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[tomdominer]

Pre-Alpha Trailer

Project

My first project going it alone is a top down randomly generated shooter. The basic concept is Hotline Miami meets Spelunky meets Paradroid. The main character is a robot, called IO, that cannot shooter and must hack and take control of enemy droids in order to survive. There is a playable demo on itch.io. Please follow the link at the bottom to try it out.

Goals

I'm looking to create a top down roguelike shooter that successfully captures that same sense of emergent chaos that Spelunky does. There are other randomly generated shooters, like enter the gungeon etc, but I don't think these quite have the same level of rogue-ish game design sensibilities where each object has properties and rules which create those player stories that I love so much.

Devlog

I'm gonna start a dev log on here to (hopefully) keep you guys updated with progress on the game. So far, I've spent over a year working on the project. I've mostly made the game by myself, so far, in Unity 2D, with contract art from Ruud Hendricks. A lot of that time was learning to properly program in C# and also the ins and outs of Unity. I've got the basic playable elements of the game down; including AI behaviours, dungeon creation rules, movement and the hacking logic.

Playable Pre-Alpha Demo itch.io link

[tomdominer]

So, this week I've been working on the energy system.

At first, the game had one health bar / number that was used for both health and powering weapons. I wanted to have one pool for both systems, similar to how F-Zero X had a boost system that used up your health, but it didn't create the gameplay tension I was looking for because you usually wouldn't let your health get that low, as you could also just return to earlier areas of the map and recharge it.

Now, I've separated the health and power into to numbers, bars, similar to dark souls. The combat is now about managing that power bar, so you never get to low and become vulnerable, where as the health measure overall damage. Also, the only way to get health back is to exit the robot you have hacked, which destroyed it. I think this gives  a stronger decision making element to the health system and also makes the power system a bit clearer to the player.

Here is the power and health systems working:



And here is the player recharging his health by exiting a robot and hacking an energy panel

[Io]

I'm looking to create a top down roguelike shooter that successfully captures that same sense of emergent chaos that Spelunky does. There are other randomly generated shooters, like enter the gungeon etc, but I don't think these quite have the same level of rogue-ish game design sensibilities where each object has properties and rules which create those player stories that I love so much.

I agree wholeheartedly and hope you achieve what you're aiming for.

[tomdominer]

Thanks Io. Me too! 

[tomdominer]

Update 2: Invisibility & Invincibility

I've been trying to give the base robot (called IO) a defensive move, like the other patrol robots have. So, I've added the ability to turn invisible. This (unsurprisingly) completely changes the stealth gameplay and makes the whole process much more interesting tactically. Along with that, I've added a brief invincibility period after you get damaged. This allows the player to parse the fighting in the game much more easily and respond to attacks by retreating or hacking etc.

https://gfycat.com/WatchfulHoarseDamselfly (Trying gfycat as the quality seems much better than photoshop)

This seems to have improved the gameplay substantially as the whole experience is much less overwhelming when the shit hits the fan.

Also, trying to add a bit of enemy variation by added a shotgun sulletbot. The enemy balancing is still quite off, with the laser guys being the dominant force, but I think I can address this issues by making the shotgun be useful in more situations, perhaps by narrowing the laser spread.

https://gfycat.com/ScholarlyDevotedAlligatorgar

Liking the new build a lot more, at any rate. Please check it out with the itch.io link above if anyone fancies giving it a go.