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[Canucklehead]

Updates!
Update #7 JSON Creator and Game Work
Update #6: More Combat work and JSON Creator Tool Start
Update #5: Combat Halfway Mark
Update #4: Monster Name Masterlist
Update #3: Dungeon Content Ideas
Update #2: Dungeons and Team Idea
Update #1:  Dungeon Generation Starting and Outline

Hi Everyone!

So honestly I've been looking at starting a topic on TIG but as this is my first game by myself I've been a little scared

Anyways, I've been working on a game for about 2 months with things slowly coming together.

Here's the idea.

Fitness based Dungeon Crawler.

So, that sounds a bit strange but stick with me.
If you've used a fitness tracker for a long period of time, I've found personally that the numbers become just that, numbers. They rarely drive me to go out and do more walking or anything like that. So, what if I made a game that required me to go and walk to be able to play it.

That's where Order of Fitness (working title still) comes in.




The goal is go make it so people can play the game by walking/sleeping/burning calories and covering real life distance.
I want to make it so you can't just pay to get free steps and thus pay to win, you just have to go out and be healthy.



This was taken today to show just some of the basic stuff I am prototyping after being logged in (via GameSparks)
The last bit is showing how I am going to handle dungeon layouts.

Less rooms = bigger icons and less rows.
more rooms = smaller icons and more rows.

Next step is to finish the data processing/retaining/storing etc. (making sure I don't double process the same data for example and award double what you should have)
After that is on to dungeon generation (which is going to be cloud based)

My current goal is to have the basic dungeon generation done by the end of the month and get it into the hands of some testers :D (but a move is coming up so it may linger a bit into Sept, we shall see )

If you have a Fitbit and are interested in testing it later on, send me a message

Also, I have started a Trello board that I update with what I'm working on/bugs I encounter etc. https://trello.com/b/K8qS6mJ4/order-of-fitness

[ThilDuncan]

Sounds really interesting, I like the idea of my character feeding off my exercise, looking forward to hearing more :D

[Canucklehead]

Thanks 
So far that seems to be the sentiment when I talk about the game with people as well, so here's hoping :D

[Canucklehead]

Well I'm just about to start some dungeon generation in the cloud.
The goal of it is to have the user's device call to GameSparks to generate the dungeon and then receive it back and then have the data ready for the player to explore.

As you may have seen in the first post, the gif is a "blockout" of how I see the dungeon system working.  Instead of traditional Dungeon crawler/rogue like style games I'm going to test out if it feels good to have a free room picking system.

This would mean that you could pick any of the generated rooms at any time to enter and try your luck with. I think this will be the easiest not only to implement but will save one extra data sent to and from the user's device.  Also this should keep the barrier to entry low in making it so the user does not get pigeon holed into having to fight one monster (if there was only one path from a room for example.

The goal for the user is to complete the whole floor (all the rooms) and then be challenged by a boss monster before going to the next floor.

So..Time to start :D I'll post back again when I have something to show :D

[Pixel Noise]

Well I definitely like the idea of it!

I may have missed it - but how are you planning to track all these things? Are you planning to link it to a fitbit account? Obviously that would be easiest - but then of course you're dealing with a much smaller potential player base.

[Canucklehead]

So the initial start of it will be based on Fitbit BUUUUT I don't want to screw myself over by being only Fitbit and have already identified several other trackers that I could support (Jawbone/Up, Several Garmins, Apple Watch, Microsoft Band etc.)

Basically if it has at least:
Sleep Tracking,
Calorie Estimate
Steps Tracking
Distance Tracking

Then I should be able to support it for the game.  I am starting with Fitbit as it is the one that I actually use currently.
The idea later on will be to make it so at registration time, you select your tracker, link your account and then go on to play

[Canucklehead]

Was just about to move onto the dungeon planning when I realized that I should make it a bit easier on the players for getting the full amount of their work.
So I went and added retroactive grabbing of stats from the previous day IF they logged in.
So as long as you log in once a day, you are guaranteed to get the full amount of your steps/dist etc. the next day you login thus not forcing people to have to login when they are going to bed for example.

Now it's doing some last checks on the data then going onto figuring dungeon and party stuff out.

[Canucklehead]

Well got the checks done and have started figuring out how I'm going to go about the Dungeon Generation but I'm going to take a slight (very slight) detour and try to cover Teams first.

One of the things I want dearly for this game is to support 4 player (at minimum) parties so that way you can play and clear dungeons faster with your friends. Not only should it be a bit more fun it should also make you a touch more accountable to be active in your Real life as well.

So, I have Team Joining done right now (need to add a textbox so you can name it since I'm sure most people don't want o be part of team "The Testies"

I'm trying to get Team Leaving finished as right now my settings in the back end are apparently wrong...once you join...YOU CAN NEVER LEAVE! Muahaha! But seriously, it's a bit annoying

So if I can get the party stuff going like I want then it will actually make the dungeon sharing a bit easier later as well.

Quick overview for how I expect the multiplayer Dungeons to play out:

You've joined up with your friend and are going to explore the Dungeon.

See Image below for other details.

[Canucklehead]

Team Creation (With naming) and quitting now work correctly.
Have to figure out a good way to do Joining as it requires the teamID which is a stringID (not the team name itself).

Probably have to do a custom Cloud Event for searching my Team Database for the team name and trying to do a join in the cloud that way (should work well enough).

[Canucklehead]

Well, The basics of teams are now in the game and ready to go.
Team Creation with custom name
Team Joining by Name
Team Quitting
Is all in and useable

I will add the TeamChat later when it's more applicable but for now it's on to the Dungeon-ing finally!

[Canucklehead]

So, Starting to brain storm what I'm going to start with for my dungeons.

Still have to start coding the classes for it in the client side but I think I know how I'm going to start it for my cloud code at least which is a start.

So I think I'll have 4 possible things in the dungeon rooms.
Monsters
Traps
Treasures
Shrines

Monsters
Not sure what all I'm going to do for monster names, I wanna keep it in the fitness theme so things like the ole Gains Goblin and more (hopefully)

Traps
Kicking down the door has the possibility of releasing a trap (trying to figure out how I'm going to keep this balanced, maybe if the players stats are not higher than a certain trap threshold they activate it ..I dunno yet, play testing it will be!)

Treasures
Different types of treasure possibilities such as
Equipment
Gold
Potions
Maybe even some special stuff like treasure maps (extra areas?)

Shrines
These would be rooms that if you pay the tithe to the shrine you can get buffs, but is it a shrine to a prosperous god or a vengeful one?

Just some ideas I've been kicking around.

These are just a few of the possibilities as I want to of course, keep the scope small for starting and then just expand later

[Canucklehead]

I'm going to write down some of the Monster names that people have suggested to me, that way I can keep them in one place and check the list if I need to :D

Gains Goblin
Whey Wolf
Protein Panther
Dumbbell Dolphin
Bicep Buffalo
Triceps Triceratops
Swolltan the Barbarian
Deadlift Demon
Sprinting Spriggan
Sit-up Cerberus
Jacked Jackal
Bicep Barbarian
Maximus Latimus
Gluetus Maximus (just cause it sounds like it would work )
Steroidus Rex
Crunching Crab
Casein Cretin
Calamitous Calves
Jack Squat
Protein Predator
Pull-up Python
Captain Curl
Gojizilla
Wicked Wheatgrass
Creatine Crabs
Villainous Vitamins
Crossfit Sally
Peter Pecs
Sir Curlsalot
Jack the Ripped
Captain Crunch
Crossfit Critter
Lionel Lifter
Peter Push-up
Johnny Jumper
Cardio Cougar


Some good ones in there in my opinion :D

[Canucklehead]

Dungeon Generation version 1 (data wise) is done.

Based on the town that the player is in, Rooms will be generated (each town has a minimum amount of rooms that need to be generated) and the monsters that inhabit that area will be picked to be in rooms. A piece of loot from each monster is generated as well for when the player would defeat it.

Now I need to add some stat variation to the loot to make it so you can get the maxed out ones (equipment farming).

But I'm happy about that. Next is to put the cloud call into the actual game and then deal with the data from said call. This shouldn't take very long but I'm honestly a bit wiped out from a recent move across the world (yay jet lag)

So I'm close to meeting my personal deadline of end of August, having Dungeon generation done and in game (by done I mean at least working.

I'm quite excited to have most of the code for the generation done in the cloud which will make it so I can tweak min/max values and such without having to push a full update to the store(s)

[Canucklehead]

Well I ran into a bit of a block the last few days
I had to restructure my data for monsters and their loot as I could not figure out a way to access the insides of the data (was some weirdness where after getting my loot item from the loot array it would have the object wrapped in an object so I couldn't figure out how to get my variables out of it )

So now I've done a quick restructure and am trying to get the stats to work. Then hopefully I can do a few little fixes for team play (making sure dungeons for solo/team work as they should for accessing and updating) and then work on the processing of the dungeon data in the game itself :D

[Canucklehead]

Dungeons are starting to come along a bit better. Still getting used to JSON (I'm really not used to being able to just tell it to go into a class and it just does it..so parsing is still a mindset switch for me)

Have it now putting the dungeons on the screen based on data from the cloud. Few more things to hook up then it's on to combat
 (basically just have to hook up energy usage and the actual check if the room is completed or not since a team mate could have done it before you have for example.)

[Canucklehead]

Well it's been a while since I updated (not that I haven't been doing updates to the game)

Mostly because of moving, and working at a new job to pay the bills (unfortunately not in games at the moment )

Anyways, I have a few days left to get my new personal deadline done, combat.

I currently have most of it setup and ready to go, with only a few things left to implement.



SO what you're seeing in there is just showing that I'm still getting data from Fitbit itself (yes it says 100 steps because it's 2am )
Showing the Character sheet where the inventory currently is as well as the equipment area.
Next I go to the Dungeon to kill some monsters, kill 'em dead like!

After all the monsters are dead in the dungeon it lets me generate a new dungeon from the cloud. Every time I click a room I get the monster from the cloud and kill it dead.

So, what's next to implement before the end of the month?

1. Monsters attacking back (basic to start)
    - I want to at least have them attack players to force them to have to heal etc. I'll build on it later to make it more     diverse

2. Monsters dropping loot and players being able to actually "pick" it up and have it in inventory
    -In the gif you can see where it says loot, that is the actual loot the monster WOULD drop if you killed it. Currently I don't have it so you can pick it up...soooo the void gets fed a lot lately.

3. Equipping/using of loot.
    -I have currently made it so monsters drop equipment pieces as well as Health Potions. I still have to implement all of these in game (which actually shouldn't take too long *crosses fingers). Ideally you can click on the item in the inventory which will say like Use/Equip, Sell , for starters. I do have some other things I WOULD like to have later on but they aren't crucial to the base gameplay and I'd like to get this out and tested  ASAP.


I think I can do this. I have 2 days off from work to try and throw most of this together in the app itself as most of the cloud coding is in place for it already, and the small bits that aren't shouldn't take too long to fix/throw together.

I'm pretty happy with how this is coming along so far. There is the odd ugly thing I don't like too much in how I have to program this within Unity (sometimes it seems hard to keep things strictly OOP and not just throw refs and objects all over the place.)

The next things AFTER the above points?
Maybe some more monster implementations OR maybe sitting down and writing the tool I want for making the JSON's for monsters, equipment, potions etc. etc.

We'll see how it goes. I could always try to get some art in there as well but hey...functional before beauty eh!

I'm also going to be putting Energy in the Dungeon area so people can see how much they currently have without having to switch back and forth between screens.


For those reading, I'm wondering thoughts on:

Putting vertical buttons on the edges of the screen to switch between Character(stats + Equip) / Dungeon / Inventory
(the fitbit panel itself will probably be removed at some point as it's there to let me see how many steps I have for debugging, maybe I'll keep it and just keep it in the menu as well.

[Canucklehead]

Just a little update on the stuff that's happened since last post

So I got more work on combat done. Mainly in making it work better with teams. There was a bug where if you were in a team and a team mater claimed the last room and you tried to enter, you would get told it was taken (worked as it should) if the team mate clears it they can then generate a new dungeon. You would then be stuck with a cleared dungeon.
I fixed it by making GameSparks (my backend) auto send a message to all team members and making them get the new dungeon

I'm spending a bit of time actually doing the JSON creator tool for the game as I know soon I'm going to want to sit down and add more monsters and be able to tweak things faster. This means the tool has to be close to what my dev is (or atleast what the JSON is currently)

So I started dickin around in WPF (spent some time blocking it out in Unity but then decided that WPF is probably a faster/better bet for what I want) and have come up with


So it's the first work in progress shot of it (maybe someday I'll sit down and learn to properly style WPF apps...but not likely anytime soon )
So right now I can add monsters to a list and then add equipment and potions to their loot table.
Few things to add to the tool is also a Town builder so I can name towns and add the names of monsters to it to generate my Town JSON as well. (there's a purposeful disconnect between monsters and towns so that way I can spread monsters around towns and such if I so choose to and not have to do more copy paste, it just ends up being a name look up in Game Sparks nosql db's

[Canucklehead]

Nother little update. It's been a while since I posted last.
I'm happy to say that I did meet my deadline of combat and such. The basic combat is in and working (raw damage at this point, no mitigation from equipment etc.)



you can't see it yet (that should be this next week or so hopefully) but when you finish killing a monster it will display it's loot, the typical battle report kind of screen I guess.
Currently you just auto loot the loot from them and it goes to your inventory  (which you can see near the end)

I currently have a dev mode cheat in there that you can see as well <.< >.>(the apple just fills hp back to 100)

I worked on the JSON Editor a bit as well and was able to get it working quite well. Next step for that is to actually make it so I can just put pre made items into the monster Loot.

For now it still increases my speed of JSON creation. It produces 2 JSON files (yes yes I know why would I do that) but 1 of them is used for the tool, has extra properties in it relating to being able to parse it back out into the tool nicely and the second is ready for the server in a specific way that I can access what I want out of it without having to loop over all the JSON in the database and search for it.

It is also now responsible for helping to setup Images for the items. I can double click ImagePath to go find the Image, and then double clicking the Sprite Name will fill in the actual image name of the image I selected in ImagePath. The only part that I still have to manually do for that is fill in the sprite number if it's in a sprite sheet (which isn't much, it's just like _1 or _12 or whatever)

Pretty happy with what's gotten done recently. It's been a pretty stressful few weeks at work so it's made it quite hard to do dev after coming home from that or before I go to work...but I just gotta keep truckin'n on :D

So next on the list is:

Loot screen/Battle Report whatever you want to call it:
-See the loot that the room contains/monster drops

Use of Potions in Battle:
-There are potions set up in game but no way to use them yet and heals are only available with the current dev cheat on

Equipping/Selling loot
-Need to be able to equip which shouldn't be too much hassle really. Few more buttons and animations etc. Also like to be able to sell stuff so your inventory doesn't over flow.

Bit of work on combat after Equipping is done
-need to make it so equipped items affect your character in battle such as increasing resistances and damage

Well that's my Update for now :D
I'm HOPING to be able to start getting people to play by the New Year but we shall see if it's ready by then or not.
Also need to start working on art...not sure at this point whether characters and such will be 3D or 2D but I have actually started looking into using Blender for 3D just in case