next »

[Nikolas]

Gameplay footage:





A more recent (but shorter) footage, with an updated color palette and procedural generated maps:







About the game:
Diskophoros is a local multiplayer game for up to 4 players.
The players throw laser discs at each other and use power-ups trying to become the last man standing.
I am currently working on procedurally generating maps and textures.
The shown in the video are manually crafted (I need to make a new video), but here is an example of a procedurally generated map:




Current features:
- Core gameplay: character movement, disc behaviour
- Procedurally generated maps and textures
- Different color palettes for the texture generation
- Various powerups
- Configurable controls for gamepads and keyboard
- A soundtrack by BARCHboi and Graham Kartna, two amazing artist, which you should definitly check out!

What's missing:
- SFX
- Proper looking menus
- A nice build/release process
- Marketing stuff: a cool logo, trailer etc.

There is alot of other cool stuff I can think of (leveleditor, different game modes ...) and I will try to keep this list up to date.
As I have never released a game I want to try to foucs on releasing a early/minimal-viable version (a demo build or maybe steam early access?) to get some feedback and gauge player interest on further features.

Plattforms:
The game is currently developed on Windows which will be the main target.
Future releases for Mac and Linux should be possible.

Tech:
- Java (game logic)
- libGDX (rendering, input, sound)
- Box2D (physics)
- Ashley (entity component system)
- Haskell (procedural map and texture generation)

Social media:
- Diskophoros website: http://diskophoros.nikolikesco.de/ (including a mailing list)
- My twitter: https://twitter.com/nmaehlmann

[alvarop]

I feel like you got something going here, at least art-wise. I'll make sure to check it out.

[Nikolas]

@alvarop:
Thank you for the kind words, nice to hear you like the graphics.


I have redesigned the power-ups. Now they fit the rest of the graphics better.
Also I animated them to make the scenery look more vivid.
I'd like to show you a GIF, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to record one on linux 
(I tried byzanz but somehow it can't create a GIF from my game window, maybe it has trouble with opengl?).
I will upload a GIF when I update my windows version the next time.

---edit---
I decided to add a picture, even if it's not as nice as a GIF  :



The colors need some more fine tuning. In fact I am only happy with the red and purple ones by now.
Compared to the old ones they miss pictograms now.
Maybe I can work around this, when I rework the HUD and add an indicator for the current powerup.
For the animation: The power-ups are spinning and going up and down slowly.

If you rather like the old look or have any criticism on the new ones, don't hesitate to tell me.
 

[GrahamOfLegend]

Like the look / feel of this game a ton. The concept reminds me of Towerfall but w/gladiators, which isn't a bad thing. Keep on grinding dude.
Also, like the new power-ups a lot more. They have more depth to them and like you said fit into the look of the game more.

[Nikolas]

@GrahamOfLegend:
Whoa, thanks alot for your feedback and motivation. Did you tried the game?
Even though I'm a big fan of local multiplayer I didn't play towerfall yet  , but I only heard good stuff about it.

[GrahamOfLegend]

For sure man! Community is one of the best parts of being an indie dev. I'm a huge fan of local multiplayer too - at the moment, my game is only local. I'm eventually gonna try adding AI but it wont evoke the same emotion, so maybe it'll just work as a "practice mode" or something haha.

No I haven't gotten to try it out yet, but I will I promise! You should try Towerfall once you can round up some friends. It's a very enjoyable experience. (You should check mine out too )

[QOG]

This looks very nice, I'll try to drag a friend into playing.
The way the grass blends into the sky bothers me a lot though. The colors need to be further apart.

[Nikolas]

@Graham:
I'll check out your game on the next occasion! 

@QOG:
Thanks you for the feedback. You're right about the colors.
Even though you don't notice it that much, when you are playing the game, this is definitely a problem.
As I like the colors the way they are (except from this bad combination), I'm not sure how to fix this.
I'm afraid of making the stage to colorfull, as I planned to have more maps, each with a specifific "main color".
I'll play around with the colors and see how this can be solved. Thanks 

[Nikolas]

Hi all,
do not fear! The project is still alive, even though I haven't posted in a while  

Here is a new video showing the previously announced animated power-ups and moving clouds:

Edit: removed old video, which is now unavaiable

Background Graphics positions are now stored in XML-files and can move around linear on the screen.
Entries look like this:

<cloud FileName="cloud6.png" PosX="-737" PosY="360" Moving="1" VelocityX="0.175" VelocityY="0" Ticks="4384" ZLayer="2"/>

Also I'm wondering if anybody has tried the game yet?
Have a nice day!  

[Nikolas]

This devlog started 2014. It will be 2018 soon. What happened?

This devlog started as a devlog for the game 'Gladiscator' a highschool project of mine.
After graduating, I started studying and working in IT.
Time for hobby programming was running short and Gladiscator got abandoned.
I never forgot about it and as I wanted to continue working on Gladiscator in late 2016,
I noticed the C++ codebase was a total mess and hardly extendable.
So I decided to rebuild the game from scrath using the knowledge I aquired during the years of hiatus.
The game is now called Diskophoros and is written in Java instead of C++.
I still work and study fulltime, but I managed to work on the game during 2017 from time to time and want to start tracking progress in the form of a devlog again,
which is why this thread was revived by me.

I updated the landing page with some new GIFs and am looking forward for your feedback

[Nikolas]

I have been working on a stage selection screen. It currently looks like this:



Each stage is previewed and the animations are played for the currently expanded stage.
To achieve a smooth expansion of preview images on selection change, the width of the preview images is not manipulated directly.
Instead the "desiredWidth" is changed.
The actual width of a preview image is then calculated depending on how much time has passed since the selection has changed.
Within a second, the actual width will be adjusted to the desired width:

Code:

public static float calculateWidth(float currentWidth, float desiredWidth, float timeLeft , float delta) {
	if (delta <= 0) {
		return currentWidth;
	}
	if(timeLeft < delta || timeLeft <= 0) {
		return desiredWidth;
	}
	float widthDifference = desiredWidth - currentWidth;
	float relativeTime =  delta/timeLeft;
	return widthDifference * relativeTime + currentWidth;
}

The position of each preview is then determined by the width of its predecessors.
Currently the preview images still wiggle a little, which might be caused by incorrectly rounding floating point numbers to pixel positions.
But I am already quite happy with the result 

[Nikolas]

Here is a GIF of the game-over-screen:



The overlay is in the color of the winning player and it never hides the players.
The effect is achieved by calculating the angle between the two players and using it to move and rotate two colored rectangles.
Also the position of the menu items is dynamic, so they will always be displayed with a solid color background.

[Quentin Delvallet]

That Game Over screen and the Stage Select screens are very cool effects. It's that kind of details that can make a game going from "good" to "great" !

[Sundrop]

It blows my mind how you guys are making games using your own 'engines', and don't have presets to rely on. Keep it up good sir, I'd love to see more! 

[Nikolas]

@Quentin Delvallet:

Thanks for the kind words! I recently played Sportsfriends and got inspired to put some more effort into menu screens:



@Sundrop:

Thank you!
Even though I don't use a 'real engine' for Diskophoros, I use libraries like Box2D (physics) and Ashley (entity component system) to make development easier.
I never really tried learning an engine, as I think,
having to learn the special quirks of an engine and being forced into a specific programming language are two major disadvantages.
But it is on my todo list for future games

[Nikolas]

I have worked on a menu to configure controls for keyboard and gamepads and it's almost finished:



The controls can be configured as 'control sets'.
Multiple control sets can be configured for the keyboard and each kind of connected gamepad can have one control set.
Connecting for example two xbox 360 controllers, will lead to both having the same button mapping.

Control sets can be configured by assigning buttons to actions through pressing them in the correct order (the yellow text highlight shows, which control is next).
If a button is pressed, which is already part of a control set, the entry gets highlighted in red, so it is easy to look up already configured controls.
Navigating actions, like quit & save are achieved a little unvconventional by holding down buttons for a given time.
I feel like this is not optimal, but it allows navigating through the controls menu without keyboard or mouse, if a gamepad is available.
I tried to make the "hold <BUTTON>" navigation a little more responsive by coloring the instruction text at the bottom, as soon as the specified button is hold down.

Next up would be a screen for players to join into the game with their control sets  

[Nikolas]

Today a got to announce that Diskophoros will feature music by BARCHboi and Graham Kartna,
two amazing artist, which you should definitly check out!
I am really proud to be able to use their music in my game!

I also uploaded new gameplay footage in Full HD quality, to replace the old bad quality video.
The video features the song Ghandi by BARCHboi which is one of the tracks in the game:

[Nikolas]

I made a mockup for the player-join-screen:

Next step will be implementing it, to see if it looks and feels likes intended.

[Nikolas]

I took a break from implementing menus to add some "juicyness" to the game after watching the awesome "Juice it or lose it" talk, which can be found here:



I added screenshake to the game and made the disc flicker/light up on impact:


I am thinking about adding some particle effects or a dust animation for running players.
If you see some quick-wins regarding "juicyness", don't hesistate to tell me  

The screen for players to join a match with their gamepads is almost finished, too.
So I hope I will be able to show it, soon.

[Nikolas]

I finally finished the player-join-screen.

Players can join a match by pressing a button on their gamepad/keyboard.
Every player gets assigned the name of a greek deity. The icon next to the player states wether he playes on a gamepad or keyboard.
At the start of each round the name is displayed above the players character for identification purposes.
Initially I planned to let the players be identified by their color. This did not work out, as it would have required 4 fixed colors (one for each player) which could be used and easy recognized on every stage.
As the stages are all different colors I could not find 4 fixed colors which work on every stage.
The name assignment is a fun workaround IMO.