Hello, world!
Hi everyone! This is our first-ever Steam post. In dev diaries like this, we will be going over some of the things we've been working on. Please make sure to drop your feedback below, we LOVE criticism.
What is Dungeon Tycoon?
Dungeon Tycoon is a management/strategy/tycoon game about building and managing your own dungeon. You will design layouts, hire monsters, fill your dungeon with loot, set up shops, and do much more. Dungeon Tycoon is all about attracting and making money off of adventurers all across the realm.
Build Mode Improvements
One of the things we struggled a lot in the past few weeks was the build mode. But we think it is at a fairly decent state right now. Our current build system allows you to create rectangular walls, place various objects like traps, enemies, and loot, and also change the floor design.
Here's a cool gif:
We've been also working on the UI but I think we still need to do some more experimenting to come up with a final design. Still, I don't really want to spend too much time on the UI this early into the development.
Hero AI
Heroes are the customers in Dungeon Tycoon. You have to make sure they keep coming and that they are having a good time. Building a scalable and clean structure for the hero AI is extremely crucial for us because these little adventurers are the key focal point of the game.
We have been working on the hero AI for a while now and I think it's shaping up quite nicely. For it to work, we are using a really neat framework that allows us to work with behavior trees.
With this system, building a complex hero AI becomes less of a headache. It still needs a lot of work but for now, it just works and that's all that matters.
Art
Even though the game is at a pretty early stage, we hate staring at untextured blocks. So I try to make sure that the art keeps up with the technical side of the game. Early art makes development easier since it allows us to picture the game more clearly, and also boosts our motivation quite a lot.
Here's a screenshot from the current version of the game. How do you like the look and feel of it?
I personally love the shader we have that makes the rooms with lots of fire in them look warmer by applying an orange filter. To achieve that effect, we simply create a volume inside the rooms and apply a simple color multiplier that dynamically changes depending on the amount of fire inside.
Another small but subtle detail I have implemented is the randomized textures. If you look closely, there is some slight variation in the texture of the walls and the floor tiles. I achieve this by creating a custom shader graph material that takes location as a seed and randomly selects a variant of the input textures depending on it.
Oh yeah, I also added moth for no reason. See if you can spot them.
That's All Folks!
That's it for this week. We have a lot more to show in the upcoming days so make sure you follow our Steam page and wishlist the game <3