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[Bishop]

Hey. I made the game Trash TV years ago, it flopped and I was heartbroken for several years. Today I rekindle my boyhood dreams and embark on smashing Slay the Spire and FTL together into a deck builder roguelike where you collect cards to help you blow up ships or just lock all the doors and watch everyone burn inside.

If anyone has any name suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

[Bishop]

For the moment I'm trying to focus on the visual style as I'm still fairly unsure if it'll be 2D or 3D.

Visually I'm aiming for something like the pointclouds in Watch_Dogs or akind to this image https://d2rormqr1qwzpz.cloudfront.net/photos/2015/08/27/80178-lidar.jpg

I think it's important to think about the technology in the games universe and what's actually happening, so my idea is that at first we have a pointcloud which could be like an xray or long range sonar bouncing off all the major components.

Then we could have a wireframe-like blueprint view imposed over the top, a database of known ship schematics overlayed.

After this the ships own internal cameras can finally be superimposed to give a rendered, coloured in view.

I've got a rough around the edges implementation of this the video below. It uses a stencil buffer and projector in Unity to decide whether to show the camera footage or default to the ghostly blueprint.





Feedback greatly appreciated!

[Bishop]

Progressing the art style but it's still trying to properly find its feet.

The point cloud now updates with a slow pulse to give the feeling of it being a radar-like scan.

The ghostly blueprint view now loads in over time although it does just kinda look like the assets are taking a while to load in the game rather than in the universe.

Finally the CCTV cameras are enabled one at a time.

Also to sell the idea that the full color images come from the cameras I've started playing around with a static noise effect that can be applied per CCTV. As the player deals damage to a room we can increase the static, which is a nice diagetic effect with some real meaning in gameplay.





I think the cameras need to be called out more though, I may label them with actual words in the UI.

[Bishop]

Starting to flesh out more of the gameplay systems.

Added the concept of fires, crew and firefighting today.

I've made it so that the crew can move from room to room after each card is played and I think later this will really open up interesting gameplay options. Currently they simply move to any room that is on fire but we can imagine with the simple addition of a card that lock down rooms how this or one that raises false alarms can open up a wide variety of scenarios.

Then once the player ends their turn crew have a chance to fire fight or make repairs.

The UI for it is awful but you can also see the player now has health and each room will count down to activating its function, so turrets fire and stasis rooms wake up a new crew member.

[Bishop]

Started to add more visual feedback into actually playing a card, experimenting with making certain objects in the room rigid bodies that respond to impacts and fire effects.