So this morning I took footage of what I did last night…  I hooked up all the UI, did full dungeon population, created health, attack and defense pickups, along with crystals that you will collect to create boss-defeating bombs.  There’s no boss in this video, but he’s out there… somewhere.
I’m still in the midst of Day 4, but I started adding in sight-blocking foliage and created the graphics and basic scripting for a multi-part boss.
I just came to the realization that I think I’m kinda making Sinistar as a Roguelike… and I’m totally fine with this.
I kicked off Day 3 with a couple hours before work.  Yesterday and today I got in:
Coming along well.  I still need an item system to drive gameplay, a UI to support it, and a lot more interesting world.
Because you asked for it. Â Smell the quality of a day of work.
Is it me or does every group activity on the internet have an impenetrable acronym?  Well, 7DRL is the International 7-Day Roguelike Challenge for 2015.  Day one and I’ve got a rando warrior ambling around slaying bears…  despite the ridiculously beautiful Seattle weekend peeking in through the study window. (guh)
The old-school sprite art was purchased for a very reasonable $35 from Oryx…  Granted, his popularity means I am using the same damn art as something like 40-50 games on Steam right now.  If you’ve frequented Steam sales, you’ve seen this guy a lot lately…
Luckily Unity can help me set apart the experience a little visually, including a trick learned from folks at Unite 2014.  I also picked up a small dungeon generator library at a recent Asset Store sale, but the coding style is so different from the way I like to work, I’m not sure any of it’s going to get used…  Such is the way of buying script plugins.
The goal of Huge is to create an experience I’ve toyed with over the years, which is to have a large, unbeatable creature wandering the dungeon, until the player manages to collect the means to defeat him.  We’ll see if I can get something big and not derpy…  Ideally you should fear its approach.  I’ll try to keep info posted here and in my 7DRL entry.
It’s been a while since I’ve last updated, and in the interim I’ve toyed with a number of different game mechanics, from vehicle combat to a simple artillery system, all of which have helped me slowly get back into programming.  C# is definitely less hardcore than what I dealt with 10 years ago, but paired with all the Unity features it puts me right at the level of complexity I’m after…  I can gloss over noodley trivialities like building dynamic lists or parsing input files and get right to gameplay.
But developing in Unity can have something of a…  “momentum” to it, and despite my vow make small finishable stuff, recently I’ve kept putting time into a single project.  I wanted to keep things ugly so as to not limit my ability to create gameplay, but thanks to that damn asset store and a few bucks it was just so easy to get some assets and start to make things looking pretty good.  On the upside, having better art inspired me fictionally and prodded me to do a bit more worldbuilding.  While I do still need to get some fundamental gameplay hooked up and purge the few remaining test sprites that I don’t own, it’s coming along all right in the meantime:
Hey, did I mention that my buddy Jim Shepard has finally finished his epic, Dungeonmans, and it is fully purchasable on Steam?
He’s done such an amazing job…  I spent a few weeks helping out a little on traps when I was awaiting a move to San Francisco back in 2010, and it was the very thing that made me realize how much I had missed game coding.  I can’t lay any claim at all to the final product because probably 1% of the code I wrote back then made it into the final product, but it was a meaningful moment to me nonetheless.
Back in November, Jim and his long-distance contributors/friends decided to gather in Seattle for a week-long push to get Dungeonmans that much closer to the finish line.  I put in a day or two (as a designer this time) and helped create a couple of “master dungeons”, and it was amazing to see how much the game had improved over time.
The coolest part was having an honest-to-god game studio, Adventurepro, in my basement for a week!  These are amazing guys, each with years and years of grizzled veteranmancy (a word I just crafted now) behind them…  They deserve every new success.
With my terrible computer issues, I decided to change my 1GAM plans for March into a card game while my machine…  reformats, re-activates the reactor core, vents smoke, whatever the heck it needs.
I’ve been toying with the idea of a Tower Defense card game based on Defense Grid for a while now. Â I can’t really release anything “official” since it’s not a Hidden Path project, but here’s a peek:
If for some sick reason you like spreadsheets as much as I do, click below:
