worked on the ui mostly today, but spent a bunch of time just tuning gameplay and fixing long standing bugs as well. In addition to the in game ui, was also working on game over screens and that type of thing.

also am just spending time trying to beat the game on a regular basis, and then tweaking it harder. So, removed the priests ability to heal himself, removed the ninjas ability to hurt the things that it is zipping through.

I am pretty sure that I am going to need to do another pass on the animation system, right now it is setup such that animations are non-blocking in the game, but I want to encourage people to look at the results of their actions, so I might make the animations block input again.

more work to get this ready to send to testers again. Also was messing about with custom ways to play the game. So: no health pickups, doubling the number of chests on the levels, no gold run. Oh man, am I excited about the fact that these types of runs are even possible! it is like I am making a real roguelike or something.

So anywho... if you want to play a build of this, drop me a note, I will add you to the list of people. Am aiming to have a build later on this week hopefully? who knows though, the future is exploding with possibilities, so I might just keep it to myself.

made an absolutely huge change to it today:
- added chests that give you one point when you hit them, but spawn one monster

SO SO MUCH BETTER. So I actually spent probably an hour playing the game, both trying to beat it, and also doing score runs. I think it is almost to the point where it can support deep play. It is interesting how having these breakthroughs tends to open up interesting other avenues of problems, like now I am seeing a bunch of decisions in the game that are boring that I need to tighten up.

i.e. I took out the miners secondary action which was turning walls into gold. now he just turns wall into empty spaces. And it also needs to have some decision in place about what character you choose to take with you into the dungeon, because right now you just pick up every character you come across for the 2 extra hp. Also that opens the question of certain builds being better than other builds. And now I am wondering if I can do something with streak scoring.

Anyways, a whole world of delightful options has opened in front of me, and I am excited to share the game with people again.

Still trying to find ways to push towards an incremental release, had a good discussion about painful bits of the experience. So have decided to change the level structure into something more linear, rather than the 4 possible good endings of increasing goodness, we are just going to have one good ending, and a bunch of bad endings.

also:
- added a ninja character
- did mockup to fix the ui

new lineup.

- did a pass through all of the player colors and unified them a bunch
- got the replays working a bit better so that I can find bugs more consistently

most of what I have been doing is cleaning up little bits to get it closer to actually showing testers again. Basically getting the overworld tighter, and the ending screen tighter.

project still alive and kicking

- added tech and desert worlds
- added swapper enemy
- added cobra, scorpion, and normal snake
- added poisoned state (to support above)
- fixed innumerable bugs
- added builder character (can make new [breakable] walls)
- tech world has pads that disable disableable characters
- new graphics for a ton of stuff
- added a store (converts gold to hearts)

I know I should do a testing release, but I think it will need to be a ton closer to functionality :0. I have been showing it to people in person, and there are still a ton of things that need to be done. Hopefully will get close to a release mode soon tho.

so, the overworld is going to be effectively a really nicely dressed up menu system. All the unlocks are going to go into it, as well as the highscore table and the options menus and stuff. It will also be a place to stick silly jokls and maybe some world stories and stuff. Hopefully it won't let people down too much :D

thanks, sean is doing a killer job on the art.

it feels like so much, but I think I have just been messing about / showing other games / working on other games.

- added an overworld allows direct access to the dungeons (also will have a little tutorial section, a tavern, the highscore list, and a monster zoo)
- made some tweaks to make the ice world harder
- added the ice mage, yeti and a 3 hit guard

(god that imgur jpg compression is ROUGH)

started adding a new world!

Here is how it currently works.

in world one, you have a chance to see the stairs to world to on levels 5-7... if you ignore them, you can continue to the end of the dungeon, and collect your prize. If you go down the stairs then you start in the new world, level 1. Rinse and repeat for 6 worlds or so (for 30 total levels) where the last world probably just has 5 levels total.

the new world is an ice world, and contains the following (so far)
- ice distance shooters that freeze you for 3 steps
- snails that freeze the floor
- frozen floor that you just slide across, until you hit a wall / enemy / other character
- roaming enemy that freezes you, then ignores you until you unfreeze
- chasing enemies that move double steps

planned new stuff for this world:
- ice mage (mage character that can freeze enemies)
- ice walls, you can break them down to move through them
- yeti, can knock you back
- mammoth, has 3 (rather than 2) hit points.

other planned worlds include (in classic no imagination video game developer amazingness): tech, lava, garden

cool to see you are working on this again.

another graphics pass! darkened everything up.

Also:
- got rid of all the 4 way traps, replaced with one way traps that rotate every turn
- new trap hint graphic
- added a new level with pressure plates that blocks the exit until you hit both of them
- new two step chaser (ai that goes towards you but takes two steps)

very nice ! so... guessing you are using a set of fbos with feedback effects and texture lookup distortions? any other tricks I am missing out on here? Would be happy to read a tutorial.

Really like the vignetting and trails that you have as well, really contributes to the sense of speed.

yep, going to reflect what other people say. This is fucking beautiful, I am really into that subtle rotation stuff that you have going on in the big mech animation. Makes me want to figure out how to do that with 3d modeling, get similar effects.

wait a second, looking at the asset store thing you are using, it seems like it is using a texture to build the light, and then chopping out stuff for shadows. You could totally just swap in the correct resolution texture, and set it to point scale, and it would fix all your resolution issues! doooo it!!!

hey man! this is looking pretty great! I like the direction this is going. Looking forward to seeing out the game bit of it comes together of course :D

I agree with what other people are saying about the lights, they are adding a bunch of atmosphere, but I don't think they are working quite yet. I think there are a few issues in place, and maybe a few quick fixes.

- there are multiple light sources. Like the light on the barrel is coming from the right, but it is clear the light in the scene is behind it. I don't think there is a quick fix for this without redrawing your assets to match the light, or drawing your assets with hand done normal maps.
- the color temperature of the light might be off? see this chart for temps. You probably want high pressure sodium, but that will wash out everything else. Will get a hella dope inner city tower block feeling though.
- the resolution of the lights doesn't match the resolution of everything else. I don't know a good way to fix this unless you are running unity pro... I have some bad ideas of how to fix it tho, like pre building all your lightmaps into dynamic textures. Or hand painting them. :D Terrible terrible ideas.
- the ambient lighting (the pixels that don't have light hitting them) are a strange color. If it is late at night, they would be darker (or full black). I think the temp you have there is suggesting that it is just at dawn (kinda blueish, but light...) if that is true, you could push it harder by using the lighting chart above.


all the above should probably be ignored though, just make the game, and figure out the graphics later. It sure is fun to bullshit about graphics tho, isn't it :D

[the cooperative]

new art! huzzah!

the cooperative


a map


this isn't final, needs another color pass, but I am way happier with this than the stuff we had before.
also added the following features:
acid/lava hurts enemies
enemies standing in the path of distance enemies block shots

I am sorta coming around to the vision that I need to get rid of all of the current enemies. I sort kinda hate all the early levels now :/ so... that is a fucking pain in the ass. for all of you, that probably means another dev build to play at some point tho :D hot dang!

alright! back to work for real. I don't think that I am going to do another web release until the full version is done, at which point I am going to start charging for it. So everyone will have to use their imagination for these new features (or just tell me to post it, whatever):

- added barbarian character, knocks back enemies next to it
- added astral walker character, can walk through walls on a cool down (currently 5)

mostly just hung out and caught up at the office today, everyone has been away, so it was kinda necessary to reset. Might try to get some more done at home tonight.

still pretty sick, but I managed to talk over the art with my artist and got him moving forward (i think).

also added a new enemy type, moves in the direction you move, attacks when you end next to it.

Thinking about adding a single inventory slot, I am pretty sure it will help with scaling the game, adding more levels and such. Also might start me down the path of overworking everything, but I am not sure. Certainly feels like something I want to do.

soooo. I was digging through my old dev logs, and I realized that I actually finished this game for a 7drl. Probably best to put this thread to bed with a little text at the end explaining it.

downloads for win/mac/linux

When I started working on 7drl, I had a totally different idea in mind. It was an interesting one (a heist game with a non linear storyline), but I couldn't wrap my mind around the complexities of actually making it work. So two days into 7drl, I remembered that I had this project kicking around and that I wanted to do something with it.

I built out a bunch of enemies, and tightened up the level gen so that it made far smaller levels. I ended up hacking the generator a ton to support different wall tile shapes, but I am not sure if it was enough.

The smart thing that I did was to put a progression in, and have it end at a certain point. Without that, this game / devlog would have flounderer forever and never been finished.

I think I would like to come back to this at some point and revisit the level gen, allow it to build more interesting levels. I don't know how to do that right now though, it probably requires way more research.

The title comes from the throwable fog flasks, which are probably the most interesting part of the game.