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[traisane]

Basic information:

Riptale is a 2D retro black and white roguelike action platformer. The player has different gems that allow the PC to perform attacks that can be chained into combos killing everything in sight. Roam through dark crypts, underground forests, and mushroom caverns and fight reptilian beasts, cultists and other ancient enemies with your trusted blade.

Main features:
-Gem-based attacks that have to aimed with an analogue stick/keyboard
-Procedurally generated world and other game content
-Lot’s of enemies with challenging bosses
-Shops, runes, statues, challenge rooms, pets
-Uptempo soundtrack paying homage to the classics of yesteryears and preparing you for the action

Screenshot:



Background:

Riptale has been under development for the past 6 months. We started the game when we took part in Ludum dare #36 in August last year. In our team we have a game designer/project manager, programmer and graphic designer.

http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-36/?action=preview&uid=8424    

As you might guess from the visual look of the game Downwell was one of the inspirations early on. We wanted to combine some pinball mechanics with fast sword attacks. The very first demo had the main character (Kumo) falling down and bouncing around destroying enemies and various objects around the level. The idea was to try and keep Kumo from falling down until you had destroyed all the enemies and loot as much as possible.

Pretty soon after Ludlum dare we decided that we will make the game more like a normal platformer. We kept the slicing sword attacks and came up with the idea that different gems allow Kumo to perform different types of attacks. Also to make the game more unique the attacks have to be aimed (in 360 degrees) carefully by the player so that you don’t waste the gems. At the end of a successful attack there is a small slo-mo effect so that the player can attack again chaining the attacks into combos. This made Riptale’s combat challenging, fun and fulfilling. There is still lot’s of falling down and the attacks allow Kumo to climb back up when ever needed. If you want to survive in Riptale you have to think a head and use your gems carefully so they don’t run out in the worst possible moments. Through shops, secrets and unlocks the player will naturally progress into a slicing, dicing, killing machine.  

The game features standard roguelike-elements like permadeath, procedurally generated levels (4 different areas to explore) and other contents, unlockables, challenge rooms, shops, bosses, secrets and most likely some sort of quest system. Quests are still in development and we would really appreciate any suggestions on what type of quests should be put into this type of game? The levels have statues, altars, thrones, lots of breakable stuff etc so there is a lot of options.

We submitted Riptale to Steam Greenlight at the end of January. We got greenlit in about two weeks with around 4100 yes-votes (61%). We are currently finishing all the stuff that are required (menus, unlocks, Steam integration) and in a week or so we will start focusing on adding as much content as possible.

Our goal is to release Riptale in two months. Any feedback would be very welcome!

Greenlight trailer focusing mostly on combat:




Greenlight page: (Steam shop-page coming soon)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=851630714

Web-site:
http://www.supergod.fi

[DireLogomachist]

Looks good! Love the skulls under the floor   

[InterGalactic]

I've seen this on Twitter and was really fascinated at the wow-factor that even retro graphics can bring. Congrats on getting it greenlit, well deserved!

[traisane]

We started Riptale in Ludum Dare in August 2016. While the black and white style has been there from the start there have been many changes a long the way.

The biggest change was the attacks. Originally they were quite “normal”, i.e. something that you might expect from action platformer. Here is an example of early attacks:



As you can see you could just click the attack button as many times as you wanted. The boxes had no chance! However we felt that this type of fighting has been seen many times before. So we wanted something different. We came up with the idea of using gems for the attacks. Each gem allows Kumo to perform a different attack. But after each attack there will be a cooldown period during which that gem cannot be used again. The gems work little bit like a stamina system in some other games.

It is interesting to see how players will react to this type of fighting. Hopefully it will be “easy to learn, difficult to master” -kind of thing. But it allows us to design gems that work better on some enemies but are almost useless agains others. Some gems will naturally be stronger that others but they should be rare to obtain.

Kumo has gone through 3 iterations as well.



In the epic-fight-against-the-boxes you can see Kumo 2.0 in action. Also note the red shadow he used yo have. We have since ditched that as well. Maybe we should keep it?

[Superb Joe]

hold on just a second here, i'm seeing a third, different colour

[traisane]

Indeed, if you look closely you can find some red pixels here and there

The game progresses nicely. There are some new enemies and attacks. Credits, menus etc are also just about done.



We have also opened beta-testing for public. If you are interested please sign up e.g. through here

http://www.alphabetagamer.com/riptale-beta-sign-up/

[teemuki]

Good stuff! 

[traisane]

Lots of progress! Menus, unlockables, trinkets done!

There has also been lots of small fixes on various aspects (jumping, bounding boxes, enemy behavior). Also first version of challenge rooms has been done.



Final boss is also done. Most bosses are now ready for our own playtesting. There is still lots of work regarding them. They are always much more complicated than standard enemies.

We have managed to get some really good youtubers to play our demo and provide feedback. One excellent point was to recharge the gems based on successful attacks. We have been working on this and our idea was that if you hit an enemy with each of your gems in the same combo, all of your gems will recharge immediately. This seems to be working really well!

[jctwood]

The one bit graphics and general flow of the game is breath taking. Really excited to see the response on release, I wish you great success!

[Silkworm]

Cool! Gameplay looks really satisfying and like it has some depth to it. Will be keeping watch!

[MaxTexeira]

Following you! i'm making a few colors game too!
Main two are white and a black tone haha 

[traisane]

Thanks guys!

What we have found out is that there are some pros and cons in doing black&white pixel graphics:

Pros:
-Faster to draw and animate (this is a big benefit for a small team)
-Easier to stand out (at least it used to be, not that many b&w games)
-Retro-feel (some like it)

Cons:
-Limits the style of the game
-Retro-feel (some don't like it)
-Still images all look the same (the game looks much better when you play it than when you look still images, this might be a problem later in e.g. Steam store)
-Particle effects must also be mainly b&w

Anyways, we feel that black and white style was a good choice for us. Luckily we got some really good artists to draw graphics for us. They had to practice at first but quite soon they got the hang of it.

[freank]

great b&w style!

[traisane]

Steady progress. 

We are using Game Maker. We know that there are some issues with it (e.g. paths leak memory). We have also found out that you should avoin creating Game Maker rooms dynamically. As far as we know you can create new rooms dynamically but you cannot delete them! So if you use Game Maker do not create rooms with GML. If somebody knows a way to delete rooms please let me know!

Some random stuff we have been working on:

-Jumping
-Bounding boxes
-Dust particles
-Parent objects for different enemy types
-Spitter dragon

[traisane]

More progress, mainly on achievements. The following is for Game Maker: Studio users, se read on if you want to know more.

First we created an object to listen to achievement progress. When the object is created, it will fetch current achievement data from a data storing/handling object in which achievements are stored in booleans (set to false by default).

When a specific achievement listener is triggered, based on what requirements the achievement has, the object will proceed to check out the criteria. If an achievement requires active listening, the object will count event occurrences or wait for something to happen. Achievement data is then sent to data storing object, which in turn will save it in a file.

At the same time the program will send Steam API a message to unlock the achievement in Steam’s own system. Thankfully, Steam and GameMaker work nicely together!

Yoyogames has quite good documentation about Steam API, see https://docs.yoyogames.com/source/dadiospice/002_reference/steam%20api/index.html

[traisane]

Some progress:

-Challenge rooms done.
-In the final release there will be 6-7 types of challenges each of which have 2-3 different versions.
-We have now beta versions for Linux and Windows ready.
-We started closed-beta testing with the Windows version.
-Mac beta-version should be done next week.
-Steam shop-page done ([http://store.steampowered.com/app/616000/)
-Redraw some of the sprites so that they are easier to spot
-Combo-counter
-we added a feature that if you hit with each of your gems they recharge immediately. This way you can have never-ending destruction! Also allows nice challenge rooms 

-New feature in action:

[traisane]

Last weeks have been quite busy. All features have been implemented but need testing. Luckily we found a full-time game tester to play the game.

Some work that has been done:
-All bosses done, still need some testing
-Killing bosses rewards the player with extra benefits
-Rune mechanics, activating the runes affect the gameplay in some interesting ways
-Libraries, books in the libraries contain the lore and most of the story of the game
-Most of the sound effects are in
-Linux version done, Mac version needs more testing

On the marketing side:
-Implemented user traffic metrics to start online marketing campaings
-Started using Keymailer
-Release date teaser done


-And of course release date set to be April 27th.

Two more weeks to get all in order. Exiting times!

[traisane]

We are done 

We managed to release Riptale today in both Steam and Humble Store!

The past weeks we mostly worked on Steam integration (e.g. achievements and trading cards), submitting our builds for inspection and getting the store page ready. It takes some time to have everything in order.

Difficulty level has also caused some challenges. But then again our game is a roguelike and it is supposed to be challenging. Still we had to nerf it down just a little bit.

We also organised playtesting session which went pretty well. We went to a nearby school and had around 25 students test our game. There were few crashes but I think we managed to fix them. It is always painful to watch people play your game for the first time. They manage to kill themselves in all the ways possible. Sometimes it is even funny.  We did not manage to test Linux and Mac versions enough so we will release them next week.

Oh, we also organised the most lame launch party ever: all we had was one Burger King meal for our play tester (my sister's kid). I ate his spicy cheese balls.