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[sam_psychic]

Godkin

Hi, I'm Sam (Twitter) (Blog).. somewhat of a veteran game-developer (indie since the 1980s). I've been collaborating with some cool artists at Goblin Portal since early 2015, and Godkin is our 2nd game together.

Godkin is an online party-based combat RPG, where you play as demi-gods defending procedurally-generated mortal realms that are being invaded by hordes of monsters. As you gain experience, you will learn spells which are aligned with one of 10 different elemental gods. The monsters are also associated with specific elements, and gathering a party with appropriately varied skills will be an important goal with the more difficult game maps.

Screenshots/Concepts/GIFs


Village under attack from maggots


Fighting a maggot with the Meteor spell


Cover Art


The Lobby


Elemental boss monsters - concepts




Some characters and monsters

Estimated release date:  late 2018
Private alpha testing:  soon!  




Please join our Discord channel or wishlist Godkin on Steam.

[sam_psychic]

Attack and Defend

To win a game of Godkin, your team will have to balance attack and defence. You’ll have to track down and eliminate all of the monster camps on the map, while also overseeing the construction of walls, barricades and towers for the villages. As monsters approach the villages, your role will become that of field-captains: fighting, yes, but also marshalling and instructing the mortal characters who you are trying to save. Working as a team will be critical to achieving all of these simultaneous goals.

Maggot Boss - Concept Art

[sam_psychic]

Villagers and Followers

The mortal characters in the game take the form of villagers and followers. Followers are essentially combatant villagers who have pledged themselves to your service, and who you can bring with you into different games. They level up and gain skills, leadership ability, and courage; however, they can die (permanently). You issue orders to followers – gathering resources, constructing defences, or joining you on at assault on the monster camps. However, you don’t directly control them – if you push them into too much danger, their courage might break and they will run away. Your followers, in turn, gather together villagers to assist them with their gathering and constructing.

[sam_psychic]

The Map

Godkin maps are procedurally generated – they include mountains, lakes, seas, forests, and villages – as well as caves and other areas which are not part of the core game win/lose conditions, but where random monsters can be found and rare loot gathered (treasure, magic weapons and armour). The difficulty of the map will be defined in terms of its monsters and resources – and as you get more experienced at the game you’ll unlock more and more challenging maps. We’re also going to include weekly challenge maps and high-scores – so teams can pit themselves against other teams playing the same map. I’m planning to write a blog post fairly soon about the procedural map generation used in Godkin.

The Team

Godkin is being developed by a team of four, and this is our second game together. We've been collaborating since early 2015. There's two of us in Ireland, and two of us in Sweden.
Game Design = all of us
Programming = Sam
Game Art = Björn
GUI Art = Jonas
Music and Sound = Ian

[sam_psychic]

Just updating you on what we've been doing in Godkin..

I've been working on the Followers code - so now they can level up when they survive a mission with you (and they can also die). Their default behaviour is to follow you around quite closely - and you can choose to put them in Aggressive or Defensive mode, which determines how far they will go from you in order to attack monsters. They're a bit manic at the moment, so they need some more work. The next thing I'm working on is a Flag system, which will allow you to designate places on the map for the Followers to go to (or stay near) rather than following you around.

Björn has been working on monsters and spells.

The fire-themed boss in Godkin has a mean stomp attack which causes explosions and will also set forests on fire.

Ian has been continuing to fill in various sound effects (this week, it's bow and sword sounds), while Jonas and I have also been starting work on a pitch document for publishers.

[sam_psychic]

Another quick update! I've been continuing to work on Followers - we now have a Flag system so that you can direct your followers to defend anywhere on the map rather than follow you around.

I also implemented two new defensive spells: "Reflect Shield" and "Stone Wall" (the 256-colour GIF palette has mangled these a bit, but you get the idea):






Bjorn also did this rather nice piece of concept art!

[sam_psychic]

Catching up on what we've been doing in the last 2 weeks..

I've implemented the 'Summon Walkers' spell, which comes from the pool of spells aligned with the Soul element. This creates a short-lived horde of zombies who fight as your allies, slowing down advancing monsters. (Please excuse the debug text above the maggot enemies!) I also put the code together to make monster attacks (from their camps) come in distinct waves.

Summon Walker (Soul) spell.

Ian has produced a bunch more cool sound effects, focusing on the recently-added spells such as Stone Wall.
Bjorn has been designing concepts for new monsters, as well as making more concept art for our publisher pitch.

One of the main ways to defend villages in Godkin will be to construct towers and enchant them with various spells.

[sam_psychic]

Another quick update! I've been progressing the building and resource gathering system - so you can now direct villagers to chop wood from trees, or mine stone or 'crystal' (a magical element) from outcrops around the map. You can also direct them to build walls and towers (which are important parts of the tower defence aspects of the game.

These changes required me to think critically about the pathfinding system used by the monsters, villagers and followers. It's a classic A* algorithm, and previously paths were all calculated in one go (i.e. the entire A* alg was run from start to finish when required). This was fine for short distances, but over larger distances I need to avoid framerate stutter if the calculations take more than 1/60 of a second.

Up to now, there was a special system for long-distance pathfinding whereby monster camps, resources and flags performed continual calculations to construct and update paths to the village. Creatures could then hook into one of these paths and follow it. The calculations were carried out with just a few A* node expansions per render frame (this could be called 'ambient' calculation), and took a few seconds to calculate long distances. This was fine.. but there were always going to be exceptions (e.g. say you summon a follower from the other side of the map?) So what I did this week was overhaul the system so that all creatures do ambient calculation. If they need to navigate a long way, they need to 'think' for a second or two before they go.. but that's just fine from a gameplay perspective; shorter paths only take a fraction of a second to construct. This made pathfinding into an asynchronous activity, so needed a bunch a code changes throughout the AI system; but it's all looking good.

[Sundrop]

Another quick update! I've been continuing to work on Followers - we now have a Flag system so that you can direct your followers to defend anywhere on the map rather than follow you around.

I also implemented two new defensive spells: "Reflect Shield" and "Stone Wall" (the 256-colour GIF palette has mangled these a bit, but you get the idea):






Bjorn also did this rather nice piece of concept art!

That yellow orb thing. I kinda wanna eat it...

[flex$]

all of the ability effects are looking really lively and fluid, and that's a must here. keep going