the past month and a half or so, I’ve been planning out the project that I started just last week: Sketchtroid (It’s a placeholder name).  Sketchtroid is a top-down arcade-y metroidvania with a ‘sketchy’ artstyle (basically, I plan in hand-drawing everything with a tablet).  I won’t go too far into design at the mo.  Each mechanic and design decision I’ve made will be covered as I implement it.  For a general roadmap of the project, check out the repository on GitHub.

As of now, I’m working on the code relevant to the core combat of the game: Entities, Abilities, Statuses, Bullets, etc.  I plan on discussing each part of the system, as well as the system as a whole, as I build it.  Some parts, like Statuses, Abilities, and a small class called a Stat, are already done, so expect posts on those in the coming days.  The entire combat system should be done within the week (should be).

After I have the combat core done, posts should get considerably more interesting as I move out of pure code.

Anyway, what’s this?  Well, this is quite a few things; can’t you be more specific?  First of all, there’s the HUD, which is only briefly featured in the above gif.  It displays info regarding the current round, the score, as well as the player’s heath, shields, and abilities.  All good stuff.  The “Pause” menu (it doesn’t actually pause the game, though it may include functionality to request a pause later on) allows for things that one might expect of a pause menu, but it has the added bonus of a “strategic view”.  Right now, the strategic view isn’t much more than what the gif shows, a top-down view of the field that can be panned around.  When finished, however, the strategic view will show detailed information regarding the capturable nodes, including their names, and the team to which they belong.  Also, at the end of each round, players will be able to enter the strategic view to re-position their nodes.

I also put in these little pop-up dialog boxes.

So yea, I still have a lot to do to square away the strategic view, but once I have it done, most of the technically demanding features of Vagus’s primary game mode will be done.

Teeeeechnically it’s Saturday here as I’m writing up this post, so I’m a little off schedule, but eh, close enough.

This week I got something working that’s worth showing off: the Class Edit menu (featuring some placeholder art from Game-icons.net).  In Vagus, Player customization is centered around sets of passives that change stats, add active abilities, and offer unique behaviors.  For clarity (and to help me brainstorm), passives are sorted into sets of four called classes.  The above gif features the Surveyor class, which is centered around passively placed markers to which the player can teleport.  I have a few other classes laid out, like the Defender, Imperialist, and Daredevil.   Each class is built to work well as a full set, but the idea is to have a a large-ish pool of passives that players can mix and match to suit their preferred playstyle.  It should be noted, though, that every 4th passive of a class is locked if the 1st passive of the same set is not equipped (4th passives tend to be the strongest).

Right now, though, these passives don’t do anything in-game.  All I’ve got so far is the UI pictured above and saving/loading functionality.  I started on syncing players’ passive data over the network, but that’s not quite done yet.

Once I’ve got that squared away, I’ll probably move on to the actual game, seeing as I now have all the data I need to set up each player.  With all the UI and backend stuff I’ve been working on, I’m looking forward to doing some actual gameplay programming.

Though I might end up working on a HUD too...

I return from my almost two month long hiatus to reveal Vagus (or The Vagus Project)!  Truth be told, there isn’t much to show off yet, even though I’ve been easing into the project over the past few weeks.  Despite that, Vagus has a much more complex design in comparison to my last project Tytans II, so I have plenty to yap about in this preliminary post.

Tytans II has taken an indefinite back-burner position.  I learned a lot about Unity and C# though it, which was my original intention when I started the project.  Given that it served its purpose, I don’t really regret moving on before polishing it into a final product.

Now that I’ve addressed that, let’s talk about Vagus, a competitive multiplayer game that takes inspiration from a Japanese card game.

Oi, you there!  Yea, you!  Lemme talk at you for abit.

As you can see above, I added the Arc ability.  Now, you may be thinking “Why, Streus, that’s just a lazy teleport!”, and you’d be right.  Well, it can’t teleport over walls, so it’s not completely lazy.  It also damages enemies caught between the start and end points; so that’s nifty.  Arc isn’t completely done yet, though.  I’d like to add some VFX between the start and endpoints, and I need to tweak the collision detection a little, but it’s all good.

On the UI front, I spent a whole 10 minutes updating the UI for ability charges so that it wasn’t just a number overlaid on the ability icon

And I gave the health bar a simple little low health animation.

And the energy heat bar got a little gradient that I may or may not keep.

Hold up.  Heat?

Yup.  Most of this past week was focused on redesigning the energy/mana pool system into something that fit Tytans II better.  Heat is what I came up with.  Instead of passively building energy to spend on abilities, players will start with an empty pool of heat that will build as they use abilities.  Heat will decay passively, but players can also discharge heat by using their basic attack.  Exceeding the heat limit incurs...some kind of penalty.  I’m still mulling over what exactly the penalty should be, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be going with some kind of damage infliction.  Could be straight damage equal to the exceeded amount (heat - heatMax); could be a damage over time status effect with the same value; could be a movement penalty.  The possibilities are endless.  Mostly endless.  Pretty endless.  More endless than not.

Other things will probably demand my attention this coming week, so next week’s post shouldn’t be anything too substantial.

Happiest of Mondays, everyone!  Good holidays?  Good.  Let’s get into it.

Like I said last Monday, I took this week off, but I still spent a little time thinking about what I’d like to get into this week.  Part of that was just implementing Charge, Trap, and Arc (which I started on today; Charge can be seen above), and part was redesigning some clunkier parts of Tytans II.

This post ended up actually being pretty lengthy, so if you want details...

I don’t feel like writing this post, but I’m doing it anyway!  Uh, I mean...  Happy Monday, everybody!

Prometheus got even more work this week.  I fixed up my distribution algorithm (it was quite buggy) and I settled on attack patterns (two displayed above) for him.  He and his minions are pretty much complete; however, I can’ t help but feel like they’re lacking something.  I’ll probably revisit him after I’ve done one or two more bosses, but for now I’m giving him the back burner treatment because I’m just so goddamn tired of working on the same fight.

I’m just going to add in his ability drops and call it a day 2-3 weeks.  At least I’m happy with the icons for his dropped abilities.

Charge, Arc, and Trap, respectively.

I’ll try to get some work done on those abilities and get started on Helios this week, but I really can’t promise much.

Happy Monday, everybody!

This is going to be a long post, in which I’ll cover difficulty, re-balancing, AI, algorithms, geometry, and I’ll say the word “tacos” once.

Ready?  Let’s dive in!