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[faborro]

About
Rogue Data is a roguelike action-RPG where you have to fight your way out of a vast, digital world that is filled with surreal creatures wanting merely one single thing: your data. The whole space is controlled by a mysterious existance hungry for all your information and seeking to destroy your will to reach deep into the unknown core of the system.

At first sight, the battle scene features a classic grid which you would normally expect in turn-based strategy games. However, the movement happens in realtime with no pauses or interruptions!
 

early first version of the battle field with the basic elements

If you are familiar with the great megaman battle network series you can tell where I got my inspiration from <3

Features
In this game you'll be confronted with exciting decision based events, you'll be navigating through the procedural generated data world, collecting abilities to strategically counter your enemies, win epic boss fights and enjoy the perma-death madness

Team
Fabio - me, coding
Nhi - artist

Engine
I'm using Unity with Entitas (an Entity Component System Framework).


I greatly appreciate your feedback and look forward to share my progress with you.

[WaywardEmcee]

Hey, it's like those Megaman gameboy advance games!

[Chris MacAdam]

Good luck with this! I love the battle system from those mega man games. I think you can make something really cool out of this!
Is there going to be a deck building aspect to it? Or is it more like an rpg where certain classes just have certain abilities?

[faborro]

Good luck with this! I love the battle system from those mega man games. I think you can make something really cool out of this!
Is there going to be a deck building aspect to it? Or is it more like an rpg where certain classes just have certain abilities?

Thank you, Chris! We too love MMBN and the deck building system in particular, also the movement system: it has much potential to create awesome and fun game mechanics in other contexts as well, which is why we are intrigued to try out a combination of the movement system with a classic ability system that fits the playstyle of a fast-paced action-rpg roguelike.

The basic idea is that the player collects abilites and equip up to 4 abilites at a time based on the environment and in consideration of the available combos. So you have to think carefully which abilities to take into a battle before it starts!

We also plan to have a variety of different classes. The interesting part is that every class can use any ability. The difference is that every class has unique characteristics which determine the composition of the abilities chosen to take into a battle (e.g. a class that focuses on close combat range has 2 close combat abilities, 1 long range, and 1 defensive ability).

But as we are in the early development stage, nothing is set in stone!

There are many other cool aspects we came up with, but we will figure out the details in the near future, and will share it in this devlog

[faborro]

This week we managed to implement the basic structure of the ability system. With that done, the basic battle system is almost finished! I'm pretty content with the progress so far 

As I'm fairly new to ECS the implementation of the ability system turned out to be quite a challenge. The multitude of unique abilites we plan to incorporate require a scalable concept.

In the end I implemented the logic completely in ECS. For the view part of things (controlling particles etc.) I had to fall back on some classic class inheritance and polymorphism. I'm certain that there is a much better way to do it, but for now I'm ok with the solution I came up with.

After that I noticed that I tend to think in an OOP kinda way and had to remind myself to apply it only in this particular area, otherwise it could get a little mixed up. (I won't go into detail about ECS here, cause I dont know if anyone is interested in it as it is still uncommon. If you want to hear more of it, just let me know.)

In the next devlog I will share the challenges we face with this type of battlefield.

And here is someone new ready for the combat (WIP)! See you next time 

   

[faborro]

Hi there,
let's talk about the battlefield and the challenges we faced with it.
The main source of difficulty were the sizes of the characters. We want the characters to be different in size, that also means that some characters are much taller than a battle tile. That resulted in problems regarding the right perspective. When the player character, for example, attacks with the flamethrower, it appears above the actual row. The solution we came up with is to highlight the affected tiles so it becomes obvious where the attack will hit. We decided to use this method only in situations where confusion might arise and left out the cases in which a normal shadow had the desired effect (see gift in gif ).The slash is an example where neither the highlights nor the shadow is needed, because it is clear where the attack will hit.

We also had to consider the relationship between the characters in terms of their sizes. A two-tiles tall character that is located in front of a one-tile tall character would complete cover the small one. A possible solution would be to change the x position of the characters so they appaer slighlty offset.




Since the holidays are just around the corner, of course we also like to send you warm christmas wishes. Happy holidays!