Hi!

So this is going to be my first long Jam, it's going to be interesting on the side of time and resources management. Even made a planning and all. I'm doing it alone.

The pitch of the game is in the title: Zelda's Link's Awakening gameplay, Several playable races with strengths, a few weapons and items, randomly generated dungeon and monsters to bash to get out. Every room is a single screen, just like GB's Zelda. The random stuff is actually the most frightening thing of the package, I already vaguely tried my hand at it in a LD but it was hard. Hard but really funny to see stuff growing out of nothing, following rules you decided.

So far I have the movement of my characters, graphical bugs during movements because I use frameskip to move objects slower than 1pixel/frame, camera going from a room to the other, a corner assist script to helps the character... going around corners, the auto-tile for the walls, and of course the pixel perfect camera. I can up scale the screen as I want, using round zoom values.

Here is a .gif of the thing running:

More pics to come!

- Skaz

I like the transition between rooms.

Great art! :)

Thanks!

Some progress: rock texture for the walls and autotiling floor!

Now, on to the combat!

This looks so damn good. Transitions, art and ui is certainly on point. Looking forward to checking it out when it's done!

I love Link's Awakening! Your game is looking really good, I like procedural generation. I'm looking forward to play it in the end!

This looks really good.

Great idea and the mood of the game really fits with the graphics and theme. Looking forward to trying this. Nice.

This looks great. Link's Awakening is my fave Zelda game (with only the similar Oracle games and Link to the Past coming close) so I'm keen to have a go on this. :)

Thanks guys!

Here is some fresh news, combat code is progressing!

Directional knock back, damages, enemy basic wander movement are in.

I also remade the movement code to allow lesser than 1 movement values, it wasn't fun but necessary. Here the dwarf moves a 0.75 pixel a frame, and skeleton at 0.5, without ever moving half pixels.

Now on to the shield doing actual shielding!

Actual hearths showing actual health points: CHECK

Shield deflecting attacks from enemies in front of the character: CHECK

Pushing enemies around with the shield: CHECK

Now lets relax a bit and make the skeleton animated and facing it's moving direction. Then, the skull they leave on death will be a projectile, will land far from the player, and after a few seconds will grow a new skeleton if not crushed! Better dispatch them quick and one by one, they may be slow, stupid and weak, they will be a real pain in large number.

Very cool.

What do you folks use for making these GIFs? I tried GIFCAM but it seems to take me forever to get it working properly and outputting a non-glitchy gif.

Licecap!

Awesome idea and execution!

Here's hoping that Orc on the right ends up playable in the final version! I love being an Orc. :)

Morning is awesome for bug-fixing. I had tow annoying bugs I couldn't squash before going to bed. Took 5 minutes to fix this morning. I take good note of that.

I also relaxed doing some sprites, here are the new skeletons!

Ok, what now? I'll make the skull ejection and resurrection, then it might be a good idea to make the bow at least before going to the random gen. It really going to be hard to make something as complete as I want before the deadline.

Ok THAT WAS QUICK.

Resurrection animation? Well maybe after the jam. Now on to the BOW AND ARROW! I might have to reduce the absolute maximum hearth possible or make them smaller if I want to put an arrow counter somewhere...

It's done! Bow shooting, arrows that stay stuck in walls, and that's all for now.

Next is a break, after the break, maybe the first step in the proc gen direction?

I want to play.

Nothing new, my break isn't finished yet :p Just had fun making a .gif for tweeter, might as well share it here:

This looks like great fun.

Thanks Hawken! Hope it will be.

Here is my first shot at making a randomly generated totally empty dungeon.

There is something truly fascinating about this.

So far I generate a "main path", meaning the player is guaranteed to be able to go from room 1 to room 64, but I will add alternate paths. They will follow the same logic, but will have a priority on going left, right or back, maybe diagonally. They might be dead ends, or reconnect with another path. More .gif later today!

Is there a name for this game yet!

Love your project! I'm totally paying this when the jam finishes :)

No name yet!

Thanks Andrés!

Random gen is way more complicated than I'd like it to be, but it's funny. I think the dungeon by itself is pretty strong now, next step is single room generation with meaningful variations. Here is what a dungeon looks so far: 64 (more or less, there is still bugs to found) rooms of ordered chaos

Blue room: starting point. Pink room: exit. Green is the main path, guaranteed (pretty much...) to connect the start to the exit. Orange rooms are alternate paths, meant to force exploration, and potentially hiding treasures at the end.

I will make a few rooms automatically connect to every rooms surrounding, to break the linearity of paths.

Secrets room are also planned as a long term goal, with the appropriate bombs of course ;)

Now is a good time to go to bed and make myself ready for the final run. I'm afraid a lot of features and sound as a whole won't make it to the jam version of this game. On the bright side, it's the perfect project to put efforts in from time to time, so I'm really planning to make it big and long term!

Keep up everybody!

- Skaz

Couldn't resist, had to navigate one of the dungeons by myself.

Takeaway: it feels WAY BIGGER when walking from room to room than whatching the thing from above. So if you restrain player movement by forcing combat, or fiding keys in certains paths before progressing, a run could be really long. Might have to reduce the numbers of room for the jam version, maybe 32 will be enough.

I sped up the character a lot for the demonstration.

This is fascinating to watch being developed. You work really, really quickly.

Thanks! I don't know if I'm fast, I feel like I loose a LOT of time.

Not much to show, I have debugged and streamlined the dungeon generation, 99.9% guaranteed to be finish-able based on the room connections. Reduced the amount of rooms to 32, will be plenty to explore and die :) Red lines show connections, if you see a full line before the other, it's the algorithm making a hole through rooms to connect start to finish.

Now is time for room generation!

So! I'm really happy, things are taking shape!

Let's generate a dungeon!

It feels like I have 10000 ants under my command to execute my orders. I love it.

End result.

What about exploring it? Let's go!

It's probably not made in a effective way, but hey, right now I'm more interested by the result than anything else. There is only one room type, so I don't have as much variety as I want, but that's to be made before the jam. Right now the objective is to make an ACTUAL GAME. So spawn some enemies, make arrows a finite resource, make possible to grab the arrows stuck in walls, put as much stuff as possible into the dungeon to make the exploration worthwhile.

From now on the game will grow as I put stuff in it and playtest, we'll see where it leads!

DOORS.

Because why not? Doors are cool. Once opened they can show you where you've already been, and be locked.

You only have three and a half hours! Hopefully you can get it submitted in time!

IT'S LIVE!

https://skazdal.itch.io/rogue-boy

I'm too tired to post .gif or comment on the project, I'll do it after a good night of sleep. Thanks to anyone who give it a shot!