Friday, September 26, 2014

Where we are with development, and other general stuff

Well, after four months of developing we have finally reached the development of the final boss level within the game, and you have no idea how happy I am. Last night I finished the implementation of the final boss, Nexrolis. In this post I'm just going to go over how the boss works, and show some pictures.

So, if you don't already know, the game we are working on is Floors of Discomfort. It is a roguelike dungeon crawler with a bit of platforming. The way the game works is that there are five levels leading up to a final boss fight. Throughout each level you have to collect coins then find a key that will allow you to advance to the next floor. Each floor has it's own theme and level of difficulty.

The sixth level is where the boss resides. He will be the final fight in the game and will result in beating the game if he is defeated. Nexrolis, as he is called,  has a three stage attack. He first executes his melee attack, a quick stab. If the play is close enough he will be dealt 10 damage.

Below is a picture of the stab:




Nothing too fancy about it, just a basic stab animation. Soon after though, he conducts his range attack, quite a bit more devastating than the previous attack. With this attack, Nexrolis casts a shadow skull at the player. The skull moves rather slow, but if it collides with the player it will deal it will deal 30 damage.

Below is a picture of the skull animation:



Nexrolis' final attack is the fire rain. The attack is pretty self explanatory,  he causes fire to rain from the sky. It is his most devastating attack, and hard to avoid, but it is possible. The goal in creating this game was to make it very hard, but possible to beat. When you die you should feel as though it was a mistake on your part, and not the game being unfair. Anyway, below is a picture of the final attack.




The animations are very smooth, and everything for the most part is working. There are still some things that need touching up, but I am very pleased with how everything came out.

Nexrolis isn't going to have a health bar, and there is no pushback when he is hit so we are going to have to figure out a system for giving the player some indication that he hurt Nexrolis because if not the boss fight won't feel right. Other than that, things are going well.


Looking forward there is still a lot to do, but not so much gameplay anymore, development is starting to move toward aesthetics now. The entire game needs to be scaled up because the scale is too small, that is going to be a project. A pause menu has to be implemented, an options menu, the backgrounds need to be animated. The core gameplay, however, is done and that is a huge milestone.

All in all things are progressing quite nicely. We are going to start work on the cutscenes and making the game look awesome and then it will be time for release! Things are moving very quickly, it's hard to believe that only a few months ago this game consisted of a bunch of squares moving around the screen... it's crazy.


Monday, September 15, 2014

Floors of Discomfort - What is being worked on now

After the previous post that I had published about minute ago, I decided to make this short post that will highlight the new features we plan on adding soon.

The first addition being a hot bar in order to map the player's items better and display it in a more logical way. What I am mean is, the play can go to the shop in order to buy weapons and spells of sorts. As of right now, those attacks are mapped to seemingly random keys that the player would never be able to figure out on his own without someone teaching him these buttons... Obviously this is not how it should be, so we have introduced the idea of the hot bar which will hold the spells and map the spell to one of the number keys. This is a change that we have wanted to make for a while, as it is an essential change, but only recently have we gotten around to it.

The next addition being a brand new enemy which will be the second enemy to reside on the bog level, which is the third floor. This enemy is named the Voodoo Master and he has the ability to teleport and shoot some type of arcane ball from his hand. We haven't yet worked out the specifics for that guy but the start of the animations are done so he will be thought out more and implemented.


The final addition that we plan on making is the final boss level. That also still needs to be thought out a bit but there is some idea for how he will work. Once the boss is made that will conclude the core game development itself and we will be able to focus on the aspects of the game that are not quite as important to the core concept of the game, such as an achievement system, extra playable characters, etc.

The development process is going quickly, and a lot of progress is being made every day. I am not yet sure of an exact release date, so we'll just see how things go.

- Frankie

Floors of Discomfort - Where I have been and what I am working on

I left this blog off several months ago during the development of a game engine at the time I had called 3 Prong Engine. The development of that has stopped as I have moved on to bigger things which I will get to in a little bit. I had started talking with some friends about a game idea in late June, a platformer of sorts which would use 3 Prong Engine as it's base code and test the engine's ease of use and what not. The problem was, at the time I really didn't have much of an idea as to what I was doing when it came to game engines, and so the project soon turned into a big mess of impossible to manage code, and so the engine was retired with the game idea. At some point in the future I do plan on possibly restarting the work on the engine again, because they do help, but as of right now I am going to stick with my current game development method. However, that is not what this post is about. I want to write about what I have been up to during the summer, and why I have just neglected to write a post since June.

After retiring our previous platformer idea, which we do plan on coming back to at some point, I started playing around with random level generation. It was nothing more than a fun thing I was doing one night, nothing crazy, but then all of a sudden I had an idea for a game. A platforming, side scrolling, roguelike dungeon crawler that would be hard as hell, and like that Floors of Discomfort was born. Though, in the beginning it wasn't called Floors of Discomfort (I think I had named the folder Storm Cloud or something..). I had proposed the idea to my friend, the graphics designer on the 3PP team, and he thought it was a great idea as well and so we started development.

He started making some graphics for it, I started laying out some basic collision maps, and randomly generated levels. Before we knew it we had the beginning of a game, the first floor was done, we had some items, and the ideas were starting to fit together. This was about mid July. We still didn't know where we were going with this, or what our end goal was, but there was something here, we both knew that and so we continued.

Here is the first development video I had posted on YouTube:


As you can see in that video, things were still a little shaky, not everything was looking and working correctly, but the concept was there.

Fast forward a few weeks and we have already successfully created the second floor. Things started to really take off, and we started to have a vision for the game. We knew what we had to do. This next video update is of me talking about these additions.



Things are starting to come together a little more here, I had made a few bug fixes, and an entire new floor was in the game now.

Going forward another few weeks now and we have made a ton of progress. Three enemies are now present on the second floor, and the third and fourth floor have been created. I had done a complete rewrite of the game pretty much during that development period and so everything was working smoother, but there was still a lot of work to do.

This is the third video update for the game.



After that update it was two weeks until I had posted the next update. That update is the most recent update, and even though it is far outdated from the most recent version, it highlighted a ton of progress. A new level, five new enemies, and a new item.

Since then there has been a crazy amount of progress on the game. Enemies have been redone, new enemies have been added, bug fixes, and player movement flow. I plan on making a video this weekend on all of the new additions and fixes because it is too much to highlight in this post since I am so backed up on my blogging.

So, yeah, that is what I have been up to for the last few months, and why I have suddenly disappeared. With the development of FoD progressing though I will be making blog posts whenever I can, probably whenever there is a new addition to the game that I feel should be highlighted. I tend to only make the videos when I feel that there is a mile stone that has been reached, but the blog posts can be more frequent and highlight smaller changes in more detail than I can in a video.

Anyway, I am back, so expect some stuff. I am going to keep the old posts for novelty value, just know that the development there has been halted and the majority of my development time is being spent on FoD.

- Frankie