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matwek
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« on: December 02, 2013, 06:07:38 AM »

KARA

The game is a 2D action roguelike-like platformer with some puzzle elements. Both me (the artist(except for the main character sprites)) and adn (the programmer) have different inspirations which I think leads to a very unique feel for the game. adn is inspired by roguelike-like games such as Spelunky and The Binding of Isaac where as I am much more interested in the platforming side of things with games such as Mega Man and Alex Kidd in Miracle World.



Story
The game's story is pretty simple in its execution. There is a mining company that is employed to dig up valuable artifacts. One day they dig into an ancient booby-trap filled temple and find an artifact that causes all the robots to malfunction. The player takes on the role of a one man clean-up/demolition crew and is sent in to destroy the malfunctioning robots and retrieve any artifacts he might find on the way.
Whilst the basic story is simple we intend to add a more in-depth backstory and theming for the player to explore if they're interested in finding out more.


Gameplay
At its heart the game is a platformer, so expect plenty of jumping, trap avoiding and robot smashing. The game is also built around the idea of collecting hundreds of upgrades and abilities, though.
For an example of how that works: you start the game with the ability to throw your hammer.



But then you might get upgrades that allow the hammer to be thrown through various objects to cause more damage. You also might gain an ability that turns the hammer into a homing projectile so you don’t have to pick it back up after each throw.



The idea is to have lots of upgrades/abilities that can be composed together in various ways, creating a new experience each run.

We’re also working on the idea of adding artifacts as trinkets (using Isaac terminology). These items will be quite rare but fairly valuable. Each one will provide the player with a large upgrade but will also come with a negative curse for using it. The curse will be unknown to the player until they do research on the artifact through exploration (like pills in Isaac, although sometimes with harsher negative effects).

Here are some more gifs showing most gameplay elements we have implement so far:
Basic ranged attack
Basic melee attack
Attacking an enemy
Hitting seeker missile
Blocking boulder
Boulder hit!
Seeker missile hit!
Boulder hitting enemies
Breaking things
Dying
Thor's Magic Hammer!
Jumping!
Magic Hammer again
Ranged attack kill
TNT exploding 1
TNT exploding 2
TNT exploding 3
TNT exploding 4
@o@


Progress
At the moment we’re in the process of testing out all the abilities, traps and various robot types to get a nice feel for gameplay balance. After that we’re hoping to put together a small demo of sorts where the player can explore a manually designed room populated with enemies and puzzles.

The end goal is to have randomly generated rooms with randomly placed traps and enemies and, with each playthough, providing the player with a different selection of abilities and upgrades to find. The randomly generated dungeon will work as a mix of Spelunky and Rogue Legacy: each room will be generated as Spelunky does it, but the overall dungeon will be generated like Rogue Legacy/Isaac does it (with different rooms, possibly of different sizes).

@KARAgame | matwekpixel | @adnzzzzZ | Rick Mallory

« Last Edit: September 04, 2014, 11:43:59 AM by matwek » Logged
DanDecarlo
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« Reply #1 on: December 02, 2013, 07:12:02 AM »

Everything looks fine, the only things that feel out of place - the bright orange blocks might be made a little darker, and the robots remind me of penguins for some reason. Good luck.  Grin
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Prads
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« Reply #2 on: December 02, 2013, 08:26:06 AM »

the robots remind me of penguins for some reason.

Haha yeah I agree with that too. Those robots do look like penguins.
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matwek
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« Reply #3 on: December 02, 2013, 08:53:05 AM »

the robots remind me of penguins for some reason.

Haha yeah I agree with that too. Those robots do look like penguins.
I'm going to take that as a positive reaction
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adnzzzzZ
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« Reply #4 on: December 02, 2013, 10:26:34 AM »

Hi everyone. I'm the programmer on this project and I'll be posting some interesting stuff here sometimes maybe. Here's what I currently have implemented for how part of the procedural generation in the game will work (also posted here):

Generate a grid:



Color the grid with x red rooms (hard), y blue rooms (medium) and z green rooms (easy) such that x+y+z = n rooms in the grid (x, y, z can be changed to control difficulty):

  • First color it with x red rooms such that no red room (or most red rooms) has another same colored neighbor (this can be changed if dungeon difficulty should be higher);
  • Then for each red room color one neighbor blue and one neighbor green;
  • Color the rest of the rooms with the remaining number of rooms for each color.



Choose two nodes that are far apart enough and then find a path between them while mostly avoiding red rooms. If you choose a proper x, since red rooms can’t be neighbors to themselves and the pathfinding algorithm doesn’t go for diagonals, it should create a not so direct path from one node to the other.



For all nodes in the path, add their red[, green, blue] neighbors. This should add the possibility of side paths and overall complexity/difficulty in the dungeon.



Join smaller grids into bigger ones according to predefined room sizes. Higher chance of smaller width/height and lower chance of bigger width/height. In games like Isaac this doesn’t exist, since all rooms are of the same size, but why constrain myself like that?



Generate all possible connections between rooms.



Randomly remove connections until a certain number of connections per room is met. If n = total rooms, then set n*x rooms with >=4 connections, n*y with 3, n*z with 2 and n*w with 1, such that x+y+z+w=1. Controlling x, y, z and w lets you control how mazy the dungeon gets. If z or w are considerably higher than x or y then there won’t be many “hub” rooms that connect different paths, so it’s gonna have lots of different thin paths with dead ends. If x or y are higher then the dungeon will be super connected and therefore easier.



Reconnect isolated “islands”. Since step 7 is completely random, there’s a big chance that rooms or groups of rooms will become unreachable.



To fix that:
  • Flood fill to figure out how many isolated groups exist;
  • Pick a group at random and go through its rooms. For each room check if it neighbors a room belonging to another group, if it does then connect them and end the search;
  • Repeat the previous steps until there’s only one group left (everyone’s connected).



And that’s it, I guess. There’s more stuff like adding special rooms, but that’s specific to each game, so whatever. But basically I have a few parameters I can control when creating a new dungeon: dungeon width/height; percentage of hard, medium and easy rooms; what color neighbors get added to the original path and the percentage of rooms with >=4, 3, 2 or 1 connections. I think that’s enough to have control of how easy/hard the dungeon will be…

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Alec S.
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« Reply #5 on: December 02, 2013, 11:03:26 AM »

I really like the look of this.  Following.
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ephoete
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« Reply #6 on: December 02, 2013, 12:35:33 PM »

Holy cow I don't know but it's like Rogue is meeting Worms... The game design looks insanely aggressive and speedy I love it. Nice chara-design as well... especially the robot (which has two fans now if I understood well).
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noumenus
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« Reply #7 on: December 02, 2013, 01:22:29 PM »

Seen this on the reddit, looks superfun
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« Reply #8 on: December 02, 2013, 01:36:11 PM »

Nice pixels. :3
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Kyle O
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« Reply #9 on: December 03, 2013, 05:51:53 AM »

This is already looking really excellent. Love the hammer...

How does that saying go...?

When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
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« Reply #10 on: December 03, 2013, 08:28:13 AM »

I love how you handle the map generation procedure.

Following  Smiley
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antoniodamala
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« Reply #11 on: December 03, 2013, 09:01:21 AM »

The gameplay looks tight already, you just have to go easy on the orangeish scenario to make it even better.

Following.
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adnzzzzZ
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« Reply #12 on: December 03, 2013, 09:12:13 PM »

Trying out a "meteor shower" kind of skill. Not too sure about it yet...

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William Chyr
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« Reply #13 on: December 03, 2013, 09:37:33 PM »

The meteor shower looks pretty neat. I'm assuming it has to actually hit an enemy to damage it, correct? Do the slightly faded meteors also cause damage?
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adnzzzzZ
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« Reply #14 on: December 03, 2013, 09:56:24 PM »

No, they're just so it doesn't look as boring. lol

And yea, the leading rock has to hit the enemies to do damage. Maybe if we ever get around to making some fiery rocks (like actual meteors) they could have a small AoE for damage when they hit the ground/an enemy.
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Sir Wolf
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« Reply #15 on: December 05, 2013, 06:24:50 AM »

Hi everyone. I'm the programmer on this project and I'll be posting some interesting stuff here sometimes maybe.

--

Maybe your next post can be about how you generate a room with a set difficulty (ie. how you generate a difficult/medium/easy room).
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« Reply #16 on: December 05, 2013, 07:21:28 AM »

Hi everyone. I'm the programmer on this project and I'll be posting some interesting stuff here sometimes maybe.

MORE LIKE THIS.

Following.
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adnzzzzZ
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« Reply #17 on: December 05, 2013, 10:39:17 AM »

Hi everyone. I'm the programmer on this project and I'll be posting some interesting stuff here sometimes maybe.

--

Maybe your next post can be about how you generate a room with a set difficulty (ie. how you generate a difficult/medium/easy room).

We still don't have lots of enemies, traps and other gameplay elements defined, so specifically saying what a hard/medium/easy room is is not possible yet. But ignoring the difficulty of a room, the way it will be generated will be similar to how Spelunky generates its maps. http://tinysubversions.com/2009/09/spelunkys-procedural-space/

Basically each room will be subdivided into a grid of n slots (n is variable because room size is variable) and each slot will correspond to a predefined room layout chosen randomly. Each room layout may have some embedded randomness, and the way it connects to other room layouts may also add some randomness, but they're mostly predefined/designed. I still don't know how well this will work because I've never implemented something like it, but it kinda makes sense in my head, so... yea.
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adnzzzzZ
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« Reply #18 on: December 06, 2013, 04:18:29 AM »

Changed the way the meteor shower skill looks a bit.



Before spawning each rock, I spawn a bunch of smaller dust particles that use the arrival behavior on the position of the soon to be spawned rock. After that I fade the dust particles away and fade the main rock in. The main rock also has a small trail after it which fades out and scales down rapidly after it is spawned.
« Last Edit: December 06, 2013, 04:24:04 AM by adnzzzzZ » Logged

OniWorld
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« Reply #19 on: December 06, 2013, 09:33:36 AM »

Changed the way the meteor shower skill looks a bit.



Before spawning each rock, I spawn a bunch of smaller dust particles that use the arrival behavior on the position of the soon to be spawned rock. After that I fade the dust particles away and fade the main rock in. The main rock also has a small trail after it which fades out and scales down rapidly after it is spawned.

I love it - looks much better than before. Maybe have the camera shake a bit less when he's charging and more so when it crashes to the ground?
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