Everything about this looks amazing. Seriously, SERIOUSLY loving it.
following, how have I not seen this thread.
nice! love the wagon gif
hi hello welcome thank you
ya this wagon gif looks sweet. (i liked it a little more with the black tree in the front, gave it more depth)
I liked it too, but since all the layers are only screen width, it created sort of a strobe effect (not really strobe effect) as it passed every second that was an eyesore, not to mention it made it more apparent than it is already that you are seeing the same scenery over and over again. Maybe at a later point we'll add more dynamic foreground, midground, background elements, but right now it's not a priority.
Is there a name for those critters pulling the wagon?
lemme give you a hint as to how we refer to our creatures: bat, goblin, spider bomber, lurker, goblin general, baby dragon, worm. this one we're calling
pigs.
This looks great! Love the idea, but it does sound tricky to mix metroidvania with procedural maps.
I don't know how much metroidvanian it actually is. Is that in the OP? I should really update that, initially that was the idea to have abilities that acted like keys in order to progress. Right now it plays more like an action-adventure rpg, off the top of my head Rouge Legacy, Catacomb Kids fall in the same vein of what we are trying to do, so a platformer with elements of rougelike - in that you start customizing your character, make your way through levels, see how far you get, prepare yourself for death, die, repeat. Obviously these game differ on how they progress, mechanics, story, world.
so right metroidvanians, progression revolves around keys and gating, whether actual keys or abilities - with a linear or semi-linear progression leading up to an end. That's hard to do with a procedurally generated game, but isn't entirely out of our reach - it helps that our proc gen is setup like spelunky's - where rooms are designed before hand and stitched together - so if we wanted we can always feature a specific room on a specific floor/area - we could do multi-roomed puzzles as well with this setup without too much trouble - introduce keys and gates to progress.
The central thing we have to design for is subsequent playthroughs since permadeath is a thing and dying a lot is a thing. So the challenge is making each of them unique enough for the player to want to play again. And there are many ways to skin a cat, but the experience should be focused and refined, so you want to avoid bloating it with features which end up feeling like gimmicks. So far we've been fairly conservative, but in order to not get too far head of ourselves and find ourselves wasting loads of time and resources making a game we didn't set out to make, so far we've put our energy into setting up the ground work so it
feels great to play, the core of the players experience. And we have that the game is fun and enjoyable to play but that's not enough.
That said, we're at the point where we are starting to introduce elements that are specific to the world and story we are creating. There is going to be a story, there is an end. Which brings up some design issues, first of which is making it worth playing to the end, so a good story and a good world environment to explore. But we also want it to be replayed over and over again, so if the player beats the game they know how it ends so why bother playing again? One way to achieve that is revealing the story/world only partially, so they get more out of it on other playthroughs. So having a pool of world/story related objects/(puzzles?mechanics?) and events we can randomly pick from and insert into levels but still within a linear timeline.
Disregarding story but still on the topic of addressing replayability, we started building the game to be very skill based, the player wants to play again because they feel they are or are getting better as they play. Inline with that he player should make conscious decisions about how they'll progress, risk vs reward situations.
Emergent gameplay/narrative is also very important to this kind of game, things that happen on a run should have weight, there should be some sort of a response, consequence, whether that's player actions or enemy actions, and those responses should make the player play differently or hint at saying something. One thing that we're doing is taking that into consideration when choosing what skills our affinities grant, specifically how they cross-play with each other, they're simple behaviors usually but in combination you can get some interesting results. A simple example: a melee attack has a charge time, and a period of time where it's attack is effective - combined with the dash skill which is intended for dodging and getting out of sticky situations - you can perform a dash attack, which hits multiple enemies and is extremely effective in this game. Add to that elemental enchantments, or aoe skills. Some of these combinations might be hardcoded, but in the instance of the dash attack that was just from playing around.
Our enemies are also built on simple rules, taking cues from spelunky but haven't yet implemented any kind of behavior to allow for them to play with each other, except for the shopkeeper which can be an effective but dangerous ally
---eh
so yea started out responding to your post, and then went somewhere else. So did I describe a metroidvanian, I dunno I need to check my definitions.
Other Things
- dealing with death
I'm working on a new gui system
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