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[mirrorfish]

This looks AWESOME! Really looking forward to checking this out. Reminds me of Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain and Nuclear Throne, all faves. Definitely eager to see more stuff in this vein. The paci :panda:ng and fluidity look great.

I hear you about struggling with difficulty progression, one of the things I am considering adding in my own 3D action rogue like Pollen is that as you pick up positive buffs it either gives you a negative buff or applies a positive buff to some enemies.  Ideally the player will have some choice to make about which to take.  This way it avoids the player snowballing with power and becoming invulnerable while still giving that feeling of power and progression.

Risk of Rain took an interesting approach in toggling enemy increase in difficulty to time elapsed. This gives the player an interesting choice to try to speed ahead and keep ahead of difficulty curve or try to go slower and farm and grind items to over power.  Anyway, just some thoughts. The whole style and feel look to be really well in place.

M.

[kebabskal]

This looks AWESOME! Really looking forward to checking this out. Reminds me of Binding of Isaac, Risk of Rain and Nuclear Throne, all faves. Definitely eager to see more stuff in this vein. The paci :panda:ng and fluidity look great.

I hear you about struggling with difficulty progression, one of the things I am considering adding in my own 3D action rogue like Pollen is that as you pick up positive buffs it either gives you a negative buff or applies a positive buff to some enemies.  Ideally the player will have some choice to make about which to take.  This way it avoids the player snowballing with power and becoming invulnerable while still giving that feeling of power and progression.

Risk of Rain took an interesting approach in toggling enemy increase in difficulty to time elapsed. This gives the player an interesting choice to try to speed ahead and keep ahead of difficulty curve or try to go slower and farm and grind items to over power.  Anyway, just some thoughts. The whole style and feel look to be really well in place.

Thanks so much!
Those are indeed the main inspirations.
Not really expecting for this to turn out THAT good, but got something to aim for at least

Actually, the struggle I have is just the lack of enemy types. Only four types at the moment.
Need to make more and harder ones that appear on deeper floors.

But all those things you mentioned are great when I get to that point.
Maybe I set a timer per floor, and start spawning random enemies when it runs out.
Negative effects are interesting too. Make the player stronger but give specific Achilles heels. I like it!

Something I am trying to achieve is an undulating sense of overpowerment. Maybe over a four floor cycle:
1. Underpowered - Have to be careful
2. Equal - I feel well matched to the enemies
3. Overpowered - I am destroying everything.
4. Enemies are catching up
* repeat

[mirrorfish]

Cool! And I'd say don't sell yourself short with regard to those other games, they're all small team projects and there's no reason you can't compete, especially with the strong visuals you have already.

I agree that getting the difficulty curve right is a huge deal, especially with procedural content.

For my game I am basically planning to take heavy influence from the RoR system.  Here's what I'm planning, influenced by their system, there's an AI 'Dungeon Master' who tracks time and has a set amount of difficulty points for how many enemies can be in a level. Every time interval he checks to see if the enemies alive add up to that difficulty point variable, then if not he spawns enemies to bring back up towards the difficulty level. 

Each enemy has a difficulty level assigned to them and as the overall difficulty level increases the point cap goes up and higher point value enemies are then available to spawn. In RoR they do it with 'elemental' enemy types so baseclass enemy + fire trail and more HP etc. It's a pretty awesome design and gives that game an awesome and really challenging but understandable difficulty curve. I took a first pass at coding the system in C# and can share if you are interested.

Keep at it!
M.

[Buzzwerd]

This is looking awesome. Love that the corpses stick around. Sub.

[DarthBenedict]

 

Wizards are best.

[Hypnotron]

Can I pick different avatar for my wizard? 

[kebabskal]

Each enemy has a difficulty level assigned to them and as the overall difficulty level increases the point cap goes up and higher point value enemies are then available to spawn. In RoR they do it with 'elemental' enemy types so baseclass enemy + fire trail and more HP etc. It's a pretty awesome design and gives that game an awesome and really challenging but understandable difficulty curve. I took a first pass at coding the system in C# and can share if you are interested.

My current ideas for difficulty are somewhat similar:
I'll have a different set of possible rooms for every 3 floors which changes which enemy types can spawn.
Not all possible enemies in a room spawn. This is a random weighted by Floor%3 or something.
Enemies can be cursed (or blessed, depending on how you think about it) with things like fire trail or larger size with more hp, hyperspeed etc.
All floors should end with a random boss room that has to be defeated before you can go down to the next.

The code is simple. Tuning is hard.
And most importantly: I have to Make More Stuff ™

This is looking awesome. Love that the corpses stick around. Sub.

Thanks! I want it to feel like you are creating a mess, wreaking havoc all over the place

Wizards are best.

Especially the small ones! 

Can I pick different avatar for my wizard? 

Not yet. I'm thinking about how I would handle that. Too early to say

I think I'll probably at least try to do the Risk of Rain style classes with set abilities. See how that feels.
Fire mage, Necromancer, Frog whisperer...

[justafolio]

Simple enough a concept that can be a lot of fun! Love the simplistic/flashy art style!

[lionfish]

I love the color palette!  Great Job!

[kebabskal]

Wreck shit!

Gonna do a proper progress report soon, but just thought I'd get this out there in the meanwhile.
Things get kinda out of control when you get a couple of items

[Quarry]

One thing that I couldn't notice when stuff got intense was the wizard himself, I understand the purple colour scheme but make the wizard stand out!

[atmos]

The game looks like so much fun. Gotta keep an eye on your thread.

[Rat Casket]

One thing that I couldn't notice when stuff got intense was the wizard himself, I understand the purple colour scheme but make the wizard stand out!

Same here. In the most recent gif if took me a moment to find the wizard, and even then I lost him once or twice.

[kebabskal]

One thing that I couldn't notice when stuff got intense was the wizard himself, I understand the purple colour scheme but make the wizard stand out!

That's a given. It gets REALLY messy after a while. You lose track of the wizard even when you are playing.
Work in progress

[Quarry]

Same here. In the most recent gif if took me a moment to find the wizard, and even then I lost him once or twice.

Exactly, while the GIF was playing it was rather impossible to notice the wizard. Maybe it's better when playing as you might be able to instinctually position the wizard...

That's a given. It gets REALLY messy after a while. You lose track of the wizard even when you are playing.
Work in progress

Now this is a dev I like

[eobet]

I also wanted to say that the animations look really slick and lovely...

...and that it was confusing as hell to have the wizard the same colors as the projectiles and enemies.

[lionfish]

Looks better and better.  Great job!  Are you making the animations and art yourself?  What about the sound?

[kebabskal]

Looks better and better.  Great job!  Are you making the animations and art yourself?  What about the sound?

Thanks!
Everything is me at the moment.
No sound yet.
Probably gonna need to get some help with this project if I want to see it finished.
Sound might be the thing that is the simplest to  "outsource" as I don't really have a vision for it yet.

I'd love to collaborate with someone on this project.
Just not found the right match

[Lemmily]

  Loving the art style, and the tiny wizard! I see much Binding of Isaac(huge BoI fan) in that jumping spider boss + bosslings !

[kebabskal]

Ok, time for a progress report!

First some gifs:

Abilities


Enemies respawn when the top right respawn timer runs out.


Been busy with family stuff like weddings and easter but have managed to get some work done anyway.

Abilities and classes
First off, I have been trying out the WoW/RoR style abilities.
The pink wizard is the only one implemented in code, but have ideas for 3 more classes.
The abilities are not super interesting but serve as a good base for evaluating the idea.
Abilities might change, but I think the concept of abilities will stick.
It's also nice to have all the cast-time, cooldown and channeling code in place.
The left and right mouse button items are untouched so far, but I am thinking maybe lock it down to LMB: Wand, and RMB: Whatever is picked up.

Current abilities are: (Inspired naming pending)
* 1. Raspberry super-nova - A lot of projectiles all around the wizard
* 2. Homing missiles - Channeled spells that spawns 2 homing missiles every .25 secs for 5 seconds
* 3. Crit spit - Increases the crit chance (chance to shoot those bigger missiles) to 100% for 3 secs.
* 4. Pink Beam - A pink beam that goes through walls and enemies alike and does massive mounts of damage.

Difficulty and progression
Second, I am toying with difficulty and general game structure.
The first change in this area is that all rooms have doors that lock until you finish off all the enemies.
Also all rooms has a respawn timer that only stops when all enemies are dead.
if the timer runs out a new batch of enemies are spawned along those that you didn't manage to vanquish, and things get a lot harder.
Both number of enemies spawned and the respawn interval is controlled by which level you are on.
So, finally the game actually gets harder and harder.
Still only four enemy types though.

Tech stuff
I have modified the default sprite renderer shader to allow for additive, subtractive and multiplicative color modulation.
To facilitate this I made a simple c# class that finds all the sprite renderers in a gameobject and updates the colors accordingly.
This is used to easily flash things that are getting hit and fading things in and out.
Not perfect by any stretch, but gets the job done.

The draw-order of the sprites was previously a problem. Looked weird when things that were supposed to be behind got in front etc.
The very dirty solution I found was to, like with the color stuff, find all sprite renderers and then each frame set the sort order of them to be relative to the gameobjects y position. I don't have a lot of sprites with this code so performance is ok.

Gimme a shout if you want the code (c# unity)!

What's next?
Not sure. More enemies, more items, another floor type, a proper boss battle maybe?
Audience participation is encouraged. What do YOU want to see?

On a related note: Again, big thanks for all the feedback! Both encouraging and informative!