Messages

1

7DRLs / Re: Orb Temple [7DRL 2017] Failure

« on: March 13, 2017, 02:17:03 AM »

Well, I've participated in 3 7DRL challenges, and my record is now 2 for 3. 

My 3 day business trip turned into a 6 day business trip. The timing couldn't possibly have been worse. Well, what are you going to do? Have to get that paycheck to keep the lights on.

Unfortunately, I barely had any time to put a game together as a result of this last minute business trip. All I have managed to do in the evenings after work is create a barely playable prototype.

My current plan is to try to do my 7DRL sometime this spring instead. I know it won't count for the official 7DRL challenge, but whatever, I'll just do it for fun.

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7DRLs / Re: Orb Temple [7DRL 2017]

« on: March 09, 2017, 01:35:40 AM »

Ugh, I got called on an emergency business trip to LA yesterday and I'm going to be here for the rest of the week (at least). I'm going to lose 4 solid days because of this. At most, I'll have this upcoming weekend to try to eek out some basic skeleton of a game in time for the deadline. I might be making a 2DRL this year. 

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7DRLs / Re: Orb Temple [7DRL 2017]

« on: March 04, 2017, 10:55:39 PM »

GitHub repo created: https://github.com/TheSleevePSU/7DRL_2017

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7DRLs / Orb Temple [7DRL 2017] Failure

« on: March 04, 2017, 09:28:57 PM »

Well, I've decided that I'm going to attempt another 7DRL this year. This will be my third time participating.

Orb Temple (name subject to change) is going to use some of the ideas from my previous 7DRLs, Rogue Space Marine (2015) and Helix (2016).

Like my previous games, this will be a boiled down game with heavy emphasis on one hit-point tactical combat.

The basic concept is that the player is limited to two actions: move, or throw an orb. There are several types of orbs that can be thrown, each of which has varying effects, such as damage, stun, slow, repel, or confuse. The catch is that the player doesn't have control over which orb is thrown - the orbs will be queued up in a random order, sort of like the way blocks are queued up randomly in Tetris.

Here are some things I'd like to keep from my previous games:
- Bullet dodging
- Turn based mechanics with a real-time "feel"
- Cool-down timers on abilities
- Densely packed levels that thrust the player into immediate combat
- Punishingly high difficulty but hopefully a high level of replayability

Things that I'd like to improve upon from my previous games:
- More "readable" game state so that it is clear to the player if their attack will hit or miss
- More "readable" game state so that it is clear to the player if they will be hit on the next turn
- No crashes on level loading! (Helix was prone to this...)

I will likely be collaborating with a coworker of mine (Blake Barrett). He showed interest in learning Unity so we decided to team up. In the past, I've done my 7DRLs solo, but I thought it would be fun to try one out in a small group.

Planning on starting maybe Sunday.

-Brett Gildersleeve

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7DRLs / Re: Helix [7DRL 2016 - Success]

« on: March 21, 2016, 06:18:41 PM »

Thanks kipar,

Unfortunately, I haven't had much luck tracking down the bug that causes it to crash when loading a new level. It crashes sometimes, and not other times. This is my first time using Unity, so I'm sure I'm missing some small thing that is causing this bug.

The later levels step up the difficulty quite a bit, but the basic concept of the game doesn't change. The level generation stays the same, and there are no new abilities or power-ups for the player. It just gets harder. I didn't have time to make an interesting progression as the player completes each level, sorry.

Maybe I will work on a post-7DRL update that addresses some of these problems.

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7DRLs / Re: Helix [7DRL 2016 - Success]

« on: March 15, 2016, 03:36:19 AM »

I just recorded a quick tutorial video showing how the game is played. Also added it to the top post. Check it out!

https://youtu.be/TwJN8a8Kymg

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7DRLs / Re: Helix [7DRL 2016 - Success]

« on: March 13, 2016, 11:58:10 PM »

OK, I finished up a few hours before the deadline. Man, I'm tired. The game is OK, a bit buggy, but OK. I achieved the following personal goals:

• Finish within the deadline
• Learn enough C# to make a decent game
• Get familiar with Unity
• Code my own game manager, state machines, and pathfinding
• Don't rely on any external code libraries except the main Unity API
• Create a game with a unique mechanic (rotating moves, move queues)
• Have fun and don't run myself too ragged

So, if you consider those goals, then it was a great success!

Some regrets:

• The game is not very deep
• I would have liked to make smarter AI and more enemy types
• Attacks and abilities are limited
• Level generation is pretty boring
• It is similar in many ways to my 2015 7DRL, Rogue Space Marine, even though I coded it from scratch
• Players will potentially discover some bugs

Well, I guess that's what you sign up for with one of these challenges. It was a good experience anyway.

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7DRLs / Re: Helix [7DRL 2016]

« on: March 13, 2016, 05:43:44 AM »

Day 5+6: OK, here's what I have working now:

• Actions (moves, attacks) are generated as a list and you get little graphical previews in the corner of the screen showing you which moves are coming up, like in Tetris. Come to think of it, I think Tetris was one of my main inspirations for this game, subconsciously.
• Enemies have state machines so they can patrol, hunt, attack.
• Enemies display thought bubbles that show what state they are in.
• Game loop has been refined and the game flows pretty well between states without bugs now.
• Enemy behavior is generalized. I just need to expand it to create multiple enemy types.
• I implemented pathfinding from scratch. Enemies can now use line of sight and pathfinding to hunt you down.
• Exploding barrels now damage the player and enemies.

I still don't have level generation, which is the last big thing remaining. That, and difficulty progression.

Due to the fact that I had to spend so much time coding the basic game systems, it left me very little time to actually create a game. I'm OK with that. My real goal, as I've stated before, was to learn C# and Unity.

In any case, since I have very little time left, I'm going to make this a single-screen, arena style game where the goal is to defeat all enemies. After defeating the enemies, the screen clears and a new level is generated with more difficult enemies. This is what I will work to implement tomorrow up until the deadline. More enemies, some basic level generation, and some sense of difficulty progression.

Here's a screenshot showing the current state of the game:

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7DRLs / Re: Helix [7DRL 2016]

« on: March 11, 2016, 02:44:56 PM »

Day 4:
OK, now a few more things are taking form. Collision detection is working, and players can generate projectiles (fireballs for now) that can collide with enemies and cause damage. The bare bones of an actual game are starting to come into focus.

Quick demo here: https://twitter.com/TheSleevePSU/status/708152640421634048

My deadline for finishing is basically late night on Sunday, so I have the whole weekend to work on this project. It's a little disheartening that I am still working on very basic concepts like movement and attacks, but hopefully I can pick up the pace and get a real game in place this weekend.

Thanks for the suggestion Gornova. I'll think about it. Right now, I'm trying to get the basic systems in place, but I'll consider that as the game gets more fleshed out.

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7DRLs / Re: Helix [7DRL 2016]

« on: March 10, 2016, 04:48:25 AM »

Day 3:
Again, very little progress to actually show. Most of the progress came from improvements "under the hood" in the framework. Players and enemies are now aware of each other and will move in a somewhat intelligent fashion, being blocked by walls and other actors.

Here's a quick video showing very simple movement going on.
https://t.co/mZ1yWBfxW4

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7DRLs / Re: Helix [7DRL 2016]

« on: March 09, 2016, 05:02:59 AM »

Thanks, Gornova.

Day 2:
I was able to spend another 3 hours coding tonight. I made some small progress:

• Player can now input moves using the keyboard.
• Enemy units have a very simple AI that makes them move in a random direction.
• The game controller state machine executes the moves at the right time.

So, the turn system I want is now in place and running.  No, it's not a lot of progress, but it's something.

I got hung up when trying to implement generic lists to track the types of moves the player can execute. C# is a language I haven't used very much, so part of the problem is trying to wrap my head around new ways of creating data structures. I'm going to open my C# reference tonight before I go to bed and see if I can find some insight there.

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7DRLs / Re: Helix [7DRL 2016]

« on: March 08, 2016, 05:16:14 AM »

Note - I started working late Sunday night, so that was kind of Day 0. Today is the real Day 1.

Day 1: Worked at the office from 8:00 to 18:00, went jogging, finally sat down to code from 21:00 until 00:10.
I have no real progress to show today. I ripped out all of my code from yesterday and basically started from scratch... AGAIN.
I now have a game controller singleton with a state machine. It tracks the player's turns and enemy turns, as well as other active objects in the scene like projectiles or traps.
I also have pseudo code for most of the basic behavior of the game, and now it's just a matter of translating that into C#, a new language for me, and getting it to run in Unity.

Since I'm focusing primarily on learning a new language and engine this year, I doubt my game will be all that great, but I'm having fun and learning a lot, so, mission accomplished (so far).
Still planning on pulling an LD48-style weekend from Friday evening until Sunday late night, so maybe I'll pull off something great in the 11th hour. We shall see.

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7DRLs / Re: Helix [7DRL 2016]

« on: March 07, 2016, 04:48:04 AM »

I started working a few hours ago. I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to approach this game. Here are the approaches I considered:

• Use the codebase of my 7DRL from last year and change the mechanics to create new gameplay. I ultimately decided against this because the code is an awful mess and I didn't want to have to revisit it.
• Start a project from scratch in Unity. This was appealing because I'd like to get proficient at C# and learn the Unity engine. However, this clearly has a huge learning curve and includes the risk that I don't finish in time.
• Use an existing framework. I actually dropped $30 on a framework called Rog in the Unity Asset Store, but after several hours of reading through the source code, I realized that it is locked into a very traditional set of gameplay mechanics and it is very tightly coupled, making it painful to hack out the parts that I need. Oh well, maybe I can use this in the future, but not this year.
• Start from scratch in GameMaker, which I have some experience with, but try to create some really unique game mechanics that differ greatly from my entry last year.

After a long, painful period of indecisiveness, I decided that I'll just make something from scratch in Unity. As such, I doubt this year's entry will have anywhere near the level of polish that the game I made last year did. In any case, the goal for me is to have fun and learn something. So, I'm going to try to get proficient at Unity, regardless of if the game turns out well or not.

After just a few hours, here's what I have so far:


Quick video showing how the attack square (red) rotates based on the facing direction of the character:
https://youtu.be/qSygxigXrYw

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7DRLs / Helix [7DRL 2016 - Success]

« on: March 04, 2016, 07:30:30 PM »

[Success]

Well, I finished. I'd call this a partial success. The game is playable but not as polished as I'd like. If you somehow manage to beat the last level, level, the game might crash. But, at that point, the game is over anyway! Hopefully there aren't any other glaring bugs.

Here's a quick tutorial video: https://youtu.be/TwJN8a8Kymg

Here's the download link: https://thesleeve.itch.io/helix

What follows below is my original post:

-------------------------------------

Last year, I made Rogue Space Marine for the 2015 7DRL Challenge.

For this year's challenge, I'm planning on doing another game, tentatively called Helix. The general idea is that the player has a limited number of moves which are "jumps" that form a particular shape. To get an idea of what I'm talking about, think about the knight in a game of chess. The knight can move two squares forward and one to the side, for example. Similarly, Helix will feature a collection of randomly-generated multi-jump moves and attacks that can be rotated 90, 180, or 270 degrees.

A few other notes:

• I'm using this as an opportunity to learn Unity. I made my game in GameMaker last year and I thought it would be fun to try something new.
• I'm planning on using one-hit mechanics similar to my game from last year
• I will probably use the same tileset and artwork. Sorry! The focus here is really more about coming up with new and interesting game play.

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7DRLs / Re: Rogue Space Marine (7DRL 2015) (Success)

« on: April 23, 2015, 01:49:01 PM »

Hi everybody,

I recently made a few post-7DRL updates to the game and I wanted to share them with you.

The new version is available here: http://thesleeve.itch.io/rogue-space-marine

16 March 2015: Several bugs that would crash the game were discovered and fixed. The first one crashed the game if you had an active shield at the end of the level. The second was related to enemies that tried to attack you without a line of sight... the result of fixing that bug is that enemies now try to get a line of sight before attacking, which actually improves the gameplay in my opinion.

20 March 2015: Multiple level generation bugs fixed. There hopefully shouldn't be any more problems where a hallway to another room is blocked or there is a breach in the wall that allows enemies to walk out into space. The level generation is a bit complex, so I'm not certain that the bug is 100% fixed, but I think, at the very least, I made some improvements to prevent this bug from happening.

22 April 2015: Red alert respawning fixed. Originally, all dead enemies would respawn 10 seconds after the red alert sounded. This made finishing a level after the red alert nearly impossible. I wanted a red alert to create a very difficult situation for the player, but not an insurmountable challenge, so I randomized respawn times between 10 and 20 seconds to make it a little more fair.

22 April 2015: Ability description screen added. So many people asked what the different abilities do, especially the passive effects that are hard to understand, so I created a simple screen to explain. Press and hold F2 at any time to display the screen.


23 April 2015: Enemy patrolling fixed. There was a HUGE bug that I somehow never noticed in the enemy patrolling code, and this caused the enemies to all congregate in strange spots around the level. The result was that you might find several rooms completely empty, but then stumble on to a room with 30 enemies in it, because the enemies all decided to go to that one spot. I found the bug and I wasn't quite sure of the best way to fix it, so I eventually decided to make it so that enemies stay in their starting rooms when patrolling. I didn't have a lot of time to play-test this, but from my early observations, it seems to make the game more fun and balanced.

So, those are the updates I have made since release. It's worth noting that the core gameplay remains the same. The changes I have made are mostly just bug fixes, and even though some of those fixes resulted in slight gameplay improvements, it's still essentially the same game.

On another note, the rankings of the 2015 7DRL entries were just posted and my game ranked very highly, and I'm very honored by that. I just wanted to publicly thank everybody for playing my game. I put a lot of time and effort into it and I'm really glad that people seem to enjoy it.