Ganymede Gate - Sci-fi roguelike (Alpha7)

[chiguireitor]

Hi all! I've been a little shy here and just realized that i was posting on the wrong sub-forum. The Incubator seems rather dead and there's a lot of action going on here on early dev.

Ganymede Gate

Download the ASCII version on Itch.io

A Sci-fi futuristic game: you're exploring a human base on Ganymede that stopped communicatin home several months ago, there were some promising experiments with AI-bio engineering, but things seem to have went horribly wrong. The jovian moon is set to be nuked, but as the sole member on the UN board against this procedure you blast off with a team to the base to find out what happened and prevent the disaster taking place.

The game features multiplayer gameplay, turn based and *realtime* (don't hate me, just optional) modes, procedural weapon creation and will feature in the near future procedural monster creation, procedural quest lines, daily runs and support for multiple client technologies.

Currently, the game plays on the browser (you need a fairly recent browser with WebGL and WebSockets support) and the server runs on Node.js. The code is up on Github with the latest semi-stable release and support for npm deployment with the command "npm install MultiRL".

Current demo instance running on an Openshift server



Currently the game has 0 analytics (neither client nor server side) so, if you run into a bug or have suggestion just reply here and i'll be sure to reply asap.

[chiguireitor]

--Reserved for troubleshooting--

[chiguireitor]

New release - Alpha 7.

What's in?

• New UI in-game, less clutter, more game real-state.
• Better class selection screen, now you have idea of what you're selecting.​
• Better turn scheduling.
• Ambient sounds, and some new sounds.
• In-game shortcuts to inventory items.
• Traps.
• Better mouse support, you gotta try it!.
• Better colors for in-game items.

If anything crops up, don't hesitate to contact me.

[chiguireitor]

This week some UI work was done for the tiles version (tentatively named Ganymede Gate DX).







UI work, as a lot of people now, is one of the most daunting tasks, filled with seemingless innocuous and repetitive tasks that need to be done in order to get a good UI/UX.

Nice thing is, all the UI fits a 256x256 texture. Sprites + Fonts + Tiles + UI are about 151 Kb, which is nice and doesn't adds too much bloat besides the nasty 70Mb of runtime i have to carry with NW.js Will see in the far future if i can compile my own NW.js with a reduced feature set.

[chiguireitor]

Shader configuration and window resizing is done!

Check it out on youtube!

[chiguireitor]

Been working on the new UI (which is, arguably, the most boring part of game development). I need to polish it a lot because my UI/UX was lacking.

Today began working on some icons for the special abilities, still monochrome, will have them slightly colored later:



Also, the charselect screen is taking shape nicely, the empty space at the right is where the special abilities will be shown:

[Avagart]

Been working on the new UI (which is, arguably, the most boring part of game development).

Definitely yes. And it's a bit challanging (maybe only for me, dunno)

[chiguireitor]

Been working on the new UI (which is, arguably, the most boring part of game development).

Definitely yes. And it's a bit challanging (maybe only for me, dunno)

It is very challenging, specially because there are so many other cools one would be rather doing, but a good UI/UX is basically a make it or break it scenario for most games, and differentiation comes a lot with polishing.

[chiguireitor]

Perk icons on action:

[chiguireitor]

This week i finally began integrating the new frontend to the game engine. It is chugging right along, but real-life is proving it harder to develop everyday.



(Missing here are the enemies, items and several props note rendering, because of implementation not being done yet)

Gamepad Support: One thing that was surprisingly easy to do is implement the input handling from gamepads. As the game is HTML5 based, there's an array and an event that alerts you from gamepads, and then you poll it every frame for changes. Nothing complicated, nothing too involved:

Code: [Select]

var gamepads = navigator.getGamepads()
Is enough to give a gamepad array with objects that are pretty self explanatory.

Here's me moving the player with a controller.

A nice thing is that playing with a gamepad feels nice, and lot of people like it that way. I will try to test support with as much controllers i can get hold of. Here's hoping i can get a Steam controller eventually.

[akeley]

A nice thing is that playing with a gamepad feels nice, and lot of people like it that way

And a lot of people - majority in the RL world probably - still considers gamepads as console heresy. It`s an understandable old habit/sentiment, however gamepad (with a good d-pad) is superior to all other forms of control input, it`s just ergonomics.

Xbox controller seems to be a standard these days on PCs (even though its d-pad sucks), if you adjust for that you should cover the majority I suppose (I use PS3 gamepad but through Xbox wrapper) Not sure about the Steam one - these haptic "pads" seem ill-suited for RL gameplay, bit like touch screen control.

Didn`t I play this game some months before, in some kind of online MP edition? I like the premise...carnage and sci fi setting is nice. Font bit too small atm and the "double" option don`t seem to work. I like your gfx style too. When`s the next release planned?

[chiguireitor]

A nice thing is that playing with a gamepad feels nice, and lot of people like it that way

And a lot of people - majority in the RL world probably - still considers gamepads as console heresy. It`s an understandable old habit/sentiment, however gamepad (with a good d-pad) is superior to all other forms of control input, it`s just ergonomics.

Indeed, this is probably the feeling of the majority that already are on the roguelike bandwagon. However, i'm intending to open up the game genre a bit to the "masses" so people that don't usually play roguelikes can get a hang of it. And yeah, gamepads are ill suited for some genres, but roguelikes shouldn't shun them because their ergonomics help on long sessions where you can relax your arms a bit and play comfortably.

Didn`t I play this game some months before, in some kind of online MP edition? I like the premise...carnage and sci fi setting is nice. Font bit too small atm and the "double" option don`t seem to work. I like your gfx style too. When`s the next release planned?

Probably, the online mp edition is on the official site http://ganymedegate.com (bound to be changed when there's the first DX release). I'm doing dual releases: an ASCII-only version that's open souce in the most liberal license (MIT) and the DX-sprite-semi-closed-source (some parts are copyrighted, some will be released under MIT too) that will be available on Steam eventually when i start the campaign and it gets greenlit.

I'm targetting monthly releases, most releases of the open source version i'm putting on itch.io, and this DX version will get its first alpha probably next month, properly announced on all possible channels. There's a mailing list on the official page where i announce releases too.

[Legend]

Quote
A nice thing is that playing with a gamepad feels nice, and lot of people like it that way

And a lot of people - majority in the RL world probably - still considers gamepads as console heresy. It`s an understandable old habit/sentiment, however gamepad (with a good d-pad) is superior to all other forms of control input, it`s just ergonomics.

Indeed, this is probably the feeling of the majority that already are on the roguelike bandwagon. However, i'm intending to open up the game genre a bit to the "masses" so people that don't usually play roguelikes can get a hang of it. And yeah, gamepads are ill suited for some genres, but roguelikes shouldn't shun them because their ergonomics help on long sessions where you can relax your arms a bit and play comfortably.

I definitely appreciate gamepad support. Aside from becoming more accessible to the "masses", it also opens things up to those who have situational constraints which may actually make them more likely to play games with a gamepad as opposed to keyboard only.

I actually play many roguelikes using keyboard mapping software like xpadder and joy2key. Infra Arcana, DoomRL, and Frozen depths for instance are quite easy to do so with their limited command set and the ability to scroll through ,enus with arrow keys and make selections with enter.

The best way I found for movement, is to separate the cardinal directions on the left joystick, and the diagonals on the right joystick. Using the dpad itself to be able to map to other functions.

[chiguireitor]

...
The best way I found for movement, is to separate the cardinal directions on the left joystick, and the diagonals on the right joystick. Using the dpad itself to be able to map to other functions.

Interesting combination. Do you use your diagonals as "diagonal" joystick movements? or cardinal movements are mapped to diagonals on that second joy?

[Legend]

Interesting combination. Do you use your diagonals as "diagonal" joystick movements? or cardinal movements are mapped to diagonals on that second joy?

I use the actual diagonal directions for movement.

At first I tried mapping all 8 directions to a single joystick, but because of the nature of analogue joysticks, it was rather difficult to move without accidentally registering going down-left for instance as either just down or just left. Then I went to mapping cardinals to the dpad and diagonals to one joystick. Then both joysticks since it just felt more natural and often needed more buttons to be mapped which was more comfortable on the dpad directions.

This leaves a xbox360 or Logitech f310 as I have with full 8 way movement and a minimum of 16 usable buttons. And even more if needed by adding a "shift" function to one of the buttons. Which makes it so if I hold it down, then all the other buttons change their mapping functions as assigned.

The big hurdle to this is if menus cannot be navigated by cursor and enter keys. The secondary downside is There can be quite a few functions to try and memorize which button is programmed to do what. It can take a good bit of time to set it up intuitively.