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[Oddball]

Description

There are dark places in the world inhabited by evil denizens. Places filled with danger and foreboding where no ordinary man would dare to journey. However, there are a few who are willing to risk death in the name of good, in the name of justice, in the name of.. valuable loot!

Hack, Slash, Loot(HSL) is a single-player turn-based dungeon crawler for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Take control of a lone hero and explore sprawling dungeons, fight dangerous monsters, and most importantly, plunder valuable treasures.

HSL features thousands of items, monsters, and dungeon features, and with a new dungeon created every game you can be sure that no two plays will ever be the same. Boasting easy to master controls you'll be adventuring in no time, but there is still enough depth to challenge the most hardened of adventurers.

Screenshots


Additional Info
Website HackSlashLoot.com
Twitter @OddballDave
Youtube



Rock, Paper, Shotgun Review
Destructoid Review
2 Girls 1 Game Preview
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Demo
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HackSlashLoot.com, Steam, Desura, Indievania, Mac AppStore, GamersGate

[Oddball]

This has been in development for a little while, and the few people who follow me on Twitter may have already seen some teasing screenshots already. But now I thought it was time to start a DevLog as I really start to ramp up development on this.

The story so far
The basic engine is in. Player and enemy movement is all working. Combat runs smoothly, if a little uneven at the moment. Level generation is working better than I'd hoped. Dungeons are created and populated with monsters features and items. I wanted level gen. to look like it could have been done by a human level designer, and for the most part things look so. There are only the occasional 'why is it like that?!' moment, but plenty of 'that looks fitting' moments. Most of the interface elements are in, the only missing ones are the sound related stuff.

My aim is to have masses of content, so much in fact that most will never see all of it. I want players to mention something cool they saw in the game to other players and have the other players response be 'I've never seen one of those whenever I've played'. This may be too much of an undertaking so it's more of a 'shoot for the moon' goal. The content currently stands at 125 dungeon features, 85 monsters, and 46 items in the first dungeon theme, although that should increase dramatical before I'm finished. And that brings me to another aspect of the game, dungeon themes. Each dungeon will have a coherent theme which should mean that you will not get out of place monsters, items or features on any play through. I'm not sure how many dungeon themes I'm going for but I already have a lot of ideas so again this will be as many as I can.

Still to do
There is loads still to do, hence the 20% icon at the top. The game is still missing the whole front end, currently it goes straight into the game. There is no sound at all, I'll probably do that last, and look to getting someone in to do the music. There is very little in the way of effects in there, so there's still lots more visual punch is to come.

[Conker534]

How much is it going to cost?

[Helmeted]

Looks totally sweet. Following with interest!

[deathtotheweird]

you don't see many commercial roguelikes for PC. I think most would only consider buying it if it made it stand out from other roguelikes, because there are so many already.

do you still think you should use those same sprites though? if you're going to make it for a commercial product, you should probably try something else. we've all seen these a billion times already by now, and having them in a commercial game might put people off. I dunno though.

[Oddball]

That is definitely something that worries me allen. However with there being so much content and me not being any good at graphics this is currently the best option for me. I've just got to hope that I can mix it up enough to make it stand out from the crowd. I have redone the graphics since my assembelee ones, but I don't know how much that'll make them stand out. Is the market really that saturated with these sprites?

@Conker: I don't know how I'm going to monetize it yet. I'm currently leaning towards a basic free version with 'paid for' add-on dungeon themes. But that could all change before release.

[Player 3]

One way to make some money of of it, besides themes, is that I would recommend pre-set, yet proceduralized quests. You know, one that even has sidequests in a roguelike besides the cliché one: survival.

[Conker534]

If your doing floors..
I think the free version should allow you to get to floor 50 and under with a BIG limit on things, like items and such.. then the paid for version goes unlimited floors, with all items, or whatever you decide to do.

Don't change the graphics!

[Oddball]

Queued movement
I've been a little distracted by the TIGCompo so not made major progress on this over the last two weeks. I was also supposed to be working on the magic/special item generation, but I didn't like how it was turning out so I've put that on the back burner whilst I think how best to implement it. I did however work on queueing the players actions so that the player can get things done with the fewest amount of clicks possible. Now you can click on anywhere you've been and if it's still accessible then your man will make his own way there. This means if you find yourself having to backtrack it's much less of a chore. As the game works with a limited/small viewport I've also allowed for the player to click on the minimap to achieve the same effect. The queued events are interrupted if a new monster appears or if the player is attacked.

[tametick]

do you still think you should use those same sprites though? if you're going to make it for a commercial product, you should probably try something else. we've all seen these a billion times already by now, and having them in a commercial game might put people off.

We have, but >>99% of players outside of TIGSource haven't.

[andrew-101]

Very neat gui.

Btw, on hackslashloot.com, the link in the footer doesn't work.

[Oddball]

Thanks. I usually have a tendency to make my GUIs a bit cluttered so with this I've tried to keep a decent amount of whitespace in there.

Oh and thanks for the heads up on the footer link. Should be fixed now.

[Conker534]

You should update this more!

I'm into it.

[increpare]

Hey, good to see these sprites getting put to good use...

[Oddball]

Thanks for the enthusiasm guys, but I don't like to update too often as the updates feel a bit mundane when they are too frequent.

Procedural item generation
I feel like I've finally got a system I like for the procedural item generator. The old version felt too random and was easily identifiable as a random algorithm. The new version is much more discrete, and makes much better choices when allocating magic/special items. I've achieved this by using a tagging system. Anything that request an item from the generator will pass a set of 'tags' with the request. Some of the tags are auto-generated and some are specified by the dungeon theme. These tags tell the generator preferable item properties. When the generator needs to make a choice during the creation process it first checks the tags for any preferred properties and then favours those choices over the others. An example might be when a weapon is needed for the wizard to wield the 'magicuser' tag will be used, the generator now knows to remove any options that a wizard cannot use. The tags are extremely versatile and can be used for a wide variety of filtering, not just for character class. There are ~100 recognised tags at the moment and I'm far from finished, I'd say the item generator is about 50% done.

I did get a little sidetracked whilst figuring out the item generator, and added some extra gameplay features that I hadn't originally planned for. Hopefully this isn't the start of feature creep and I can stay focused now that I have a better idea of the direction I'm going.

[shrimp]

I'm following this! The dungeon walls and the UI panels are especially classy. Also the controls sound very slick, which is good to see in a RL (and because I'm a big usability geek)
I think you said it was a "coffee break" roguelike. What makes it fit in a coffeebreak? Desktop Dungeons-style small chunked levels?

[happymonster]

Looks great! It is going to be turn based and point and click based movement / combat?

I would have a look at making the colours of the background more saturated and leave the items / enemies the same colours. They would stand out more and I think it would look a bit better overall.

I'm not such a fan of the half-wall height tiles, have you tried normal ones?

[Oddball]

@Ed: I'd say what make it a coffee break roguelike is that you can play the game casually as well as seriously. The way the controls work means you control almost all the gameplay by clicking the game field. That means if you're playing casually, i.e. not being too strategic, then you can whiz through a few games in no time.

That said, there is a lot of depth for those that want it. The limited inventory means that picking up or dropping items become very important decisions. Add to that the effects of item synergy and there is quite a bit of strategic depth. But like I said you can ignore all that and have a very satisfying game without it.

@happymonster: The game is turn based, and completely point and click. I may add hotkeys eventually but I'm concentrating on mouse controls for now. I know the pseudo-oblique game view isn't everyones cup of tea, but I kinda like it. I may have to do something about highlighting the grid better though as it can be a little confusing at first.

[simono]

just discovered this! I like how it looks!

if office is quiet in afternoon i'll give it a try

[Oddball]

Procedural item gen continued
I actually finished magic/special item gen the other day but personal stuff stopped me posting a devlog entry. I'm very happy with the results, getting a pair of winged boots that speeded up my character was one highlight. Another was when I found a magical pork chop in a barrel, I don't remember what it did when I ate it but who cares what it did it was a magical pork chop!!! The gameplay is almost feature complete now. I just have one more feature to add then I'll be moving onto content and adding all those lovely bells and whistle. To celebrate this I'm moving the progress bar to 30%. Woot!

Here's a shot showing a trail of items I've left behind before getting ambushed by a gang of Goblin Ragers