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[Jondog]

Super Mansion Quest is essentially a top down shooter with guns and demons.

You play as a maid who has to rescue her master from the devil, the story is unimportant really.
What really matters is shooting demons, clearing rooms and unlocking new weapons.

I started the game last year but soon realised the scope was out my reach because I didn't have enough experience in Construct 2, so I went away for a while and worked on some other games.

Recently I wanted to make some awesome guns in a game so I came back to it and started working that out

So far I've added a bunch of new guns, a reload bar + timer and a bunch of general improvements.

Testing out guns


Test room


I talk about the game on twitter quite a bit as well. http://twitter.com/Jon_dog

[Jondog]

Played a game called The Maid Fuku to Kikanjyuu (The Maid Uniform & Machine Gun) for research because it's one of the few action games I could find starring a maid character.

It's a terrible game unfortunately, a lot the controls didn't seem to work until I realised that they are meant to be tapped really quickly and not held down.
Upgrading the machine gun is almost impossible due to the amount of points you need to collect and using the gun in a level brings your score down.

Going to look into Touhou fangames next because Sakuya is a maid.

[Jondog]

Managed to simplify the weapon events a lot

All the stuff at the top used to be in every weapon subgroup.

It wasn't a problem until today when I tried to set up bullet casing that drop for every round fired and realised that with my old setup I would have to copy and paste those events to every weapon and make sure they all maintained a similar order.

This way works much better and allows me to add more events to the weapon firing sequence overall, instead of just individually.

[Jondog]

Got bullet casings to drop in alright looking way last night, I'll post a gif of it in a bit, also need to replace the gifs at the top of the post, using debug mode resulted in a choppy framerate.

[Jondog]

Updated the first post with better gifs.

Here's the one showing off the bullet casings

[Jondog]

Haven't had much time to work on it over Christmas. Decided to play Eidolon which I got from a friend, it's pretty much the opposite of this game but I still enjoyed walking around the environments, picking up food and working out where I want to go next. Very little structure apart from some limits on what you can actually do. You can't climb high mountains or swim across large lakes, you'll freeze to death in both occasions.

[Jondog]

Hexun just  told me about another action game with a maid character in it called BloodOver, going to check it out today.




You should also take a look at his game, it's a 2D maid beat em up game that he's working on http://hexun6.tumblr.com/

[Jondog]

I still have a whole stack of things I need to add for the weapons (unique sounds and animations mainly)

But what I really want is info on how to make the whole weapon feel good and give appropriate feedback to the player. I feel like I know a lot of it, but I still feel like I'm missing something.

If anyone knows of good breakdowns on video game weapons by actual developers, links would be appreciated.

[Jondog]

Wrote a quick blog post on what I did in 2014 and what I hope to do in 2015 http://pixelatedadventures.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/accomplishments-goals.html

[Jondog]

Updated the UI a bit yesterday to make more sense with the keyboard layout and remove the awful red text.


I still need to tweak the spacing and position, but now it looks a lot nicer with the weapon icon also being shown.

[Jondog]

UI has better spacing now.

Today I added a burst fire rifle that fires 3 bullets in quick succession with every press of the button.

Also added strafing which is something I've wanted to have for a long time, unfortunately I don't have strafing animations at the moment so it looks a bit weird.

It was actually really easy to do as well, all I needed to do was disable the facing direction check from changing animations if the character is currently strafing.

[Jondog]

Yesterday I started reworking my design document by removing the old stuff and features like weapon mods that are way out of scope for this game.
It's fun making different guns and some extra controls like strafing, but I really need to get back to working on enemy designs and room layouts so there's more to actually play.

[Jondog]

Worked out a template for creating rooms. After I've worked out everything for the first floor I'm going to draw a basic map.

Here's an example.

Main Room
Description: A large room with a grand staircase in the middle and large windows that let light into the room, also has 2 doors to a connected hallway
Usage: Get to the 2nd floor, central room for the 1st floor.
Items: Boss fight triggered by trying to open the gate on the stairs (when you have the boss key), Heart piece for defeating the boss
Connects to: 2nd floor landing/hallway North, 2 doors at the North to a connected hallway either side of the stair case, Entry Hall

[Jondog]

Here's a screenshot of the shop area I'm working on that connects the shops to the driveway of the mansion.

Also came up with a design that allows players to get guns in the mansion and the gun store.

Every time the player picks up a new gun in the mansion they unlock a gun license.
That gun license allows the player to buy other guns within that class at the store.

The classes will be pistols, submachine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, etc.

So now I don't have to worry about having over a dozen rooms dedicated to dropping guns, instead the player can just buy new ones once they have the appropriate license.

[Jondog]

Worked out a way to simplify weapon creation even further and it cleans up my event sheets way more than I thought it would.

The weapons now have all their data in one area and the variables are set when the player selects a weapon.

Previously I was doing something dumb and had sections for each weapon that would be triggered every time the Z button was pressed if the weapon variable was equal to the number for that weapon.
I also had events spread across several different sheets that were associated with that weapon.

This also means I can alter reload time, magazine capacity, rate of fire etc. while testing the game.

[Neeko]

Sounds like a lot of fun with some great potential.

You're not considering procedurally generating the mansion? Seems like the perfect use case for it.

[Jondog]

Sounds like a lot of fun with some great potential.

You're not considering procedurally generating the mansion? Seems like the perfect use case for it.

I've looked at doing that but it's kind of out of the scope for the game. I'm not sure how well Construct 2 would handle procedurally generated stuff either.

[Neeko]

Yep, not sure what's possible with Construct 2, though this tutorial does make it seem possible.

https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/1112/procedural-dungeon-generation-a-roguelike-game

Anyways, you definitely have the right intentions on minimizing the scope of the game so that you're actually able to release Keep it up, look forward to seeing where this goes.

[Jondog]

It's been a while since I've been able to actually spend time working on this.

I've started making the gun shop, now I just need to make an interface.
I also madea function so I can call up a text box from anywhere and also insert specified text.

Here's an image of the shop entrance with better floor tiles and nicer looking glass

[Mya]

Looking good

Love the idea of a housemaid running around with an automatic weapon :D