[Day 258]

I definitely think DD being "fast paced" is among the most appealing things in the game.

Turn based strategy games can be extremely time consuming (carefully planning every turn), things tend to be even worse when talking multyplayer. So yeah, DD bein a swift game is definitely a plus. The fast paced action helps the game feeling much more dynamic and franctic, possibly leading into much more tension (something most turn based games easily lack).

So yeah, I'm all for it.

Also, any progress on the "all players moving at the same time" while in free-move mode?

I haven't looked much into making all the players moving at the same time for multiplayer. My work on the multiplayer engine has taken a back seat lately as I work out some of the levels and progression. The main reason for this is because if I try to keep the multiplayer features up to date with the singleplayer, then whenever I change something in singleplayer I have to write the appropriate network code for whatever I just implemented. Since the game is going through constant iteration, it would not be an effective use of time to implement multiplayer elements to mirrow the singleplayer features as they may be changed significantly and the multiplayer code is much more complex than singleplayer. It's better to test out the ideas in the singleplayer build, and iterate on what doesn't work to make it better than to implement a singleplayer feature and its multiplayer counterpart only to remove or significantly modify both later. Basically I'm trying to get the singleplayer experience right and then add the correct multiplayer elements when I know that they're final. Otherwise I'll be wasting time trying to keep both singleplayer and multiplayer in check, whereas the iteration process means that things can change quite rapidbly. It's about trying to keep the development agile and flexible.

My current development plan for the next "decent" build is:
* Build 2-3 levels which are close to their final versions. Make them quality, fun and replayable. Have exciting and unique elements in them. (This is why I've been adding lots of code for map triggers, to allow interesting things to happen)
* Add progression elements (global quests + unlocks) to accommodate these new levels
* Add better HUD. (Philip is currently working on the artwork for this)

At the same time as I work on these things, Philip and Chris are developing new assets which I generally implement as I receive them.

Day 258
I was quite busy today and didn't get as much done as I would have liked to. No real features implemented today, mostly research and some design work.

I had some friends playtest the game at my house and I picked up on some interesting things that I didn't really notice or that I'd forgotten were important (since I'm so used to playing the game myself). Here's what I found:

Some of the rocks are quite difficult to see on the ground and look like they are walkable, Philip will have a go at adding some darker outlines to them.

There still isn't a line of sight display for using ranged attacks and it would be much better if a skill told you where it was going to cast it. That should be pretty easy to add in and it's a very common element in turn based games.

I'm thinking not being able to end your turn on heroes is not intuitive enough and might not be the best way to explain why you can't do it. Perhaps I should change it so that when you walk on a tile with another player you swap places instead. That's a common solution to this problem.

Even though the game doesn't have any of the nice polished explanation or help stuff that would normally accommodate it, it seems that there was too much thinking required for doing certain tasks. Perhaps it's because there were also no explanations on the skills and they had many to begin with. There are really only a couple of buttons (Space to use skill, Control to change it, and Enter to end turn [used infrequently]), and so I was surprised that it took a bit of thinking for a couple of my friends to work out which button needed to be pressed. I can't really see how I can reduce it, but perhaps more onscreen indicators would help, as well as the proper mouse controls later. Mouse may be the dominant control method.

[Day 257]

Day 257
* Created introduction level which guides the player through different elements of the game
* Experimented with UI elements that Philip is currently working on

I did another "productivity jam" today with a couple of game developer friends. I managed to get a bit done on level development which I'm happy with, but I ran into a bunch of minor bugs which took time to fix. I think that this first level is pretty close to how it will play in the final game. I'm hoping to add more levels tomorrow which I consider "finished" or very close to their final versions so that I can keep building this into a real game and not just something fun to play with.

Chris did more work on the fire elemental, including attack frames. It's a slightly larger than normal enemy which looks quite fearsome. It will suit nicely in the levels with a bit of lava and Dragons.

Philip started doing some of the UI elements in awesome pixels that will hold the skills, the healthbars, etc. Soon, nobody will have to look at my terrible programmer art! In the screenshot below I've taken some of the metal corners he did and hacked them together into the popup textbox. Philip is experimenting and working on the HUD. I really like the metallic corners so far.

Its real appeal to me is that it is turn based though, so please don't deviate too far from the formula and make it too arcadey...there are enough very polished diablo-alikes around already imho.

Keep up the good work

There will be a lot of strategic depth in the choices available to the player at any given stage. At the same time I want experienced players to be able to execute their moves quickly without unnecessary slowdowns. It definitely won't be arcadey. As you mentioned, there are already a lot of dungeon crawlers that do that fast paced action well. Dungeon Dashers isn't competing with those games, but I still hope that those same players will find the turn-based mechanics of Dungeon Dashers engaging.

Thanks for the encouragement

[Day 256]

Day 256
* Did some mockups and discussion with Philip on in game UI
* Map design for early levels

Chris worked on a Fire Elemental enemy.

Tomorrow I'm doing another Productivity Jam so I hope I'll be able to get a lot done.

I find it pretty tricky to read that text.

The monospaced font on the popup textbox?

[Day 255]

Day 255
* Added camera movement action to map triggers
* Added enemy spawn action to map triggers
* Added ability to show portraits with popup text

Chris drew a new spider today which is another oversized monster. I intend for the spider to harass the player quite a bit, stopping them in place with some kind of web shot and also spawning baby spiders.

I think tomorrow I'll do some more level development, starting with building a proper introduction level that will guide the player through how to play.

This sounds like an excellent project! Can't wait to see it in action.

[Day 254]

Day 254
* Added signs
* Designed trigger system for maps
* Added in invisible trigger tiles which can display messages when stood upon

I'm adding in a new "Trigger" system to the map editing which will allow me to make more complex designs. It will be able to handle conditions such as "if all monsters in group have been killed, then open a gate" as well as combinations of buttons being pressed to activate other actions. I put in the beginning work for that.

Chris drew a small spider today which is going to spawn from bigger spider monsters.

Philip drew some signposts in the screenshot below. These are all signs that the player can go and read which can contain any sort of information. I think I will build a tutorial level soon which the player can walk through and read signs at their leisure. A trigger is also made visible for debugging purposes.

love the look of this.

Thanks!

love the new tiles!

It is so weird seeing the characters in a non-cave setting. Looks very nice!

Thanks! I'll pass on your comments to Philip.

Looks cool. Surely they use to have health bars before? (in theory I still think it will be best to have them shown all the time EXCEPT for when they're at full health)

Some builds had healthbars, the more recent ones didn't while I tried to work out the best way to display them. You'll be able to toggle them always on and always off in the options in the final game.

Heh, when I first saw the screenshots, I thought "Wow, this looks a lot like Dusty's style!"  Small world. 

The game looks good, although I'm not a fan of turn-based gameplay. 

Hopefully I can change your mind! Dungeon Dashers is really quite fast paced. I personally play it quite quickly. I'm doing all that I can to remove unnecessary waiting and streamline the experience so it's mostly action... while leaving you the ability to stop and make strategic choices when you need to (no small task, but that's my vision!)

[Day 253]

Day 253
* Added new "Ancient Tomb" tileset which Philip has been working on for a long time
* Added healthbars for players
* Added healthbars for enemies
* Added popup textbox feature to display text for levels and storyline

Healthbars display for a brief time whenever an entity takes damage. Optionally you can see the healthbars of all players and enemies on the level by holding down Q at any time. I will add an "always on" and "always off" toggle to the options screen as well.

The Ancient Tomb tileset is something that Philip has been refining lately. This is his first iteration, and so there are some more tile variations and types to come. I'm really excited with this new tileset as it's a different location to the caves and the "castle/dungeon" tiles. To match, I will be designing some new enemies such as mummies, scorpions, etc. to fit the environment.

The popup text is a nice textbox that appears and displays text that is usually related to storyline or objectives. It can be linked into with map triggers. It also has that typewriter effect so that it comes out letter by letter and can be sped up / skipped by pressing another button. It will give a lot more context to the levels rather than the current maps which don't really explain why you're in a dungeon!

Popup textbox with some example text (Whatever came to mind):


New Ancient Tomb Tileset testing:


Health bars displayed for all entities while Q is being pressed. No lighting effects on:

Aw, I totally forgot you can freely dump all of your APs into attacks in DD (or am I wrong am I?). Do keep in mind my reasoning is pretty much generic, so you need to adapt general concepts to fit your game's mechanics.

Yeah you can use all your AP on multiple attacks in a row. The first system put in let you have 1 attack per turn and X movement points. It's much faster and more fun to just let the player keep hitting until they run out. If you try to attack an enemy when you have less than 5AP it will still attack, but it will be a weaker attack as a percentage of the AP you have left. e.g. 2AP left = 2/5 times as strong as a normal attack.

Take this a personal opinion only, but I would definitely try and incorporate as many mechanics which deal with controlling foes and the battlefield itself as I can.

Skills which knock back enemies by a tile or two might be a good fit for the Knight. Pushing an enemy into a damage-dealing tile like a pit, lava, spikes, whatever? FUN!

Skills which can move enemies around are definitely fun ideas! I'd like to do some of those too. There are some problems when moving lots of enemies at once (which tile do they land on? What happens when they are pushed into walls, etc.) But all simple things which can be figured out and made consistent.

The Wizard might use a spell to change the nature of tiles (AP-reducing tiles, damage-dealing tiles, stone-walls-tile setc). These kind of spells might/should be used in conjunction with other skills to promote good strategy, cooperation between players of different classes, emergent gameplay.

Perhaps some kind of "traps" that could be laid down? Placing a poison snare on a floor tile that activates when an enemy walks over it? And temporary walls, like you mentioned, which die after 3 hits from an enemy.

Definitely avoid focusing too much on skills which only revolve around dealing damage, as that would make for repetitive gameplay and would also hinder more varied strategies.

I agree! I think the Rogue is going to be fun to play and he will have some pretty diverse non-damage dealing skills.

I would also advice grating similar skills to enemies. Opponent which just walks to you and swing/shot their weapon are a boring bunch of stats behind fancy pixels, but stuff quickly become way more interesting as you give them a trick or two.

I'd like there to be a fair few unique enemies with unique skills which are more than simply damaging the player. If the player can get stunned/slowed/confused/poisoned/etc. then it will bring out a lot more strategic choices for which enemy should be killed first.


Thank you very much for the super great discussion so far. All of this really jumpstarts a whole bunch of ideas in my head. Feature creep!

Some strategy games go as far as denying ranged attacks when in melee range. Also, some of those games usually introduce a "Point-blank shot" skill, which allows for a (more powerful) ranged attack to be used when in melee range combat only.

...

It's really up to the kind of design you're striking for. If you're not sure about this, you might as well want to try both approaches and see which one works best for you.

I might see how a minimum distance would affect the gameplay. It might slow it down a bit, but it's worth exploring.

Also, I've read you're having a bit of a hard time making the Elf and Wizard feel different from a mechanics point of view. I'll just give you a few thoughts to think about.

...

All in all, you just need to think more about what kind of roles your classes are supposed to fill. Hope this helps.

Your suggestions are extremely helpful! I actually have many of the skills planned that you have suggested. One problem is since there is a Rogue character, it takes a lot of the "mobility" skills that a fast character like the high-elf would normally have.

I realised that any sort of move such as "take aim" shot, isn't as interesting in Dungeon Dashers as it might be in other games. For example if you can "charge up" an attack for 10AP and shoot it for another 5AP, then its damage has to be at least as strong as the three normal attacks you could have done in that same 15AP. If it is stronger, then you wouldn't use the 15 normal attacks very often at all, unless you needed to take out lots of small weak targets instead of focusing one. I added this skill already in the form of a "headshot" skill.

I just realised that some kind of AP reducing skill would be cool for one character though - basically what you mentioned above as a "slow".

You may want to try implementing ranged attacks as free-skills (ie they do not count towards the skill-cap when selecting your hero's skills) with a low AP cost.

Ranged attack would be slightly more AP-consuming than normal melee attacks, which in turn could make kiting way less efficient as a strategy. This might be a welcome consequence or not.

A free-skill might be the way to go, however I'm concerned how it will affect the in game UI and the player's understanding. It may be confusing for some heroes to have 3 skills and others to have 4.

And what sort of attack should range heroes do when they walk into an enemy? Does it automatically select that "free skill"? Or does it just do some kind of melee attack that does the same damage as that free skill?

[Day 250]

Day 250
* Implemented Twisting Backstab skill for Rogue (Increases Critical Hit damage by 200% for one turn)
* Implemented Headshot skill for Elf (Guaranteed critical hit for next attack)
* Implemented Bloodpact skill for Rogue (Convert 20 HP into 10 AP)
* Implemented Exploding arrow skill for Elf (Similar to fireball)
* Implemented Magic Net skill for Elf (Shoots a net that immobilizes and enemy for 2 turns)
* Implemented Lord of Deception skill for Rogue (Makes you invisible to enemies for one turn at the cost of setting your HP to 10. Enemies can still attack you if they accidentally walk into you, but they will not target you. This is useful if you simply need to cheat death for a turn and you have somewhere to hide.)
* Added stats to equipment selection screen (can now see your stats for each character loadout)

I managed to accomplish a fair bit today which I am happy with. I had a couple of game developer friends over for a "productivity jam" where we were all working on our separate projects, using the Pomodoro technique to manage our time. It worked out well and we all got a lot done. I'd definitely like to do it again in the future.

I found that the skills I implemented today further increased the strategic choices for each hero. Now it's really fun to blink behind an enemy, buff your critical hit damage and take him out. Using Lord of Deception was fun too. I can imagine some levels where it would be fun to use and outwit enemies. Perhaps a wall of 20 safely guarded Goblin Archers that you're able to sneak past, undetected?

I did find however that the Elf's skills were less interesting. I didn't realise it at the time of (quick) design, but after implementation, her skills felt quite similar to the Wizard's. I might need to rethink some of her skills and tweak them to make them more unique.

I'm also not entirely sure how to do the skills for the ranged characters either. Currently shooting a ranged weapon is a skill on its own (since melee combat is simply walking into an enemy). Perhaps the Wizard and Elf should have four skills available? Or perhaps having to choose a low cost skill to use is part of the strategy. Maybe you'd rather tank out your Wizard with skills that cost more action points but can't be used as frequently? I'll have to playtest.

This image has the lighting effects turned off (besides dropshadows which could be replaced with hard shadows in this mode) - to show rebmeM tsetaL what it's like without them. The Rogue is using Lord of Deception to hide from enemies.

Awesome pixels, but it's bad idea to use smooth shadows.

There's an option to turn off the lighting effects so that there are no smooth shadows. This option is available for pixel purists, as I understand that having smooth shadows (and "too many" colours) can take away from some of the artistic qualities of pixel art. In the current build you just press F6 to toggle it on and off.

Love how it's coming together, well done.
Can I request that here is at least an option to display health bars all the time?
Perfect project for IOS btw, hope that comes to fruition.

The health bars are something that need to be done soon. I might even tackle them today, thanks for reminding me. The UI stuff is still WIP so I need to do a bit of design on that. I'm thinking that the heroes' health will be displayed with healthbars at all time, and enemies will show their health for a short time after receiving damage.

You know I love this!
And stop making me want to make dungeon crawlers. 

Stop making me want to make platformers! 

[Day 249]

Day 249
* Implemented Reach skill for Knight (attack two spaces in a row in one direction)
* Implemented Cleave skill for Knight (attack three spaces perpendicular to the player's direction)
* Implemented Guard skill for Knight (50% physical damage resist for 3 attacks)
* Implemented Critical Hits (enemies take more damage when you hit them in the back)

I was happy with the progress I made today. I added a fair few new skills, and already the game feels much more strategic. With more skills you have the opportunity to make more smart choices in combat. In addition, the critical hit system makes you think about where and how you want to hit an enemy, rather than just hitting them front on every time.

Here's the cleave attack in progress, being used to smash some boxes.

RUN! Those overgrown rabbits are everywhere 

Nicely phrased

[Day 248]

Day 248
* Implemented new stats for heros, equipment and enemies
* Fixed bug with level end portals being too close to one another
* Fixed bugs with the draw order of gates
* Changed gate behaviour so that they exist "between tiles" instead of occupying an entire tile themselves.
* Added Minotaur
* Added Rabbit Warrior (any guesses for which indie game this pays homage to?)

New Minotaur and Rabbit sprites are done by Chris Pariano who has also done all of the equipment art so far as well.



If you haven't seen it already, upvote and favourite Dungeon Dashers on Steam Greenlight!

[Day 245]

Day 245
* Did stat and attribute design for items and enemies