This devlog will be a text version of my video devlog, if you'd like to watch that. check the video below:
In this devlog I'll be going over the current gameplay loop, rare enemies, overall progress, and a look into what a rough timeline will be like. My next goal has been to participate in the steam bash bash festival September 18th. I've done my research thanks to extremely helpful resources on howtomarketagame.com, festivals are HUGE for indie games (or can be huge) so I really want to get a demo out.
Before I explain what I've been working on, Let me give you a general idea of everything that needs to be completed in order to submit for that which is in 1 Month. (Sept 19th)
Gameplay lop variants on stage progression. Rare enemies. Enemy spawning algorithm. Enemy Scaling, a huge balance pass, item implementations, one more boss, more boss attacks, a survival stage, settings menu, main menu, and last but not least... Sound effects.... for literally everything... of which there is a massive list...
But heres the good news, all this is doable and to prove that, in the two weeks since releasing the trailer, here's what Ive got working so far.
Previously, In all devlogs, videos and even the trailer, levels were static, they were set and saved and i manually placed enemies, items and such around, Its a bit of smoke and mirrors all games do in development, but one of the main reasons I felt fine doing this was converting this over to procedurally was ALWAYS the goal, so it was baked in I just had to actually do it.
The first thing I had to do was pull out all static elements in the scene, pretty simple, then I had to make a mesh for the entreance and exit, and update the mesh generator to get the information about the hole in the ceiling and floor to position them. Now that we have a fully section off entrence, exit and level, It was time to make it all loop.
Generally, All levels in THE PIT will have at least 3 qualifications for progressing. Killing the boss, Disabling the barrier over the exit, and one other random objective that will change per map, things like Kill a certain number of enemies, find certain objects, or activate certain structures. So the most important one was the teleporter, and the boss.
Ive had the boss(es) for a bit as you've seen in my other videos and trailer, but mainly all i had to do was set up a coroutine and VFX to spawn him in, additionally I had to add a reverse hitbox to the barrier, to show how close it is to breaking. Once both are eleiminated the portal opens, and you descend a long pit to the selection area.
The selection arera has two holes the player can choose from which will dictate what kind of area they will go into next. Additionally, there will be a shop in this area where the player can choose items as a reward for clearing the stage, but thats not quite done yet.
Then the last thing I needed to do was add a trigger on the portals and the loop was done, for testing purposes I simply reloaded you into the same stage, but that was good enough. Next up was to preform this procedural on all 4 stages so far and make sure the generator properly generated elements on each, and used the same seed. Which wasn't much work.
So now, gameplay loop mostly done. I then started working on a character select menu, the character select menu is pretty self explainitory, and I think i'm going to go with a 3d UI for all my UI's besides the settings menu, cuz I like the look. Here you will get all descriptions of the characters movesets.
With that done, up next was probably the least fun i've ever had in game development.... a settings menu...
Its not that I don't like UI work, its just with a settings menu, every single option requires its own implementation. A lot of what GOOD programming is about is minimizing repeated code or specific implementations and having solutions that work for any input. But this.... was just greuling work... every single seperate option has its own if/else case... but after 2 days of work, we have working settings. I plan to add more configuration because I believe an important part of a good game is the ability to customize your controls to your exact taste, modify the camera settings, change the controls, change the sensitivity, its your experience, i'm not going to force you to play a way if you don't like it.
Moving a step back from there was the Main menu. If you're not familiar with the lore, all 6 of the masters so far have been imprisoned so the main menu area is of their containment zone. The first thing I did was implement the main main menu options, including the main mode, descent, a secondary mode gauntlet which is infinitely increasing survival, and the upgrades zone which is where all the meta-progression from the game will come in. And then just options for settings, and a quit button (please don't click it)
I then moved on to the survival stage itself, to pull back some of the game dev smoke and mirrors, each stage isn't actually fully solid, on the edges it sort of just drops off, but since you are in the center, that is fine. But for the survival stage I wanted the possibility of the player dying from being knocked off the stage, so i had to tweak my noise generator to specifically close off the mesh. After tweaking the materials, Ive got a survival stage with a portal up top.
So up till now, I had manually placed packs of monsters around to test, fight and record with, now I needed to write a spawning algorithm to generate packs of enemies progressively. To start this off I'm going to handle difficulty the same way Risk of Rain does, which is in essence what most games do just obfiscated away. The longer the game does, the more difficult it gets. Simple enough yea?
So Each enemy is assigned a difficulty rating, then as time goes on, it checks if there is un-filled difficulty, and spawns a random set of enemies, It then repeats this process until enemies fill the area up to this difficulty. This makes it so i can tailor certain monsters to only spawn in smaller packs, or spawn large groups of enemies at will.
One of my biggest pet peeves with risk of rain 2 is the waiting..... sometimes 15 minutes into a game of risk of rain... you're literally just waiting for enemies to spawn. I want the areas you do into to feel alive, filled. This is the domain of the biblical enemies you are fighting, not just an empty area where I spawn enemies next to you. So ideally, my goal is when you drop in to a new area, the area is filled with small packs of enemies based on how many stages you've been through. Then as you progress through, more and more spawn in order to keep up the pressure.
Lastly, I started the proper implementation of rare enemies.
I really like this design in path of exile, and feel risk of rain's is a bit limited. So I pulled that system out, and put it here to ee how it will go. Most of the enemies once you play enough become pretty formulaic... you learn how to dodge them. Rare enemies however will attack at different rates, move faster, have more heath, and sometimes have devestating effects like 100% crit chance to really make sure you are dodging them.
Overall, I want the game to not feel static, even though its fully procedural, procedurally only goes so far when the things in the procedural worlds are the same. So this will keep you on your toes.
So thats all for now, All that was done in the span of under 2 weeks so filling in all the remaining work needed t oget a basic alpha demo up and ready for the demo should be possible! So if you're interested in playing an early demo of the game wishlist the game! Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next time.