#sketchtroid

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.

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:

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.