#indiedevelopment

Then may I introduce: Dungeons and Dining Tables!

For the past 3 years I have had the privilege to work on this little indie game project as the Lead 2D Artist with Catalyst Games, and today we have finally hit launch on a limited time public demo for PC on Steam for you all to play and enjoy alongside a crowdfunding campaign through Kickstarter for finishing funds for the project! In DnDT you play as an axolotl and dive into the randomly generated dungeons to explore, solve puzzles, defeat enemies and collect rare pieces of furniture loot! Travel through the World Tree, take on new rogue-like challenges and defeat bosses for the most epic of furnishings (maybe even a Legendary Bed of Maximum Health!)

Furniture collected on a dungeon run can be used to decorate not only your home but also the homes of the quirky characters of the town of Kindlerest! Decorating your home will give you comfy points that are used to level up your house, improve player stats, upgrade shops and other quality of life features for your dungeon runs. 

With a Legend of Zelda inspired art style, Animal Crossing town building mechanics, Diablo style dungeon generation and overall nostalgia of Spyro the Dragon games it's been an absolute labour of love for the team and I to build for the last few years and if you have a moment I would be very grateful if you could please check it out and share the news around!

Also if you are able and this sounds like a game you would enjoy it would mean the world if you could support the project! Thank you so much!

Its hard being Machiavelli when literally everyone uses your name to describe tyrants.

Cooking Speedrun BEFORE THE GUESTS ARRIVE

This week was spent fixing a couple minor bugs in what I had built so far, and creating a bunch of new art assets. Namely, I am taking the advise of Pixel Architect on youTube and approaching the map from a more painterly perspective.

I'm drawing a whole scene at once to make sure there's enough interest in each scene. This is taking super long, but I think the results will be much better than the asset mashing I started with. Problem is that I haven't planned out the whole map yet, so really it's probably a bit foolish to start this process, when so much might yet change.

Anyway, here's what my WIP looks like!

...specifically for the docks section, that is, and a part of the worker's district.

The biggest project I took on this week coding wise is a basic quest system.

Here's how it works:

I have an enum quest {} which lists all available quests in the game. Then there is a struct for each quest, which holds its name, description, quest giver, quest recipient, quest type, reward type, reward value and more.

When the player speaks to a quest giver, a script scr_add_quest() checks that this quest ID isn't already in the quests_array of our quest manager, and then adds it to the array. The active quests get listed in a quest menu. At each step, the quest manager runs a script scr_check_quest_receptor to see:

a.) if there are quests in the array whose status is "ready" (for being handed in)

b.) if the quest recipient marked in the quest ID's struct is in this room. If so, it checks a boolean in the receptor to tell them they are waiting for a quest, and the recipient, upon interaction, runs script scr_complete_quest, whcih pays out the reward and removes the quest from the active quest list.

Right now the only functional quest is picking up a quest from the lady NPC to drop something off at the post box, and the player can interact with the postbox to earn some extra money.

What makes this system work for me is that it works even when I leave the room - it should enable me to access recipients across the whole map, no matter where they are, and only interfere with their dialogue when a quest actually becomes relevant!

Because I never wrote a quest system before I'm quite pleased with this little set-up so far and hope it will be decently scalable for various quest types in the future. I've already set up the barebones of fetch quests that require the player to collect multiple different items!

My next big project will be change my dialogue setup a bit.

Right now, when an object creates dialogue it has to give it its ID, and when dialogue ends a boolean "dialogue end" is turned on. Based on this, the object could give out an item or quest at the end of the dialogue. But this means I have to run all the if-statements I ran to determine the dialogue all over again to determine what text-end condition is required.

Vikings don't slow down! Here's how they try to build another hut - a Fisherman's one. Will they succeed? Absolutely!  

Hey guys, another day, another small update! But first, how’s your day been?

So, in this update, I just wanted to work on something that will be necessary later, and that is making sure the ship can launch once being docked, as unfortunately, being stuck to a star base is not particularly fun.

These small changes, and a bit more polish on the basic systems will be necessary to be able to have a flawless integration of the diegetic UI. Once the UI is implemented, it does open a lot of doors up to be able to create fun and interesting interactions with the starbases. First order of business will probably be trading once that is established.