Pure sweetness!!! This art is amazing I love it! Animations are really smooth and interesting too!

Looks amazing, keep it up!

[Something Happened]

What EasterlyArt says makes sense to me. Also, as they said, everyone has their particular approach.

I'm currently working on an adventure game too. Initially the game started just as an idea of "could be cool if you were in this situation with this and that special things" then when it was finally decided to make a game about it, the team started to develop the story of the main character.

As we were developing the main character's story, we found the need for a background, for a place to put things to make them have sense, so we had to come up with places, cultures and lore.

We paid special attention to the background of things, even if the player wasn't going to know about this. Having a well crafted background is great to help you build the world you are putting the player in. Of course you are not making Lord of the Rings (the book), but either way it's nice to have a series of events behind a particular setup, like lets say for example there is a building that was destroyed by a giant boulder. The player may ask "How did that boulder end up there?" or "What happened here?", and you can choose to answer that if you want, but the important aspect here is that Something Happened and this will make the place feel alive, have a story, be more interesting.

Anyways these are just some thoughts out of the top of my head. Depending on the complexity of your game it may be harder or easier to create a new world for this adventure, but either way It's important to develop some of the lore as soon as possible to help you create more of the world.

[The question]

I like the notion of decaying the world for a period of several years depending on the character's level, and then having the new character be created in that world ("Ever since the death of the great hero <old player name>, the ogres have been raiding our villages and enslaving us").

This is a really interesting idea, I like it. But sadly it would take a lot more effort to make and is probably not worth it because you would have to duplicate the amount of assets in the game. Interesting idea nonetheless.

The question
How should I add meaningful death in a permadeath game so that the player is still motivated to continue?

I think you could look into Realm of the Mad God. It has permadeath and I've played it a couple of times, it's a lot of fun. You may want to play it a bit (if you haven't already) and see what they do to keep the player engaged even tho they lost everything when dying.

That's a pretty sweet and complete UI you have there. Looks really nice!

Great going on the constant updates 

Omg the game looks hilarious I LUV ET!!!

My team is currently working exactly on an atmospheric or lets say artistic game. It is indeed really complex as there is the necessity to convey feelings through the environment and situations. I'd say what actually defines a game as atmospheric or artistic is its capacity to produce feelings in the player, but in order to do this the player HAS to be in the called flow state, where they are not aware of their physical environment and are completely inside the game, and this is a really design-heavy task.

So, I think that a really good flow-focused game design acts as a bridge between the player and the game to get them feelz. But of course, the artistic media through which you wish to transmit feelings to the player has to be good enough too.

Definitely add it as early as possible.

Of course take into account the complexity of said mechanic. If it can be split into different "mechanic components", like for example you have to jump in order to do this other action that will activate this mechanic, then I think it would be better to introduce it by parts, so the players that may not be used to perform all the actions needed, can learn without getting frustrated.

If we go for example with mario 64's A + Z butt smash or however you want to call it combo, it is a mechanic that involves a set of steps in order to be activated. So, if you were to introduce this mechanic, you would first need to make a level that forces the player to jump around in order to get comfortable with that (assuming this is the beginning of the game), and after that's done, you can add the necessity to hit another button mid-air to perform an extra action that is effectively the new mechanic you wanted to introduce.

I think that besides the obvious shift in the colors between day and night, if you want to get this solitude feeling like in Twilight Princess, I think you'd need to focus a lot on the environment's sound effects.

The day is a lot louder than night. I think that one of the sounds that define solitude to me is the wind blowing and leaves being moved by it. Not like this sound doesn't happen during the day, but that since there's less noise during night, you are able to hear this better and will probably be the louder sound during nighttime.

I'm currently working on a game that is specifically focused on solitude on a natural environment. Since the game revolves around wind, we will be focusing a lot on the SFX produced by it in order to convey solitude.

Usually the most effective way to teach the player through game design (in my opinion) is: Each time you add complexity to the gameplay by either introducing new mechanics or new challenges to the player (like a new enemy for example), put them in a situation where they are absolutely forced to interact with the thing you added, therefore letting them know what does it do. In EVERY Zelda game, when you get a new item, the very first thing you need to do in order to keep moving forward is use this new item in some way to get out of that room.

Since you saw that Sequelitis video (which I can't stress enough how awesome it is and how many times have I seen it) you have seen the intention the designers had on the first level of Megaman X to teach the player without them even realizing that. The more the player feels he is learning by himself he will feel more accomplished and will enjoy the game even more because of this.

It may seem a little hard to think of a way to force the player to do something without restraining him, but it pretty much just comes down to creating a situation where it's impossible for the player to advance unless they use they newly added ability or w/e it is you addded.

Well I can think of a few ways you can approach this.

• Use your right mouse button to place/destroy blocks.
• If item switching is supported, make an item that lets the player place blocks with the left mouse button and destroy them with the right button.

Since I dont have much context about how the game is supossed to be played those are the viable options to me. Remember to use whatever feels better to you too.

Interesting read. From what you wrote am I correct in assuming you DONT mirror the levels? It's an admirable goal but I think without mirroring you'll always have someone complain about map bias.

Yes, the levels are not mirrored.

And yeah I totally agree, I think that actually it's nearly impossible to make a non-mirrored map be perfectly balanced for both teams, there will be always subtle differences that will prove more useful to one team in very specific situations, even if it's a handcrafted map like Dota's. There are just too many variables involved in calculating the strategic implications of a specific path in the map. But then again, I think that's part of the beauty of the asymmetry, at least for me it makes the game more interesting.

[Map Generation]

I Recently delivered my thesis project entitled Procedural Content Generation on a MOBA genre videogame and now it's time to share it with the world!

As the title says, the project involved the creation of a MOBA prototype game that uses Procedural Content Generation (PCG). The 2 major features are a map generated procedurally before starting the game, and a system that modifies the characters attributes according to the player's play style.

NOTE: You need to have a basic knowledge about how a MOBA works (games like Dota 2 and League of Legends) in order to fully understand this work.

For the sake of keeping this post short, I will give a brief explanation on how is the map generated and how the Character Adaptation System works. If you are interested in a more detailed version please visit my blog post.

Map Generation

For the map generation I started defining a set of design rules that would be used for the algorithm that would generate the map. The focus of the map generator lies on generating a map that is balanced for both teams, which guarantees that there won't be unfair advantages regarding the topology.

These rules are mostly related to how the jungle's paths are made and how they allow the players to traverse the map (this is because jungles cover a big % of the map and I wanted to avoid overscoping the project by also bringing into the equation the lanes). The generator looks for a map containing jungles that at least contain these paths:

• Side lane outer turret -> approx 1/3 of the river
• approx 1/3 of the river -> center of the mid lane
• center of the mid lane -> side lane outer turret

Having defined these rules, I implemented a genetic algorithm using the Multi-Objective Evolutive Algorithm approach, which basically consists of using multiple fitness functions to evaluate each candidate. I used a fitness function to evaluate if the paths described before are present in each of the 4 jungles on the map, and another fitness function that determined if the difference of the amount of camps on each side of the map exceeded certain threshold.

The candidate maps are created from scratch, creating all the components of the map so that it's similar to Dota 2's. Since the jungles are the places where the real changes are made on the map, they are generated using a fractal function (using the Accidental Noise Library) to make them as random as possible and then the roads they contain are evaluated using BFS functions.

You can read more about this in Part 2

Character Adaptation System

In a traditional MOBA, characters follow the common RPG character paradigm, which consists of having a character composed by a set of attributes, abilities and a level that defines how strong the character is. The Character Adaptation System changes this paradigm by eliminating the level and making the progression of a character continuous.

The progression of a character is no longer limited to gaining enough experience to reach that level-up threshold. Instead, every action performed by a player during combat affects directly their character's attributes, increasing the character's capacities constantly.

Example: If a player likes to play defensively, it's expected that they will act in this way during combat. They will probably be using a shield a lot or even blocking damage for their allies. The system will interpret these actions and then after leaving combat will give the player attribute bonuses that will let them be more effective playing defensively as the game progresses.

The way this is done is by queuing the actions performed by the player during combat, and then after leaving combat this queue is analyzed to determine the intentions the player had, how effective they were and finally what bonuses should be applied to encourage this kind of play style.

You can read more about this system in Part 3.


If you have any questions regarding anything I said or didn't say please ask away! I'm doing my best to condensate a lot of information and I know it may be confusing because of this .

Anyways, thanks a lot for reading!  

Hi guys! I've been reading this forum for a while and decided today that I should formally join! yay!.

I'm 21 and live in Venezuela.

I've been interested in games since I was little like most of you. I grew up playing and I was always interested in how people made games, it amazed me and still does. Not much time ago (lets say like 2 or 3 years) I started to learn for myself how to make games and stuff.

I attended to the Global Game Jam 2011 and 2012 and they were among the best experiences I've had in my life!! I love the indie community and definetly love making games!!!

I also have a personal dev blog if any of you is interested, I write about my developing experiences, what games were made during the Jam and things like that, check it out if you have some free time zilok-dev.blogspot.com