Hi everybody. Star Ronin is developing rapidly, and I barely had time to get this version cleaned up in time for the Debut Festival, hosted by the lovely people at Gamedev.ist!
This is a major update of Star Ronin's core systems, and I hope that people will give it a go.
But first! I want to give a major shoutout to Debut Festival for giving this little game a chance. Thanks so much! If anybody out there knows of other game-related festivals or shows I should consider participating in, please let me know.
Changelog
Full Saves
The biggest single change to the game is what I'm calling "full saves". Basically, saving and loading a game (including this Demo) works like you'd expect in most video games. You can save during a level, and everything will be exactly the same as when you left things when you reload!
You're probably thinking, "well, gosh, that's kind of standard behavior, what's the big deal". Well, if you're a nerd and you're reading this... it is, in fact, a Big Deal, because the game is procedural.
Procedural games with giant maps like this are a special kind of pain to design a save / load feature for, because there are so many things that have to be accounted for.
Teleglitch and its nearest clone, EMPTY SHELL, both of which I recommend for people who like this Demo, both have the earlier save system for this game, which I describe as, "progress save".
In a "progress save", the user's save file contains things like the gear that they're carrying, loot, etc., but doesn't contain the actual instance of the procedural world. It can, but doesn't always, save the procedural seed number, so that the level is basically the same. But basically, reloading a save puts the user back at the beginning of the dungeon.
Anyhow, I've cracked this problem, and I think it works well enough that I'm putting it into this Demo build you have in front of you today.
When you play and quit to the main screen, you'll now see that you can load your game back up, just like most games. So, if you're struggling to make progress, or started this Demo shortly before bedtime, no worries, you can keep all your progress now.
Oh, and if you happen to be reading all this, and are a serious nerd... you can see the save-files for the level saves in:
C:\\Users\[b]your_user_id\\AppData\\Local\\StarRonin
These save files are written in straightforward JSON format (none of that is, or ever will be, encrypted, so feel free to cheat, if you're just dying to have all the current weapons), and can be read into any piece of software you want very easily.
It's possible that this could lead to a level-editor for the game, allowing people to make their own rooms or even whole dungeons. This isn't on the agenda just now, but perhaps later on. In general, the way the game's coded is becoming much more structured and amenable to a moddable approach under the hood.
Fast Travel
Another thing that comes up in games with big, procedural levels is the lack of a coherent fast-travel system. We've all played Roguelike games where there are times when the player has to spend tedious amounts of their time re-traversing the world.
Classic Rogue tried to solve that problem by having a hunger mechanic; if the player didn't find their next meal, they would die, so thorough exploration had to be balanced against hunger. Ever since then, we've seen a lot of different mechanical approaches to reducing the tedium of having to re-traverse large areas that are now looted.
In early versions of this game, thankfully before anybody here saw them, I didn't even have any enemies respawn, and the level that you're able to play here in the Demo was waaaaaaay bigger than it is today.
My publisher at the time insisted that people needed a nice, short level to feel happy about winning it in an evening, and besides which, why give away so much of the game- I will probably undo this change later, as I think the rest of the game adds so much more that it'll be worth your hard-earned money).
The Fast Travel system is basically borrowed from Bethesda's classic system, which debuted in Oblivion, with a couple of minor twists.
Essentially, if there's a Fast Travel point in the game-world, the player stands on it for a moment, and then it's activated. Once active, the player can open the game's map (via ESC) and select any active point. Upon returning to the game, the player is now in the new place. This system is simple, it doesn't break procedural systems, and it's compatible with savegames; if you've unlocked a Fast Travel point in a recent save, it'll generally stay unlocked.
Crafting Sort
My son (who made most of the lovely music in this game) and I are both people who suffer a bit from Choice Anxiety in videogames.
For those not familiar with the term, we're people who recognize that using up resources to, say, buy or craft something in a game may represent an important choice about a character build. But when given lots and lots of choices, it becomes hard to choose; people's brains shut down a bit, fearing to make the "wrong" choice in-game.
This doesn't sound much fun, but I wanted lots and lots of variety, in terms of what people could do (and by the time the game is really finished, I expect that list will be a lot longer than it is today).
To help people out a bit, I've introduced a series of filters for crafting when using the Crafting Machine during the Demo, that should help a bit.
Stealth System Revamp
It was obvious from early gameplay of the stealth system with people who haven't played this before that it needed more work. Basically, people couldn't tell when they were "in stealth" or when they were in combat and needed to go hide.
I've introduced several changes to help. The biggest is that there's a nice, big meter on the right side of the game's main UI, just above the game's log / pickup system. It'll clearly tell you how noisy you've been lately, and whether anything is mad at you.
More subtle changes include how the AI judges whether it can "hear" the player, little tweaks to how it all looks visually, and so forth. The stealth system in this game is quite fun, if you can figure out how to use it (for example, in the Demo, it's quite possible to make a "stealth archer" build that can one-shot most of the enemies) but I recognized that it still needed improvement. I'll probably come back to it for even more polish later on, when the rest of the game is feeling solid.
Improved Particle Trails
This goes into the category of, "boring but important thing most people wouldn't notice", but I've rewritten the particle trail system so that it's faster and has a couple of different modes now, which I'll call, "fancy" and "basic".
Both systems are quite a lot faster, and if you go into the game's Options, feel free to crank up the number of Trails. On my system, 120 trails being created all at once barely pushed framerates under 60, so I think it's fair to say that most people will have good results.
Other Changes
The game uses a new font for most texts, that I think is more readable at various resolutions.
The game's main landing screen has been changed. A fancy animated version is coming, but this will do for now.
Little rebalance touches to many pieces of gear.
Lots of textual changes, to make it a little cleaner.
The Tutorial covers how Fast Travel and the Map works.
Tutorial can now be skipped entirely, if you just want to screw around and find out (note: new players, don't do that, lol; this is a lot more complex of a game than you think).
Monsters should not get "stuck" on each other nearly as often, in comical-looking ways (hey, there's nothing like seeing a couple of robot tanks seemingly in a permanent love-hug, but it does kind of break the illusion that they're semi-sentient death machines).