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[alwex]

Official Trailer

Playable Demo

Tikotep Adventure is a project I am working on on my spare time for about one year now.
The gameplay is based on a platform/adventure style with a strong storyline and I will look forward to add some metroidvania stuff if possible.

Story
Madness has contaminated the forest and the animals living in. Tikotep will leave his village to find out what happends. He is not prepared to see what he will find.

Gameplay
The game is mainly a platformer inspired by megaman. Tikotep can fight using his bow or his tomahawk. He will find new powers on his journey to go through inaccessible place and fight powerfull enemies.

Team

Alwex music/code/pixel art

Some images of the game

I will try to keep this devlog up to date.

[alwex]

Some technical stuffs:

The game is made using pure Java / LibGDX.
For the map, I use the excellent software tiled
The main engine is based on Artemis ODB a entity/component/system framework forked from the artemis project.
The shaders are written in glsl.
The physic engine is a custom one, I had some tests with box2D but the feeling was not good for a platformer.
Graphics are done with pyxeledit a very nice pixel art oriented drawing program.
There is no music at this stage, but I plan to use plain old midi composition (not sure about that)

My IDE : Eclipse!

[Derqs]

Love the lighting! looking forward to see more

[alwex]

Thank you, I think that light is a good thing to make some nice looking scene.

[alwex]

Need to work on the bat IA. For now it wait for the player to be at 3 cells of distance before leaving the roof and attacking the player. If the player go away far enougth (3 cells), then the bats goes to roof and wait in the dark for another victim.



I think that the bat may have a little displacement while hurted by an arrow or by the tomahawk.

Sorry for the gif quality, If someone knows a good software to record windowed game and quickly make an animated gif, please tell me.

[Pezomi]

Sorry for the gif quality, If someone knows a good software to record windowed game and quickly make an animated gif, please tell me.

I've used licecap in the past. It's a free download. Looking good man! On the bat AI maybe have a couple second 'buffer' where if it's out of the 3 cells of distance it'll 'look' around until resorting to the ceiling again?

[Eigen]

Very cute graphics, especially the main character. But I'm not sure about all the gradients, light halos and sun rays. Not a huge fan of these 'hires' effects being added to lowres pixel art. It's kind of a cheap effect. Maybe discrete tile based lighting could work out as well?

[alwex]

@Pezomi sound like a good idea to make the bat wandering a bit before going back to home, I will try to implement it soon.
I also used licecap, perhaps my computer is not powerfull enougth to deal with running the game and capturing the gif at the same time. I prefer to use a cheap computer to keep an eye on the game performances.

@Eigen thank you, I also think that the "god ray" effect is a little too much. What do you mean by "discrete tile based lighting", something like terraria light effect? Can you provide me with some example?

[Eigen]

On second thought that doesn't look quite right either. I know eigenbom experimented with a few lighting rendering modes for Moonman, perhaps he has some good insight.

[Voltz.Supreme]

Looks pretty nice! Love that sunrise.
If you did want to go with more traditional and dynamic sounding music (with a digital twist) rather than midi, feel free to give me a PM and we could talk more. No offence but I'd hate to see something that looks this nice end up with dull generic midi sounds, even if the compositions are nice.
All the best!

[alwex]

@Eigen I have seen the result on moonman, it is a very nice redering, but I think I will stick with the current light engine for now. He is able to cast shadow depending on the obstacles and I plan to use it for gameplay purposes. Nice idea by the way.

@Leo J, I have listen to your music, it is a good work. I'll keep in touch with you if needed.

If someone know a good indian based chip music source, please give the links!

I wonder how native indian music can sounds once chiptuned.

[Voltz.Supreme]

I can mock something American Indian up if you want?

[alwex]

@Leo J, sounds like a good idea, thank you

[alwex]

I try a new environment. For the moment the canoe is not moving, I must decide if the canoe move by itself or if it follow tikotep (like in treasure adventure game). Not sure about the wandering fox on the top.
The new feature called "the ladder" is barely ready, tikotep will be able to climb on ladder, tree, vines etc...

I wonder who can live in this forest, perhaps a village of imps with strange habits, who knows?

[alwex]

I am currently experimenting with a wolf. I think the AI is not hard enougth, depending on the amount of opponents, it can be too easy or too hard

I have tunned LICEcap to make the gif more fluid  

[Canned Turkey]

That looks really nice.
The movement and fighting is top notch, but maybe add some more feedback between connections?
You know, knockback and the like, just to spruce it up.

The game looks super duper, I love the mix of 8-bit art and HD effects.

[alwex]

@Canned Turkey, you are right, the fights needs more feedback, the enemy may freeze a little or get pushed away.
I wa thinking about a slow motion effect when hitting the enemies and why not a little rumble of the screen while getting hit by enemies.

[Voltz.Supreme]

As far as enemies go, my personal preference is to have less enemies but make them harder and smarter. I would think it's better to see a wolf and get nervous rather than just jump or shoot through the scene. The original Prince of Persia did this well. Every fight had your focus fully on your enemy until they dropped dead. Even the enemy health bar is a possibility.

[and]

As far as enemies go, my personal preference is to have less enemies but make them harder and smarter.

I agree with this wholeheartedly!

Also, it does look great, I quite like games that mix up the lighting with really nice clean pixelart like what you've got going on.

The animal animations looks good for the fights, but I think you're right that they need a little bit more weight to them. Perhaps knock them back and have a bit of slowdown with the hit? Would probably look cool and help the feel of the attacks, might make timing hits a bit more difficult though...

[Green Gospod]

Maybe look into Sprite Lamp for lightning. I just find "HD" lightning like this ugly in pixel games. Especially when for example the grass is super bright no matter how under the shadows it is, but then when its under the light its either the same or way too bright.
Otherwise looking good!