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[DantronLesotho]

Hello! Longtime lurker, first time poster to devlogs. I have been working on games on and off as a hobby for years and years, but I am going to try and finally finish a decent sized game to release, even if the genre has already been done quite a bit.

The game is a sandbox platformer/terrarialike, done with a lo-fi almost zx spectrum-like graphics. I went for this look out of appreciation and because it's REALLY easy to churn out assets that I don't hate. The look is somewhat inspired by Rock Boshers and Ghosts'n'Goblins.

The plot is that a long time ago eight ancient gods came to the land and were welcomed by the people. The gods eventually turned on the people, stole their land, and drove them to live in caves. Now is the time of hibernation by the gods, and you have been elected to kill them in their sleep so the people can reclaim the land. Keeping it simple.

I want to make the game sort of play out like Megaman where each of the eight god's elements grant your hero's weapon with different properties, and each of those properties can be used to more-easily wipe out the other gods depending on their weaknesses. The character has a sword and a pickaxe; the pickaxe of course used for digging, and the sword for attacking. Both get upgraded as more materials are gathered and gods are killed. The sword will get behavior modifiers that can be turned on/off depending on the materials gathered. Almost like Castlevania's soul systems.

If I end up finishing and actually have the gusto to keep going, I want to implement this stuff:

• The ability to create machines to better fight the gods and monsters
• I want the world to improve each time a new god is killed. First birds reappear, grass grows, trees bear fruit, water gets cleaner, sunlight appears, etc
• Animals to exist in the world that react to each other with rudimentary AI, giving the world a much livelier feel
• Not-terribly procedurally generated ancient cities and temples
• Members of your tribe can come out and live in your homebase, can work, farm, sleep, etc

Here is a debug image of the world that gets generated:



And here's a screenshot of the regular gameplay:



I'll have more later, I just wanted to post this to force myself to get going on this thing. I might change the style later to reflect more NES-like because it's really hard to create detail with 8x8 pixels, but so far it's pretty solid.

[DantronLesotho]

Implemented torches to gradually increase light when they are placed, and introduced a flickering effect. I love the way it looks but I'm not sure how it'll play out when I actually playtest it. I can't see shit!

[devi ever]

This looks really great!  When will you have a playable build available?

[DantronLesotho]

Thanks! I plan on having a playable build as soon as I have my monsters, bosses, and weapons implemented. Hopefully in a couple weeks if I stay on schedule.

[DantronLesotho]

Enemy and boss assets and behaviors are defined; enemy behaviors are implemented. Spawning, gravity, and collision needs to be fixed though.

Pounded through and finished the element assets tonight. I need to add methods for their distribution in the world as well as methods for their behavior for the special elements.

Inventory screen also has a framework for gathering the elements, but not for selecting them for use with the main weapon. Good progress tonight though!



...man I gotta fix those early elements (the ones on the left that look like terrible versions of minecraft elements); the non-8-bit ones look like crap to me.



Next I will:

• Polish/fix hero/enemy/projectile "physics" (will probably take the longest since it's always painful trial and error)
• Redo methods for implementing elements
• Insert boss enemies and their lairs
• Implement boss behaviors and finish boss assets
• Finish out inventory management and plugin system for use with the main weapon and pickaxe
• Build progression system to keep track of the bosses killed
• Make some cinematics
• Music and good sound effects will need to be done eventually too
• Polish, playtesting, polish!

[Durbek]

Hi ^^
Cool style, but, isn't background too black?

[happymonster]

Looks good!

[DantronLesotho]

Thanks sirs! The black background isn't black enough for my dark heart. 

[DantronLesotho]

Fixed the collision for the hero so it's not derpy any more, finally. Going to apply the same methodology to the enemies tomorrow. Now, sleep.

[DantronLesotho]

I took time off to do Ludum Dare and it was totally worth it. I actually finished a game which I'll probably create a more fleshed out version of later. As far as this game goes, I finished perks for each element that it affects on the sword weapon. Fixed up enemies' attacks, implemented the inventory screen to reflect the items/elements collected.

As I go through and fix more things on my list, I am finding more things to do, as is what a lot of other developers find I'm sure. Doing the Ludum Dare competition though gives me a great idea of the actual scope the game can encompass. I'll post more after I finish implementing the boss encounters so I have more pretty graphics and video.

[Iso]

Oh man, the art style is so familiar to me for some reason. What are you using for graphical inspiration? I love it.

[DantronLesotho]

Finished boss art assets. Since I love gifs and I know you do too, here they are:

I broke the zx-like rule, but eh. I am okay with how they came out.

[DantronLesotho]

What are you using for graphical inspiration? I love it.

Thanks! Glad you love it! The inspiration is mostly the NES version of Ghosts'n'Goblins and Rock Boshers: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=2571.0 as well as other zx-style and "dark" NES style games.

[Sarge]

Jesus Christ Marie.  It's Mineral Boshers.

I dig the sort of Amiga look you've got going on.  Cool stuff.

[DantronLesotho]

[DantronLesotho]

I'm still plugging away at the game. The inventory and weapon augmentation system has proven to be much more complicated than I originally expected and I'm sure it's because I didn't plan it out well enough. It's causing development to be quite delayed. It basically works like this:

• You have an item inventory of 54 elements in a 9x6 array. The elements are the blocks that are mined from the world.
• For each element, you can store up to 100 that you can place back in the world. If you are under 100 and place it in the world, it subtracts one. But if you get 100 of any element, it gets modified to be able to be used infinitely.
• You can also equip up to 3 elements as modifiers for your attack weapon and defense.
• The items can be classified as level 1, 2, 3 when they hit an amount of 33, 66, and 99 respectively. Different elements do different things like increase damage, speed, amount of projectiles fired, etc. and they can be stacked. Higher levels have higher effects and you can select whether you want to use level 1/2/3, depending on how many you have available of a particular item and how you want to play.

I'm almost done getting it to work properly; I just have a couple small fixes to make.

Video games.

[Ouren]

ys pls

[DantronLesotho]

Fixed the inventory system, which was elating. But when my weapon augmentations actually started working properly, I found glaring oversights in my initial programming so now I have to go allllll through those to fix them. Still, it is progress. That's what I get for programming a large block of content on little sleep.

[DantronLesotho]

I got the inventory and weapon augmentation systems to work, but the problem is that the vision I originally had for how it worked is not jiving with reality and it's not actually fun. So now I'm just going to flesh out a couple more things (boss battles, element distribution on the map, enemy distribution and spawn rates) and it will be in an alpha form. Once I get it to that stage I will do some play balancing to see if my theoretical formula can actually be something worth enjoying. Quite a letdown, I would say.