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[tanis]

Down to the Core

You're the only survivor of a spaceship crash. Alone and stranded on an alien planet, you find the entrance to a cave.
It's not just a cave, as it soon turns out this is the entrance to something bigger.
Time to pull your stuff together and make your way to the core of the planet.


Main features

- 2D platformer
- Pixel art
- Randomly generated levels
- Gain XP and level up to increase your health and damage
- Collect money to buy powerups
- Kill lots of different kind of aliens for loot and xp
- Increasing level of difficulty

Tech stack

- MonoGame Unity
- Nez (game engine by @prime31) Binocle, my own 2D framework for Unity
- BFXR, Figure
- PhotoShop, PyxelEdit


Meet the team

tanis (me) - everything

[tanis]

DevLog #1

This is a project I've been working on for quite some time. It started as a game similar to Risk of Rain but I soon decided to change direction to a more roguelike kind of game, with closed levels instead of open ones.
I also went through different iterations (Cocos2D, Unity and now MonoGame) of the game engine itself. At first I wanted to do it for iOS only, then I realized I'd like to have it run on desktops as well, but Unity is big and heavy and way too much for a simple 2D game like this. Then, thanks to @prime31 commitment to Nez, I decided to switch to MonoGame and the Nez framework and work it up from there. But I've still got the Unity version around as portability on Unity is super and I might get back there if it needs be.

This is a short video of the game as it is right now.



And some more here:



The basics are there. Level generation is working fine, the main game loop is ok, bullets, movement, collisions, are all there. The AI is still in a primordial stage and I'll get ot it later on.
I've added some basic lighting to give the game more depth and make it a bit scarier while you venture around the caves.

Items are there and you can pick them up for temporary buffs.

I still need to do all the companions, those little bots that you will be able to buy with the money you collect and that will aid you in your journey.

There's a lot of tuning to do and lots of enemies to draw.
Did I mention that I have been drawing everything myself and that I'm not an artist at all? But I've grasped the basics and I feel like I can try to keep this style and get something nice on the screen.

Since I've been working on this for so long and never actually focused to get it finished, I thought I'd start a devlog to keep me motivated and to track progress and try to keep a path to follow instead of throwing everything around every now and then.

I'd really love to get some feedback. I know there's not much to talk about yet, but I hope that as I keep posting about the development, there will be aspects of the game to discuss about.

[Geoff Moore]

Looking good! I like your sprite design, there's a lot of character there for how tiny they are. Looking forward to seeing the companions in action!

[tanis]

Thanks Geoff! I'm trying my best as drawing isn't exactly something I'm good at :-P

[tanis]

DevLog #2

Today I've been toying around with lights. I've tweaked the base ambient light and added some random lights coming up from the ground to have some variations.
Lights use pretty much the same algorithm as all the other randomly generated content, with just a chance of being there if there's enough room on top of a ground tile.
Here's a quick video:

[Overman]

2D pixel art roguelite platformer

lol why not just call it a platformer

[tanis]

@Overman: indeed! But it's way funnier to call it that way. It's a sort of joke about similar games. It's funny how people always try to categorize stuff

[Maurycy]

2D pixel art roguelite platformer

lol why not just call it a platformer

Personally I think roguelite fits well almost fine, considering the randomly generated levels .

tanis, are the levels going to be truly random or assembled from pieces or just a couple of dozen templates with some randomized elements?

[tanis]

@Mauricy the levels are being created with a process that comes from Spelunky. The level building can be summed up with the following:

- The size of the level is determined based on how far you're in the game. This information determines the number of rooms
- The rooms are created as a NxM matrix making sure that the first has an entrance and that there's an exit in one of them.
- An algorithm tracks a path from the first to the last room making sure that the exit is reachable. That way the rooms on the path have at least the connections needed to move from one to the other
- Each room is made up of one of a set of templates with fixed size.
- Once the template for a room is chosen, it gets scrambled up by adding other random mini-templates of blocks of tiles to add variations.

I'm planning on adding some special cases to create rooms that need more empty space than tunnels, or bridges over pools, stuff like that. I'm not yet sure if I want to add vendors/shops or if I am going to let you spend money in between levels.

[Maurycy]

@Mauricy the levels are being created with a process that comes from Spelunky. The level building can be summed up with the following:

Oh, I see. I haven't played Spelunky but watched a lot of LPs and the level generation was pretty well done. I was more worried that it will be like one game I played, where I felt there were maybe 10 level templates, 5 of which were used 80% of the time. It wasn't a fun experience.

If you ever feel like doing a long writeup I'd be really interested in reading about the mechanisms in greater detail.

[tanis]

Devlog #3

It's been a while since the last update.. a lot has happened in the meanwhile.

I've ported my 2D code to Unity (it's called Binocle and and you can find it on GitHub if you want to have a look at that thing). It's nothing fancy but it does help with my style of coding (code centric).

I reworked the AI and everything is being driven by behavior trees, and this is making adding new enemies quite a breeze compared to the first iteration of the enemy logic.

An updated movie of what's going on:



I could really use some help with what's coming next.
The current direction is something along these lines:

- as you progress the levels become bigger and there are more monsters spawning.
- the further in the levels, the harder the monsters
- if you die, you go back to level 1 but you carry your current money, player level and xp.
- your progress gets saved between levels
- between levels you can purchase upgrades like double jump, wall slide, more armor, more health

It's going to be hard to balance all this so any tips at how to correctly balance all the stats involved would be nice