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[gimblll]

Dear Imgui is recognizable at first glance. I've used it too until I joined the dark side (Unity3d). Ah, I miss C++ so much.
Thanks for sharing. Glad to see you have such an advanced framework under the hood.

Thanks, it's a big pain to maintain all this though. I've been asking myself a million times that why don't I just go Unity and do less ambitious thing technically... but I hope this will be worth it in some way at least.

Whoa... Isometric perspective with Disnasty Warriors-esque battles. I know some people that will be WAY into that. Then again, most Dinasty Warriors fans are WAY into anything even remotely related to Dinasty Warriors, haha.

Anyway, the game looks great so far, love the cartoony style. Nice work  

Thanks! I don't know how Dynasty Warriors it'll end up being, at least nowhere near close to that crazy amounts of characters and stuff.

Log Entry #4

This week I've finished the another pass on shopping interface. It works, but only a few things to buy as I'm still trying fix the structure of the game. I need more levels to really get a better feeling on where I'm at with all this, but my level making process is a real pain in the ass so now I've been writing a tool to assist me with some of that stuff. It's nothing fancy though, just an imgui interface to do a bit of data mangling. Setting the level order, goals, generation parameters and such.

For levels in general, I'm doing some basic layouts and stuff in Tiled and then adding a procedural touch in C++. I'll need to work a lot on that though to get more variety to the game. Currently I only have pretty much one type of a level (maze), which gets boring really fast. I'm hoping the final game would have a mix of hand designed and procedurally generated levels and the new tool should help me manage all that.

What else... Been a bit of a slow week. Struggling a bit again, so much time spent on the game that sometimes it feels like this needs to be a super masterwork of epic meganinja or I'm a complete failure. Huge self inflicted pressure for no reason really. Stupid, I know.

Alright, back to work!

[gimblll]

My #screenshotsaturday .gif. Those blobs are kind of traditional bomb enemies that start their warning sequence on touch, or when receiving damage. I made them ages ago, but haven't had them in the game for some time as there's been so much other stuff to do. But finally put them back to see if they still work gameplay wise.

[gimblll]

Log Entry #5

I did the level layout setup tool. It took a surprisingly much refactoring to get my systems clean and workable again, but now that it works, it's great to have it. I can already see though that it's going to need a lot of new stuff to be more usable, but at least now there's a base for all that stuff and not just a stupid text file.

Other things... I've not been happy at all with my level goals of the game, previously my main goal in a level would be to 'kill N enemies, or N% of enemies' from the level, but that never really worked that well and I didn't personally like it at all. Too vague. I changed that so that there's now a select number of 'captain' enemies you have to kill in each level. I've tried to avoid going there, because that means a lot of new work to implement all those enemies, but once I prototyped it, the levels immediately felt much more complete and satisfying so I guess they're staying in. Now I'm quite happy with how one simple level plays out in it's most basic form. It's going to need much more variety, but at least there's a base that I'm happy with that I can build on now.

[gimblll]

Log Entry #6

Started working on some new enemies, I'll try to do maybe 4 or 5 new and see if I'll have enough to make the first 'chapter' of the game interesting enough. The left one is going to be a necromancer type of enemy that spawns other skeletons. Or at least that's what I'll try at first and see if it's fun. The right one is a more powerful 'captain' melee skeleton. Not sure if it'll have any special abilities. Maybe.



Yeah, I'm not know for my drawing ability. But they look ok, when they're really small like in my game.

[dotsquid]

These guys indeed look ok. At least they fit the entire art style and make it solid.
Is it Spine?

[gimblll]

These guys indeed look ok. At least they fit the entire art style and make it solid.
Is it Spine?

Yeah, it's Spine. Rendered to sprites, no runtime Spine currently. Would be cool to do the main character properly with Spine at runtime too, so I could switch weapons, do some more dynamics to animation and such, but too much work in the game as it is...

[Ohmnivore]

Nice to see the game going along nicely!

[maxxburman]

This looks incredible! Can't wait to see more, keep up the great work!

[sbeast]

Looking great so far, if you need any music for it I would love to contribute.

[Seaport]

This does look rather fun 

[gimblll]

Thanks everyone, I really appreciate all the messages, keeps me motivated.

Looking great so far, if you need any music for it I would love to contribute.

Thanks! I'm not looking for anyone right now, but if things change I'll probably post about it on Twitter and/or here.

Log Entry #7

Necromancer enemy done, it's quite interesting and will probably stay in the game. Didn't tweak it too much, just want to get stuff in now. Now working on another new enemy, this spikey blob thing that rolls towards you in a direct line. First prototype done (no effects or anything). I'll probably leave it like that for now too and do one or two more enemies before starting to fine tune everything.

[Fenrir]

Hey a dear imgui fellow! really good choice, I'm also using it for all the debug and edition parts of my game and it rocks!

[gimblll]

Hey a dear imgui fellow! really good choice, I'm also using it for all the debug and edition parts of my game and it rocks!

Yeah, a really good and quick way to throw some tools together! I'm finding myself doing much more of these little tools since I started using that. Highly recommended to everyone doing their own engines.

[gimblll]

Log Entry #8

So, did one more enemy, but it didn't work out that great. Left it in the backburner and maybe I'll play around with it later. Then started prototyping a new type of level generation algorithm. I'm hoping I'd have a few different to create more variability to the 'basic' levels. Trying to build it on some ideas from this, but so far it's not created very promising results. Need to do some more thinking if there would be a better approach to this. That's most likely my goal for the next 2 weeks anyway, making some good levels and creating a solid "template" from where to create level content. And also think about how the whole campaign should be structured. Current levels are mainly just prototypes of stuff.

Due to technical choises I made very early in the project, my max level size is 64x64 tiles. It would've been plenty for the original idea, but as the game has transformed, I'm starting to feel a bit constrained by it. And I can't really change it without doing lots of work. On the other hand, I really want this game to be arcadey and 'tight' in that there's no extra fluff that's not integral to gameplay, so I guess I can also take it as a positive constraint that forces me to really focus on making most of the area I have. Anyway, onwards!

[gimblll]

Log Entry #9

The rest of last week and a bit of this week went into the new level generator, got it working pretty well in the end. It creates much more organic looking levels than the old one. I'll probably use both anyway. Maybe write one or two new ones later if I have any good ideas. Lots of time went also to refactoring my level pipeline and "editor" so that I can support multiple generators without huge pains and copypasting. Then started working on my 'minion' system. The player will have it's own army of followers he can purchase during the game. It's been working for a long time, but I had not integrated it into the game properly. But now did a prototype of how they could be shopped and respawned etc.

Here's a gif with some knight and archer minions.



Still a few things tests/tweaks for the minion system next. Then not sure what to do next! Need to do some planning. I guess an overal goal now is to start putting together a solid playable 'chapter 1'!

[gimblll]

Log Entry #10

Minions are ok for now. I put together a bunch of levels and for the first time sent a build to a few friends to see how they would like the game. Feedback has been about what I expected (ok game + confirmation to some of the problems I know), but it's been useful to actually discuss things with people and get new ideas or ways of thinking of things. Should've done that ages ago, but I've never really had a version I would've felt represented my ideas well until now. Kind of a stupid way to develop! Progress has been slow now though, spent a lot of time thinking and planning (and a lot more procrastinating). I think I'll do some kind of a 'super attack' for the player next. The fights are lacking a bit of tactics, maybe that'll add something to it. Let's see...

[Kebbab]

Wow, I'm very impressed. Animation are really smooth and the gameplay seems very dynamic. Good luck!

[gimblll]

Wow, I'm very impressed. Animation are really smooth and the gameplay seems very dynamic. Good luck!

Thanks!

Log Entry #11

Prototype of the super attack I did in action. Way too overpowered, but I'll deal with that later. It's fun though. For some reason still really struggling to get much done... long project taking it's toll I guess. Decided to do some drawing for a change, maybe that'll get me back up to speed again. Doing stuff for the 'hub/meta' level where you start the game (and end up when you die), and have some minor story elements.

[gimblll]

Log Entry #12

Started building the hub world. I've had the idea that there'd be a large god like character(s) for story reasons to give you a bit of background of the world etc. So I drew one, but pretty soon realized that if I'm going to make this cool at all, or more than one character, I need to do some tech updates!

All my characters are animated in Spine and exported as sprite sequences and combined into one texture with TexturePacker for efficient rendering (mobile target requirements especially). But I cannot do large characters with that or I'd end up with enormous textures that would never fit into memory. So I decided to integrate Spine C runtime into my engine too. That took about 2-3 days, but it's done now and works! So now that also opens up new possibilities too... like proper large bosses. And I could use it for the player too, so the player could maybe swap weapons or at least have a bit more animation. I'm never going to get this game finished, am I...

So here's a WIP giant parrot god thing doing a Spine test animation for your pleasure!

[gimblll]

Just posting my #screenshotsaturday here too. (A non-test, colored version of the same bird godling.)