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[dustin]

*Edit*

Thought I'd put a current screen shot in here...




So I'm currently making one of the bigger flash games I've ever tried so I thought I'd make a little devlog.  A summary of the game is this...

You have a stack of monsters you have to fight your way through.  Each has hp and damage they do to you.  You have hp, some items, and an attack rating.  The way it works is you have as many dice as your attack rating is.  You can roll them, any 1's or 2's count as a hit, the rest are missess but certain items can make 3 of a kind etc. do things.  After a roll you can keep any dice you want (a minimum of 1) and roll again.  If you every roll the dice and get no 1's or 2's the monster gets a free hit on you.  If you are happy with the dice you have you can choose to attack in which you attack the monsters hp for however many 1's and 2's you have and the monster attacks you for it's attack.

That probably didn't make much sense but it's pretty simple so here's an example

You: atk: 3 hp: 5
Monster: atk: 2 hp: 6
You roll getting 1,5,6 you keep the 1 and roll the other two dice again getting a 4 and a 2.  Now you have 1,2,4 You choose to attack with this and do 2 damage to the monster.  The monster has an atk of 2 so it does 2 damage to you so now its.

You: atk: 3, hp: 3
Monster atk:2, hp:4
You roll getting a 2,3,4 and choose to roll the 3 and the 4 again.  You get a 5 and a 6 neither of which is a hit so the monster attacks you and gets a free hit on you.

You hp: 1
Monster: hp: 4

This continues until you defeat the monster in which case you move on to the next one or choose to go to the store.  If you die then you are forced to go to the store but only get half as much gold as if you would have retreated.

At the store you can buy items to heal you, give you more die, allow you to retreat in battle etc.

The goal is to fight your way through all 6 or so monsters in 1 go.  Some of the monsters have special powers such as a vampire which gains a life whenever you take damage.

The game can be done with dice and cards but I'm making it as a flash game first.

Progress so far:
A single battle with no items and 6 (probably the maximum number) dice.

Things to do:
items
store
more enemies
gold

Anyway I'd be interested to know what people thought

[dustin]

Potions now work and you can keep going to fight different monsters.  Here is a picture of it's current state...



Tomorrow I will get done

The initial monsters power.
Maybe buying potions from the store.

[dustin]

Ok so the first monster now "sucks blood" so he drains your health to add to his.

Also I added notifications that pop up sometimes.

Also you can go to the store now and either have potions or not have potions.

Here is the notifications




Tomorrow I will get done
new dice system with pictures instead of numbers and a slightly different scoring mechanic.
implement player death and gold.

[dustin]

Changed the dice to have pictures and work a bit differently and added gold. The way the dice now work is this...

Swords = 1 point of damage for you when you attack
Skulls = do nothing for you but can't be rerolled
blanks = you can reroll them if you want

If you ever choose to reroll your remaining dice but get no swords then you are hit by the monster.  When you choose to attack you do damage to the monster equal to your swords and the monster hits you for whatever it's attack is.

New dice look like this...



Probably won't work on it over the weekend at all so for monday the goals are to complete one maybe more of the following.

Add in 3 more items an escape rope, a weapon, and something that lets you reroll all dice even skulls

Add in more monsters.  So far the vampire is to hard to start with so we'll need something simple and easy, a weak goblin and a strong goblin thing, and a spider maybe?

[Inanimate]

Couldn't you just keep re-rolling a blank until you get a hit?

[dustin]

If you ever choose to reroll your remaining dice but get no swords then you are hit by the monster.

So say you have three dice left.  you can choose to reroll them and maybe get more swords but if you do reroll them and don't get any swords then the monster gets a free hit on you so you have to decide if it's worth it.

[Inanimate]

Oh, I see. That makes a lot more sense.

[dustin]

Decided to do the items today so I guess that leaves enemies for tomorrow.  I think I will also try to make things look a little better tomorrow as I'm getting somewhat behind in that regard and I'm not really to good at it so yeah...

Here's what it looks like with the items...


All items are single use
The potion heals you
The sword doubles your attack
The skull rerolls all your dice (including skulls and swords)
The rope allows you to escape to the store at any time (so if you think your going to lose you can use it)

[dustin]

Had some more time so I worked on the looks some.  This is easily the most challenging part for me so if anyone has any general tips or specific suggestions I would greatly appreciate it.  Basically I tried to take out gradients and make things look more uniform.

[jwk5]

Maybe try a more unified color scheme (that is easier on the eyes), for example:




You could also try toying with the shapes and arrangements and try giving it a theme rather than just a vanilla set of menu blocks. I made the following example taking inspiration from the HUD and menus of Phantasy Star Zero. Look around at different games and you'll see a lot of good ideas for how you could go about it.




I hope that helps.

EDIT: You can also take a look at ColourLovers.com for a ton of good color schemes and GameGUI.net for a bunch of different GUI/HUD (menu and display) designs from various games.

[Hempuli‽]

That is easily one of the best pieces of advice I've seen!

[jwk5]

Gameplay-wise you could try and play more on the gambling-like nature of the dice. I once had an idea for an RPG that would use a battle system with Yahtzee-like mechanics, and while I don't exactly remember the specifics any more it went something like:

Similar to video poker you'd have the initial roll, choose which dice to hold, and then re-roll to get the final hand. It creates scenarios like "Do I take advantage of this full house to heal up or should I go for a 4 or 5 of a kind and do big damage?"

[dustin]

Wow that helps a ton.  Thank you so much.  I'm excited to try to redo the gui now.  Your mock ups helped a lot thank you very much for spending the time to make them.

As for different game systems.
Yeah i've been thinking of different systems I could use.  This seemed like the simpilist to both understand/play and I think I'll get more complex later.

I was thinking of something similiar to what your talking about in that you could buy equipment which would then have dice values on it(full house, 3 of a kind, etc.) and an ability that activated when you got that dice value.

In trying to keep it simple but still variable I have been wondering about having 4 dice values.

Nothing
Skull
Atk
Magic

Then you might have a big magic attack that uses 4 magic symbols or you might try for a dodge and a small magic attack so 2 atk symbols for the dodge and 2 magic for the small attack.  Anyway that way if you were a fighter so wanted lots of attack symbols but you rolled lots of magic symbols you'd have to decide weather or not to reroll some of the magic symbols in hopes of getting atk ones.  But you might get skulls too so you don't neccesarly want to reroll.

[Carrie Nation]

Yeah like jwk5 said, you seem big into designing gameplay systems but your overall presentation is really lacking. I scroll through Dev Logs every day and I have to admit I passed this thread up every day until now as the game just looks flat and boring.

Keep working on the gameplay systems as you do seem to have some really cool ideas but spend just as much if not more time on the visual side. You gotta catch peoples' eyes to gain interest in a project!

[dustin]

Yeah I know what you mean about looking very flat.

Yeah spending time programming/designing always seems so rewarding, I can get things done and at least programming wise I know they are done well.  With the visual aspect it feels like I can spend time on something and it still doesn't look that great so it's hard for me to make myself do it but like you said I need to just spend the time and get some practice in.

For today I coded the special behaviors of 3 more enemies and I have the pictures for them somewhat ready.  Here are the three new enemies...



After that I tried to work on the design of the thing a lot more.  In my head I think of this as a card and dice game so I tried to work around that theme.  Now you can see the players card and the enemies card, the dice on the bottom, and all the choices you have on the left hand side.  I still need to change the attack and reroll buttons and I'm not really happy with the way the items look either.



For tomorrow I plan on doing
adding player death
more design work
working on the flow of the game
multiples of each item

[jwk5]

Two major things I recommend changing. The first is use one background (or at least one perspective across the two). See how you've got the lines zooming into the distance on each of the backgrounds of the characters? What is happening is that each is trying to pull your attention out into a different direction at the same time, making it very disorienting.

The second is that your characters are facing the player, not each other, so it doesn't look like they are trying to fight each other (and instead they are just staring down the player lol). Have them look (and preferably face) each other so that you can see where their aggression is really meant to be directed.

I did a super-quick mock-up to show what I mean (and I used Pokemon-style positioning to complement the background perspective and help the player identify with his avatar).


Anyways, I hope that helps. Keep up the good work.

[Guard]

Wow that is VERY nice. I really like where this is going. Good job on the new GUI.

[dustin]

Wow that is VERY nice. I really like where this is going. Good job on the new GUI.

Thanks, although I assume your talking about jwk5's stuff regarding the gui.

@jwk5:

OK that makes sense.  The main reason for that is I was having difficulty drawing the charector from an angle like that.  I tried redoing him/the gui though and here's how it looks now.




Thank you very much for the help on the gui.  I can see the improvements taking shape .

[jwk5]

You can break up some of the "flatness" of it all by making the buttons 'warmer' in hue and removing altering their black borders to a darker shade of the main button color (black tends to "sink", by removing it from the borders we cause them to "advance" and appear over the top of the background).

You can make it feel more "game-like" by making the text (health, damage, etc.) actually part of the HUD composition and using display means more dynamic that flat black text just floating there all unorganized.

We tend to identify distance through comparison. The larger you make the player character in relation to the enemy character and the lower you place it on the screen the closer it will appear to the viewer. I enlarged the player character here and you can see that it causes an almost "over the shoulder" kind of perspective.



Designing GUIs and HUDs is one of the hardest parts of a game's graphical design. I have a lot of respect for those people who do the skins for WinAmp and other such apps, it is really a precise art. Anyways, you're making great progress with it, so keep at it.

[Guard]

Yep! Now that YOU did the GUI.. it looks AWESOME. I'm going to keep a tab on this game! Keep up the good work!

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