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[Glyph]

Your guy seems a bit heavy, maybe? Like it looks like it might be a bit difficult to hop over spikes.

Bears are fat. Case in point:


Here's a Paladin, with purely-decorative sword and shield.

Despite his heft, we know from physics that weight has nothing to do with gravitational acceleration. Anyway, the framerate of the gif is a little funked up so it might feel heavier than it is right now.

This game could do with a higher resolution

Step by step, it's increasing. It might stay here or go up to 320x240.
It started out as this, so we've come a ways:



Also, have a shopkeeper mockup. Try not to think about how this sprite is literally the same resolution as the whole game used to be.

[Kurt]

This looks really good!

[mike_w]

Sadly, I don't think that Spelunky's name lends itself well to a sub-genre (like Rogue does).

That is a fact I will not argue with

[JobLeonard]

I dunno, this might work:

"What genre is this?"

"a spelunker"

[Glyph]

Made a level editor with a few useful features, like automatically fitting levels if they're below the minimum size (13x8 currently). Here's a test gif.

[Glyph]

Some remade stuff, and some brand-new stuff.



So, knights and wizards are back in business, being a bit too tall like always (it's not as bad now that things are spacier, though). The stages are now loaded from strings like before, using a simple syntax. For example, here's the data for the stage in this gif:

Code:

   "XX         XX#
    XX    1    XX#
    XX  X---X  XX#
    XX         XX#
                 #
                 #
       @  _  1   #
      -T-XXX-T-  #
       L XXX L   #
       L XXX L   #
       L XXX L   #
     1 L  =  L 1 ";

There are also springs, just to put some variety in vertical stage traversal. They'll probably be pretty rare.

Another thing worth mentioning is sliding, which happens when you duck while running. What's really important about this, though, is when you slide through an enemy. This will open you up for a cross-up attack, which is like a critical hit. Your foe will briefly lose sight of you (turn yellow) and hitting them in this window inflicts extra damage based on Dexterity. You can see me doing this to the knight in the image.

[SolarLune]

Sounds cool! Added combat mechanics like this are great. I should play the demo - I never got around to it.

[Raku]

The enemy death explosions are wonderful, I love them

[Glyph]

Update time!



I made this level dark to show the lighting engine a bit more, but usually this particular tileset wouldn't be used in a dark level. I made the lightning spell and the ability to switch spells, so hopefully I will make many more soon. There are also bats, which might need to be made brighter since they're hard to see right now.

I'm gonna write about some technical stuff from now on, so if that interests you read on, and if it doesn't, then don't.

What took most of my time for this update isn't something readily apparent in the gif: I added in some controlled level randomization. Going off the idea of 'obstacles' from Spelunky (ever a good example of how to do procedural generation the right way), I added 'minivaults', which are similar but a bit more specific. Here's the level editor equivalent of the level in the gif, to further explain things:



The 5x5 chunks are the minivaults, and when the level is exported it now appends this:

Code:

    global.mini_data =

    "@6@11@3"

Which is, stupidly enough, an int-converted set of binary numbers representing up, down, left, and right exits available for each minivault in the map. So "@6" means the first minivault appearing has a down and left exit (UDLR=0110=6). Don't ask me why I did it this way, I don't know.

Anyway, before the level is loaded, the game loads all the minivaults in a particular theme. Here are a few sample minivaults used so far (these are really just test ones so they're subject to change):

              XXXXX
         T    X   X    -
       X L X    X  
 ^_^     L    X   X  X^^^X
XXXXX    L    XXXXX  XXXXX


The game then determines the up, down, left, and right exits of each minivault, and then when the level is loaded and we encounter a minivault, the game checks every minivault and bit-shifts out the appropriate exit data from global.mini_data to compare with them (again, I don't know why I found this necessary). Once the list is narrowed down to the actual candidates, it just picks a minivault at random and starts this process over again for the next one.

It's a system in its infancy, but with more levels and more minivaults, the chances of seeing the same level twice will quickly become astronomical.

[Fervir]

Looks pretty solid, following!

[MADSOFT]

This look awesome! Definitely following

[mike_w]

I love that little bear so much

[happymonster]

The minivault idea looks good!

[DrDerekDoctors]

Replying to watch - loving the hybrid!

[0x0961h]

Procedural generation and roguelikes are relevant to my interests, subscribed.

[Glyph]

Been hard at work remaking enemies and making the environment look a little nicer.


The curse status bar is placeholder, and I dunno if I'm gonna make curse act like that in the end. It works for now, though.


Goodbye, hero...

Here are some gifs of glitches as well.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4841993/bairglitch.gif
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4841993/bairglitch2.gif

[Glyph]

I was in a bit of a rush last time, so now I'll explain some of the status effects more. I tacked statuses onto some area 1 enemies that would never have them and then made my bear super healthy to show them off:



Here, the drone inflicts hellblight (which makes no sense). This will be a powerful later-area status effect that halves your current and maximum HP and MP. It's kind of like taking double damage and spending twice as much mana. As with every long-lasting status effect in the game, the only way to make it go away is to deal enough damage to enemies or win the battle - waiting around won't help you!



And here's a beetle inflicting poison. I think there will be a poison-inflicting enemy in the first area, but it would be rare and definitely not a beetle. So, once your poison bar fills up, one third of your health will turn purple. Fighting enemies will make the purple portion slowly go away, but if you get hit again before you can get rid of it, you'll lose all the purple health plus take the damage you normally would. Even our 90 HP test bear is quickly reduced to half health by being too careless.

Also, as you can see in the test level gifs, the game can now randomly flip level maps (not particularly noticeable since the level's basically symmetrical, though). It can also flip minivaults and use those however it wants, too. Along with the info bar (which might be a bit intrusive, yet) I think I'm about ready to move onto phase 2: a level map

[jctwood]

The colours are amazing!

[absenter]

Man, this game looks great. Keep it up!

[KellyRay]

I dig this. Looks really slick!