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[yui_jegnan]

What is this?

Septentrion is a top down action roguelike. Your goal is to find the cure for your sick daughter's disease in the mysterious tower that came down to earth from outer space.

Features

-manual revolver reload system
-randomly generated floors
-randomly generated items
-crafting
-dynamic self difficulty adjustment
-Lose everything but your level upon death

*This gif is running at 15fps. The actual game runs a lot smoother. None of the art assets are final.

[yui_jegnan]

Still very unsure about what kind of atmosphere I should go for with the game. I personally would like to go for more of a horror theme, but then I'm afraid that will prevent many people from playing the game. After all, I want a lot of people to play this game.



*extremely old concept doodle that was never used


Player animation is also somewhat of a concern. I've drawn the shooting frames ages ago, but I'm afraid to make it into a sprite sheet because I can't simply determine the most efficient ways of implementing it while letting the gun sprite to be customizeable.



Currently waiting on my partner to finish up on Bank floor for item and money storage (emergency measure for death penalty). Hopefully I can come up with a decent flying monster design by then.

[illugion]

Man those monsters look really bizarre  but i don't think an horror theme would make people avoid your game, there are tons of people who love these kinds of games out there 
Oh and i really like the shooting animation 

[JLJac]

This is going to sound cheesy, but I believe it's true: Just be true to yourself - i. e. make the game you want to make. That will create something far more interesting than speculation in "what do the audience want?" Thinking about the demand and creating games to meet it is a niche already filled by the big industry, the only thing that's better about being indie is that you don't have to do that.

I really like your horror monsters! Especially the one with the manga eyes, the feminine aspect makes it so much creepier! If you're able to keep coming up with crazy stuff like that I'm definitely intrigued by your project.

What I'm less impressed by is the level design. First of all, the level layouts are boring, just a flat floor with some out of place objects strewn around. And also the pixel art skills that are evident in your spriting doesn't seem to have been applied to the levels.

Maybe you don't want a classic roguelike maze-and-rooms layout, but would rather have each floor of the tower resemble an arena? That would be cool as well, but I don't think the way to go is to put random rocks on the floor. Instead experiment with having the walls look different, one arena might be shaped like a cross, one elliptic and so on. Also, if you're going for the arena thing, some of the big monsters could leave big corpses - that way you would perhaps get an interesting self-building level that gets harder and harder as you kill more enemies.

Best of luck to this project! Keeping an eye on it!

[yui_jegnan]

Thanks guys! I think I will end up having the horror mobs and make the atmosphere based around them. Hopefully that all works out in the end.

As for the levels. I haven't really gotten around to putting so much work into it yet. I was initially planning to just have a small 800x600 room with random debris on the floor, but I am considering to do something more like rooms and mazes or like the arena idea that JLJac has suggested.

Currently, my partner and I are still working on making special npcs and systems related to them. Will post an update about it here as soon as the decision is finalized!

[yui_jegnan]

Fixed the current temporary inventory UI into another temporary inventory UI.



Made some assets for flying ghost girl that gets overtaken by parasitic creature upon detecting the player.

[Polyphonic Entity]

I spotted some adorable cuteness between all the monsters  


 

 
 

 

[yui_jegnan]

I spotted some adorable cuteness between all the monsters  
 

Haha thanks. I made one more just before bed. I'm not sure if this one is cute though 

[gimymblert]

That last image looks like kid vs pedophile

[Impmaster]

Still very unsure about what kind of atmosphere I should go for with the game. I personally would like to go for more of a horror theme, but then I'm afraid that will prevent many people from avoiding the game. After all, I want a lot of people to play this game.

[yui_jegnan]

That last image looks like kid vs pedophile

Yes! I wanted him to look creepy and threatening.

Thanks for pointing out the error, Impmaster. I fixed it now.

I made a mining animation today. Hopefully it's implemented in the game soon!


I also tried drawing some blood objects for the game. It doesn't seem to look that good. I wonder how I can improve it.

[Worthless_Bums]

The dynamic self difficulty adjustment sounds cool - can you elaborate on how you're planning on doing this?

[yui_jegnan]

The dynamic self difficulty adjustment sounds cool - can you elaborate on how you're planning on doing this?

Ah! A fellow Roguelike dev! Your sprites are beautiful!

So here is how the difficulty adjustment works. When you defeat all the enemies on the floor, three portals will spawn in the area. Each portal will have a different color which will represent its difficulty. So if the player happens to think that the current enemies are too easy, he can go in to the 'Hard' portal. This will add +1 to the hidden difficulty variable in the game. The enemy's stats and spawn rate is dependent on this difficulty variable. So the game will get a lot harder as you continue to travel through the hard floor multiple times. As it gets harder though, you get much better loot and better experience points. So this system basically let players to take a risk for bigger rewards.

Of course, if it feels too hard, they can always start going through the easy portals, making the enemies weaker, but the game will slowly become more of a grindfest as the amount of experience points the mobs will drop will get decreased along with the difficulty as well. So it is really about finding the perfect difficulty balance for the player. And they get to do that themselves by using this system.

[JLJac]

Is this the demon tower front reception? Your ideas seem interestingly weird, I wanna see where this goes.

For the blood, try giving the splatters a random rotation. That way the repetition is concealed.

[yui_jegnan]

Is this the demon tower front reception? Your ideas seem interestingly weird, I wanna see where this goes.

For the blood, try giving the splatters a random rotation. That way the repetition is concealed.

Haha, it's a special bank floor where you can store your items by paying some gold in case the player dies. It's sort of like an emergency mechanic so the player doesn't get too depressed when they accidentally die in the tower and lose all their items that they had with them. This way, they can at least get some of the items back if they are lucky enough to end up in the bank floor again.

I really dig the front reception idea though. Sounds awesome and it could definitely add to the weirdness of the game.

[vexille]

Hey yui! The game's looking freaking awesome! You guys have done some amazing progress, congratz to you and matt, I'm really impressed :D

As for the atmosphere, I would suggest you do something horror oriented as planned, but don't take it too seriously. Make it really slapstick, I think it would go well with your artstyle and those bizarre creatures

And I really love the gun barrel idea!

[yui_jegnan]

Thanks Vexille! Matt wouldn't have been able to go so far without your help!

It could be interesting to do a slapstick horror. I used to play this game called Splatter House Wanpaku Grafitti as a child. It was quite a scary game for a child's mind.



Gun barrel idea is a double edged sword. I personally like it, but I'm not sure how others will react to the system. I guess I will find out once Matt and I manage to make a build that is meant for public release.



As for the game's progress, we are finally working on a new mob! Trying to adjust the bullet pattern and rate of fire so it doesn't become too threatening.



*The apple in the picture is a placeholder image that was drawn about 6 years ago. It won't be in the final game. Actually, almost everything in this screen is placeholder.

Was also trying to work on the background today as well, but colors and backgrounds are my biggest weaknesses. I'm not so satisfied with the result at all. I also think the background doesn't really look like a "room".



However, a nice guy has shown me some tips on how to make it look better. So I may try something tomorrow in attempt to drastically improve this!

[yui_jegnan]

Updated the first post with the most recent gif capture of the game.

My partner is currently working on the random map generation. Hopefully it all comes through soon.

Some of the stuff added recently to the game are:
-blood splattering on floor once enemies get hit
-merchant (can buy and sell items)
-throwable rocks (mini rocks that you can pick up and throw in case you run out of bullet. Does little damage but it can be thrown in all directions according to mouse position. In a way it's more flexible than guns since guns can only be shot 4 ways.)
-potion
-death upon starvation and no sleep
-shotgun (shoots five small bullets in a contra-ish spreadshot fashion. Has to be manually reloaded each time player shoots. Each bullets do less damage than revolver by itself, but in close range(close enough to hit one enemy with all five bullets) it does huge damage.)
-mining animation

Meanwhile, I've been writing the back story of the game and drawing assets for it. Here is a new mob I've been working on since yesterday.



Planning to make it so he can jump around the field and explode his head once he is near the player. Maybe explosion should not only damage the player but also give some sort of negative status effect.

Generally, I'm trying to make this game's combat feel more like that of Dark Souls. In the sense that everything you do can come with consequences so the players will have to plan out their action carefully.

[JLJac]

Why can you only fire the gun in 4 directions? If you have mouse aiming that certainly doesn't make any sense...

[yui_jegnan]

Why can you only fire the gun in 4 directions? If you have mouse aiming that certainly doesn't make any sense...

I guess there are several reasons to this.

First reason is graphical issues. Currently there are only four sides of the shooting animation prepared for the character. If I made it so that the bullet can be shot in any direction, it'd look pretty unnatural since the character is aiming straight down the sight in only 4 directions. I thought about adding four more set of frames so I can achieve 8 way shot, but then there are still some angles between the 8 directions that may make the bullet trajectory look weird if it simply traveled towards wherever the mouse cursor is.

Second reason is that I kind of wanted to make a small restriction on player's control. Like how resident evil and Silent hill series uses tank movement mechanics to amplify the helplessness of the player character. I didn't want to go that far but I didn't want Septentrion to be 100% action game. So I wanted to put something that would prevent player from steamrolling everything in the game having smooth controls. It is a very outdated type of approach but I was one of those people who were disappointed when they added roll dodging in silent hill 5. So I want to experiment and see how people would react to it.

The final reason is I want to sort of balance the strength and weaknesses of guns and melee weapons. If guns can be shot anywhere the mouse cursor is at. I think it's possible that most people will just end up going with guns despite the fact that guns uses ammo. I was kind of like this with my previous game as well, but I want the games I design to have multiple answers during the playthrough. As in I'm trying to eliminate the possibility of one thing being too good because that leads to everyone using the same thing and leading to the same experience and conclusion.


I'm not entirely sure about it yet, though. I will have to think about this again once I can get the people to play the prototype build that we are working on. I would love to get some feedback on this because I could be wrong about this 4 way shot idea myself.