Post by Uskprod in Post your progress!

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I'm working on a mouse-driven dungeon crawler! The horny bits are focused on butt stuff and large insertions. It's very plot relevant.

Hardly any content yet, but I've got a few systems working:

- click-to-move with grid-snapped pathfinding
- click-to-interact, which triggers the player to walk up to the interactable before firing the interaction
- an EventBus to handle communication between nodes
- a message window that scales to the size of the message and reveals the message a character at time, with an attached nameplate
- an event manager for nodes to queue up commands. Only commands implemented so far are "show message" and a couple different experimental "change scene" commands (e.g. just changing scenes directly vs push/popping a stack of scenes).
- an interactable mouse-driven lewd scene, focused on gradually easing in a large insertion without going so fast that it's painful
- a persistence manager where Nodes can register variables that need to be saved if the node is ever destroyed and reloaded (e.g. on map change)

Still to come are:
- a combat system
- a menu system for shopping
- a menu system for changing equipment (unless I just want equipment upgrades at the shop to be permanent)
- a random level generator for dungeon crawling, if I decide I want the areas randomly generated
- interactables and stuff for puzzles in dungeons (I've implemented this kind of thing before, it shouldn't be hard)
- actual content
- an audio system

The main things I'm worried about in terms of threats to the project are the combat system and menu system, which are both almost entirely new ground for me. I still don't have a clear picture of how complex I want combat to be. On the one hand I'm kind of interested in combat kind of like the first Dragon Quest game, which I think would be good for big "boss battle" style encounters. But on the other hand, I feel like they'd be pretty obnoxious to run into while in the middle of solving a puzzle in a dungeon.

I'm also worried that I'm seriously overengineering things, and I keep faffing around with rearranging nodes to find the "best" place instead of just making some damn content. A lot of it comes from my general frustration with the fact that Godot ties so much stuff to the structure of the scene graph. Sometimes I want a node to be a child of another node for *organizational* reasons, but I don't want the child's position and z-order to be tied to its parent. I also probably don't *need* everything to be working with signals and an EventBus; my last couple projects did just fine having nodes call each other directly.

Impy4 years ago

Good to see you back, I really liked your game from last year's jam! It sounds like you're working on something pretty fun. Set encounters are better than random encounters for games with puzzle elements in my opinion. Don't get too bogged down with the more complex systems, simple with lots of content is usually better than the opposite.

Best of luck with this years game, I'll enjoy trying it out!

TheLastYuriSamurai4 years ago

This sounds so cool I can't wait to play it!

Uskprod4 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Update:

I've got a level generator working! It lays out a maze using Prim's algorithm, then replaces each cell of the maze with a randomly-selected prefab chunk of tiles that has the correct number of exits and entrances (currently I have 3 possible chunks per orientation, for a total of 48 prefab chunks). I also store the layout of the dungeon as a tree, and place the level exit and the key to the exit at 2 different leaf nodes.

You can travel through each level, collect the key, unlock the exit, and climb the stairs to the next randomly generated level. That's enough to technically make it a game I think.

Levels can be as big as I want them, but somewhere around 8-12 cells feels about right I think. I don't know what else I'm actually going to throw into the levels except randomly placed enemies and loot.

I'll probably do the Persona 4 thing and have most floors be randomly generated, but with story-important floors premade.

Impy4 years ago(+1)

Really cool stuff! I like the chunks approach to level generation, it goes a long way towards making the dungeon feel organic. Prim's mazes tend to have lots of little dead end turns, which should be perfect for loot generation. Just hide it in chunks with 3 walls and put the traps and monsters in the other ones.

Uskprod4 years ago(+1)

Some real progress these last couple days. The dungeon generator is spawning slimes into the level now, which roam around randomly. I decided to go ultra simple with the combat system -- while you and the enemy are standing near each other, you both throw out autoattacks. The individual enemies are meant to be more of a form of resource attrition rather than a serious challenge. I do have more interesting enemy types planned as well though. Plus you'll get some consumable items like bombs that give you a little more combat flexibility.

I'm trying to make the game playable completely with the left mouse button, which definitely limits how much I can get out of the combat system.

Other stuff I got working includes transitioning between the dungeon and the town, visiting the blacksmith to upgrade weapons and armor, and a music manager. The player's footsteps sync to the beat of the song in dungeons, which I'm super excited about.

I just sat down and threw a bunch of features I want to implement into an issue tracker, and WOOF! 37 new issues of highly varying complexity. I am going to have to either cut scope a lot or continue the project beyond the end of the jam.

Also here's some tiny concept art of the main character (purple) and her love interest (red):

Uskprod3 years ago(+1)

As expected, I really am having to cut back on scope on this quite a bit. Only have 1 of the 5 major interactive lewd scenes I wanted to implement done.

At least it's a vaguely satisfying, if very sparse, roguelite at this point. I've got 3 enemy types, consumable bombs and potions, and a skill meter that charges up to let you do a big AOE attack. Not much to do in each level except fight enemies and find the key to the exit though.

of the 80 issues in the issue tracker, 40 are closed, 16 are "do later", and 24 I want to try and get done by jam submission. Most are pretty small, like removing the navmesh under the staircase so you don't get stuck on it, or tweaking the price of potions. The big ones are a tutorial level and the rest of the intro cutscene.

Impy3 years ago(+1)

Haha, the last week crunch is really something. Just today I've made 6 of the 8 levels currently in my game. Same as you, I've been pushing adding lewds to the last minute. I've got some of the scenes drawn, but at the moment none of them are actually implemented.

Also my game has only just become playable outside of a test environment yesterday.

So you're not that far behind friend, we're crawling to the finish line together. Here's to the next 48 hours 🥂

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