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[Petey]

The president has been captured by the earth's core! Are you bad enough to dig down and save him?

Prototype
For ludumdare last year me and my friend Max made a little game called DIGHARD. It turned out pretty fun so now we're making it big enough to warrant the ": CRISIS" addition. The idea blossomed from our love of juicy action games, and us playing too much Spelunky and Nuclear Throne.

You should try the original ludumdare prototype here.


 

Concept
The earth's core is very powerful. Naturally that power has gone to it's head and it's captured the president. You build up an international team of heroes that are called upon to dig to the center of the earth and rescue president. This game is going to be all about arcade action, digging, dinosaurs, and all kinds of crazy stuff happening.  We want to try constantly surprising you with what can happen and you'll never be sure if you've seen it all.

So far we've got couple heroes. We've got shovels, lazers, rocket launchers, and grenade launchers for them to use. And we've got landmines, unexploded ww2 bombs, dinosaurs, and lava wurms for them to avoid while on their adventure to rescue the president.

 
 
Team
It's me (Pete) and my friend Max (who will also be updating the devlog here). We're both reasonable programmers but this game will be a good exercise for us in design and pixel art. I'll be posting a lot of that, hoping everyone can give me some guidance.

The Plan
We want to split the game into 3 strata. First would be the earth's crust which is full of the stuff we've got so far plus bats, zombies, maybe a dragon sometimes, spikes, nuclear waste, stuff like that. Next strata is the 'lost world' which would be full of dinosaurs and ancient civilizations. The last strata and deepest down is 'hell' and would be full of demons and more lava. Finally you would fight and defeat the earth's core in a crazy boss battle. All this art and design is what we'll be documenting here!

[crusty]

Hey I remember playing the original!  Cool.

[Join Indies]

Nice prototype. Looking forward to a full version of this one.

[Petey]

I spent some time re-doing the tiles from the prototype. I referenced mostly Towerfall, but it seems most pixel art games do heavy detailing on the walkable edges of the tiles, and minimal detailing inside.

This seems to bring out the gameplay surfaces nicely and look pleasing. Here's the before and after, using detail to call out the walkable surfaces:

.

Also added a background tile and snuck in a gold tile and a spike tile.

[Petey]

Working on an indiana jones style boulder today. Hardest part in making this was actually figuring out how to record, resize, and crop gifs from unity.

Boulders will spawn in the world and can be pushed by you or explosions, and will damage the ground and crush you:



Or you can try riding on them:

[Photon]

HAHA! I remember this! Good deal to see you expanding it!

[Pixel Noise]

Haha! This looks fun, and I like the sort of goofy atmosphere/premise.

[Petey]

Today's topic: Set Pieces
The world is randomly generated, but we want to have some authored 'set pieces' that would show up say once in every 10-20 play-throughs. We're hoping to have a lot of these set pieces available so it seems like you'll always be surprised by a new discovery, even after 50 hours of playtime. You'll feel like the game has no bounds! Stuff like nazi bunkers, frozen mammoths, huge spike pits, massive bat caves, underground lakes with scary fish, vampire coffins, nuclear waste repositories, and whatever else strikes our fancy.

Feel free to chime in with your own set piece ideas! I want to know what you guys fancy.

So anyway, I mocked up a our first set piece: The Sleeping Dragon!



(Ignore my crappy old tile mock up)

He would appear pretty rarely, but sometimes if you dig down deep enough you'll discover him, snoozing away on a bed of treasure. He'd always appear on the side of the screen, so you'd never see the whole body (that's a time saving production tip for you to enjoy).

TODO:
- I need to animate him sleeping and waking up next, and then burning you or something.
- Also make the gems and coins for his bed of treasure.
- Have you able to kill him? Maybe you can push a boulder on his head?
- Redo his face. The pixels I put there are confusing.

[Pixel Noise]

Great idea - I think you're right on, in that seeing these "special" events/places/creatures every once in a while will definitely keep things fresh - and keep people wanting to explore, to see what else they may find!

Other ideas:

Old alien ruins/spaceship
Snake pit (sort of along with the Indiana Jones boulder idea)
Maybe some kind of special wizard/dwarf NPC that gives you a boost or something if you find him?

Ughhhh I'll think of more as soon as I hit "post"

[ashtonmorris]

Im thinking

-Ancient mummy tombs
-Treasure rooms with booby traps
-Caves with huge crystals
-Some underground water springs that heal you or something

[mzn528]

I love how you can ride a boulder lol, really smart and interesting idea

[Petey]

Ooh, you guys have good ideas. I'm stealing all of these!

Old alien ruins/spaceship
Snake pit (sort of along with the Indiana Jones boulder idea)
Maybe some kind of special wizard/dwarf NPC that gives you a boost or something if you find him?

These are great! It'd be cool if there was some insane super weapon inside the alien spaceship. So the player would already be surprised even seeing the ship, then double surprised to find a crazy gun inside they could use.

-Ancient mummy tombs
-Treasure rooms with booby traps
-Caves with huge crystals
-Some underground water springs that heal you or something

I want to mock up giant crystals next. Giant crystals are always awesome.

On the dragon front, I cleaned up the pixels on his face to make the forms read more clearly. Then I tried my hand at animating a sleep cycle. It's a little subtle. Maybe I'll add those weird 'sleep bubbles' you see in animated shows sometimes. You'll have to imagine him laying on the ground like in the mockup:



Next I'm going to make him wake up, breathe fire, and put him in the level on a bed of jewels.

[Canned Turkey]

That looks nice!

[Petey]

Haven't had much time to work on it, but I did get a little farther with the dragon, who now sleeps on a bed of jewels:



Also you can catch on fire and it takes a few seconds to actually die from it (now we need to add some water that you could put yourself out by diving in).

[Petey]

So I was thinking about DIGHARD's title screen and overall game flow. I like progressions of space over time in games. For example, the original Max Payne has a neat progression of height and wealth as you play. You start in underground subway tunnels and each level takes place higher and higher up until the end where you fight a helicopter on the rooftop of a fancy corporate tower.

Since the premise DIGHARD is 'dig down to the center of the earth to rescue the president' you're literally going from top to bottom. Bottom is the center of the earth, so top must be... outer space!

That means the the following:
- title screen should be of the earth from space
- then gameplay starts in your SPACE STATION! (maybe this is too crazy of an idea, but I'm gonna roll with it)
- you can run around on the space station, learn your mission, and eject down to earth's surface to start a run
- during your run you'll find gold/valuables which can be used to upgrade your space station on death
- upgrades will be silly (like a swimming pool module, pinball table, lounge module, etc)
- characters you unlock will hang out in your space station

This is also neat because you can get a feel for the controls in the safe environment of the space station before launching into danger.

So I started with really rough mockup of the title screen to try and learn stuff about how the framing and colors would work:




Next step was to try and figure out how to make good planet. I read lots of 'how to make realistic planets' tutorials and tried to translate them to a more pixel style. The big breakthrough was discovering the 'Apply Lens' distortion filter in gimp which takes a normal texture (like a world map) and distorts it to look like it's mapped on a sphere. After all that, I ended with this:




I then separated the planet's atmosphere, sea/land layer, cloud layer, and shadow layer so I can counter rotate the the land and the clouds to provide some motion. Then I hooked it all into the game and added our title screen ui, which I think turned out pretty cool:




Todo:
- Design the space station
- Get it working so you can run around and fire yourself towards earth
- Go crazy on animating in the game title letters

[Petey]

One of my personal goals for this project is to improve my art skills. The pixel stuff I'm doing for this game is kind of a first step since I haven't really done art for a game before. I forgot to mention earlier, before I did the dragon, I went back to the drawing board with the colors.

I darkened the background, saturated the colors a bit and added kinda orange/yellow layer on overlay to unify everything. Here's the before (on right)/after (on left):

[Cakeprediction]

colours indeed are way more pleasant to look at .
Dragon looks really good btw, especially it's animations!

[Pixel Noise]

Hey guys, just dropping in to say I hope development is still proceeding! This game looks too fun to be abandoned