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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsOddinary Highway – retrofuturistic rogue-lite shoot'em up
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Garfeild
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« on: March 01, 2017, 11:35:24 AM »



Greeting and introduction

Hey fellow developers!  Gentleman
Long time lurker here I would like to start devlog on behalf of the team. Currently we are working on Oddinary Highway, which is our first game for Steam and Xbox One.


Summary

Oddinary Highway is retrofuturistic pixel art shoot'em up with rogue-lite elements.

Your name is Bill and you are a son of the King of the whole Universe. You are traveling on sentient hover car named Caddy Luck. Caddy Luck has ability to travel across the Universe by accessing hyperspace "Oddinary Highway" on its will. The hyperspace is full of a matter Weirdonium, which leaks to the Universe through breaches left by hyperspace travelers. Weirdonium causes different weird changes in game reality.

  • Face numerous enemies and bosses in these worlds to fulfill your task: save family members and take City back, which were lost by your father in poker to the head of the Debt Syndicate.
  • Adapt your strategy to continuously changing game. Caddy Luck generates random useful items to help you in fight and its warps to other locations cause random changes in game mechanics.

Now, it's time to take back what belongs to your noble family!


Game Description

Gameplay is based on classic shoot'em up mechanics with modern rogue-lite elements. First of all, there is a permadeath, so player loses progress when he dies. Next, we have randomly generated levels from enemies presets.

We spent a long time prototyping and testing main feature of the game – affixes that changes various gameplay aspects. Once player gets to new level, new affix is selected and lasts till the end of the level. Affixes could be, for example, constantly changing primary weapon, or some enemies become friendly for short period, or killed enemies could be resurrected.

Weapons/items system has some random too. Player's ship has primary weapon, which is pretty default for such sort of games. And player also has secondary "items". These secondary items are randomly picked from set and player can activate current item only once. Among secondary items you can find auto-shooting drones, buffs or other useful items.

TL;DR, main features of the game:
  • Random affixes at each level with unpredictable effects for the player
  • New random secondary item every time you use existing one
  • At least five worlds, each with its own enemies based on one type of weapons (explosive, plasma, etc.)
  • Randomly generated levels in biomes from enemies presets
  • Pseudo-randomly sorted five worlds through each loop
  • Upgrades to improve player and weapons stats during the run
  • Local co-op for 2 players


Posts


Who works on the game:

Ksenia Shatunova – art
• Anna Fruit – music and sound design
Arseniy Shved – game design
• Kirill Lyubimov – lead developer
• Anton Kolchunov – UI programmer


Our Internet presence

• Tumblr / Blog
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Facebook

« Last Edit: March 07, 2017, 12:56:04 AM by Garfeild » Logged

Garfeild
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« Reply #1 on: March 01, 2017, 11:35:39 AM »

What was done so far? As we are talking about gameplay mechanics, we have implemented most tricky features to get proof of concept. This includes affixes and weapons/secondary items system. Also, enemy waves spawn/level generation was implemented to have something to play with.





Among planned five worlds we have partial progress:

  • Sand world is the most complete location with fully done levels including bosses. This includes mechanics and graphics for enemies and environment decorations.
  • Ocean world is still missing environment decorations and bosses graphics
  • City world is initial development, several enemies is already done. Environment decorations still work in progress.

Here is an example how's environment decorations are composed in game:



Returning to weapons, there are completed for 90%-100% 7 basic weapons (SFXs are missing or will be redone). Overall we created ~20 weapons with different shooting and projectiles types. Couple examples of completed weapons:





« Last Edit: March 07, 2017, 12:57:09 AM by Garfeild » Logged

Chewie
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« Reply #2 on: March 01, 2017, 12:15:18 PM »

Oh, I like this retro vibe logo! =D
Reminds me of futurama - planet express.

Hope to see some more of this pixels!
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sidbarnhoorn
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« Reply #3 on: March 02, 2017, 07:03:39 AM »

Very cool! Smiley
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Siddhartha Barnhoorn
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Composed music for the games Antichamber, Out There, The Stanley Parable, Planet Alpha...

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Garfeild
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« Reply #4 on: March 02, 2017, 07:07:32 AM »

Oh, I like this retro vibe logo! =D
Reminds me of futurama - planet express.

Hope to see some more of this pixels!

Will try to post regularly to fulfill your excitement Smiley

Very cool! Smiley

Thanks! Smiley
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Garfeild
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« Reply #5 on: March 04, 2017, 10:07:22 AM »

This week we have been focused on making enemy waves more fun. And I came up with an idea to share more details about levels and cover how they are organized in Oddinary Highway.

The result of those improvements - a wave packed with EXPLOSIONS. Grabs attention, doesn't it?


Making a highly replayable game was our goal from the very beginning. And we were inspired by Nuclear Throne by Valmbeer and Steredenn by Pixelnest. So, there are no levels like in particular shoot'em ups. When the player defeats last boss, the game "restarts" with increased difficulty.

There are five different locations in game. Each location is not only look different, but also introduces and uses unique mechanics in enemies design.  Here is breakdown of locations:
  • Sand introduces enemies with explosive weapons: torpedos, mines, missiles.
  • Enemies in the Ocean shoot plasma. In Oddinary Highway each plasma ball can spawn more plasma. And that plasma can spawn more plasma. And so on indefinitely which makes ocean a bit bullet hellish.
  • Forest is inhabited by enemies with lasers.
  • Junkyard introduces enemies with melee weapons.
  • And the final level – City is inhabited by enemies with different types of "summon" mechanics, e.g. teleports or carriers.


Going further, there are several stages in each location, for example Sand already has three stages. At the end of each stage player faces boss, who drops different upgrades to pickup.

Basic brick of the stage is an enemy wave. We manually create enemy waves and store them as prefabs in Unity. All waves have a difficulty level (easy, normal, hard) and a type (enemy, elite, boss). Each wave is usually used only for one stage, but can be reused for many stages if necessary. So, each stage is described by a sequence of waves of varying types and difficulty. When the player proceeds to a new stage, it's dynamically filled with a predefined number of waves. For example, Stage 1 @ Sand has the following structure (e = easy, n = normal, h = hard):
Code:
[e enemy] [e enemy] [n enemy] [h elite] [e enemy] [n enemy] [e enemy] [h boss]
« Last Edit: March 07, 2017, 12:57:23 AM by Garfeild » Logged

Sonoshee
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« Reply #6 on: April 10, 2017, 10:32:58 PM »

Good work guys! I especially like the background art. And the explosions in the pyramids gif feel very satisfying.
Though I would love to see the bullets a tad faster. And I think the long design of the ship doesn't quite tell where the central hitbox is ( if there is one), maybe a glowing orb in the center might do the job?
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utkiupe
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« Reply #7 on: April 11, 2017, 03:59:08 AM »

nice idea
I kinda like this kind of games but there is not much these days (well, maybe I am not trying to find them actually)
maybe a cool feature would be to be able to customize your ship
make your own stuff with items you would pick up from your runs/levels

you probably have already thought of that so anyway, I am following your project guys Smiley
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I make games at Kiupe // check our future game: Eiwee - a game about playing and learning music
Garfeild
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« Reply #8 on: April 11, 2017, 12:00:02 PM »

Hi guys,

thanks for your comments!

Though I would love to see the bullets a tad faster.
Hm... are you about all bullets or only for Ocean? We currently work on new iteration to speed up everything in Ocean. Hope to show something relatively soon. Smiley

And I think the long design of the ship doesn't quite tell where the central hitbox is ( if there is one), maybe a glowing orb in the center might do the job?
Welp, you are right, especially if we wanted to make bullet hell game. Current hitbox is smaller then actual sprite of player and it seems to be working well. But I will tell about point hitbox to game designer to check how gameplay could change with it.


nice idea
maybe a cool feature would be to be able to customize your ship
make your own stuff with items you would pick up from your runs/levels
There will be upgrades that change different characteristics from trivial fire speed and damage to special things in co-op mode. It's not a customization, but still should be interesting.
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nathy after dark
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« Reply #9 on: April 11, 2017, 12:26:34 PM »

Looks worth following.  Hand Thumbs Up Left
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