Conversations and the state machine are in, and I'm getting into the puzzle mechanics now. This might be a mad dash at the end, so I want to make sure the gameplay is solid before I do any more polish to the visuals. Planning a tutorial level to explain everything, too, so this will be a lot of moving parts at once.
https://i.imgur.com/IbOQs7N.mp4
We also have a game name now: Brew Crew! Here's the title screen art:
And two music tracks, but that's hard to demo here right now. I'll put them in the background of a video update at some point.
Last update of the night. Got some basic scene transitions and animations set up, and also we have final art for the brewing ingredients now!
https://i.imgur.com/p8HouqF.mp4
The background used here is previous work by our fantastic artist, and per the rules of the jam we can use past work, right? I'll make sure to mention what was created prior to the jam on the upload page.
Hey, we're getting work done on our game, and we've mostly settled on a design and layout now. I'm the programmer, so please forgive my sloppy mockup art, but I'll keep this thread updated as we go!
This is the main puzzle layout. You have to make recipes so Wren can deliver to your customers, with ingredients you get in the morning from your other (secret) friend. I'm still figuring out how the puzzles will work, but the idea is that you have to select a combination of ingredients to make the different orders. If you get a lot of the right ingredients it will increase your followers even more, which will make more complex orders that are harder to fulfill.
We're also going to have a small cast of characters that help you make this business a success! But more on that later...
So it begins. Here are some character and background mockups I did ahead of my jam time (since we're allowed to use pre-existing art):
If I use these in my game, it will be for a nicer character selection screen and story cutscenes. But this was mostly practice, and to work out some of the palette / pose / area designs before the clock started ticking.
I haven't started my game yet, but why not make a thread? My plan for this game is to revamp and improve on an old prototype I made last year, by adding roguelite elements (permadeath, random dungeon layouts) and more starting character decks. It will be a Slay the Spire-like deckbuilding card battler, inspired by tarot cards and egyptian themes this time around, with a simple comedy plotline that also serves as all of the tutorials and menus.
I'll be posting images and gameplay gifs here all week, but otherwise trying to keep myself busy without rambling on too much. Good luck to everyone!
UPDATE: Music and sound effect spots filled.
UPDATE 2: Character artist joined, only need background artist now.
Hi, I'm a programmer and occasional artist and musician, looking for a team for the 2020 7 day roguelike challenge. I want to adapt an existing game jam game I made last year (in Godot 3.1) into a deckbuilding card battler with random battles, a la Slay the Spire.
(click to play my 3-day solo project, on itch right now!)
On the art side, I'm reskinning it as an Egyptian and Tarot themed game, with backgrounds in an expansive desert, and dimly lit pyramid corridors. There will be a decently large cast of playable characters (starting decks) and enemies (puzzles decks you take cards from as you go), so a dedicated 2D character artist and animator is my main goal here. Backgrounds will be 2D and repeating but otherwise static, so if a non-animator wanted to tackle that, and the cards and menus, that's the other major area I'd need help with.
There will be a straightforward comedy plot, as two ACTION NEWS reporters follow the breaking story on a dark pyramid that rose out of the sand, and the card battling enemies that are spilling out of it. To build a story they pick a random onlooker from the crowd, and throw them into the pyramid's entrance with a handful of cards, camera crew scrambling behind. Everything else about this game's aesthetics will be up to you, but I'll be looking out for cartoony, vibrant art because I think it suits this atmosphere best. Style in art is good, though, so surprise me with your takes on this.
On the audio side, I want melodic tunes for three main settings: menus and travelling, a looping battle song, and optionally a boss battle theme. If you can incorporate some Egyptian sounding instruments or melodies, that's a big plus. I want the tone to be light and easily hummable, even if some of the areas you travel through could be dark or mildly spooky. There's a camera crew and reporters following you, so this game isn't really the setting for any kind of ambient horror themes. Sound effects are also something that I could use the help with, if you can make them. The newly released Godot 3.2 has dynamic audio generation now, so if you're technically inclined I might be up for coding some more complex transitions and stings.
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Just to be clear: since this is a small, week long game jam project, I'm not currently planning to pay team members for their work during the game jam. You would retain all commercial rights to your work, but I would need your permission to post the finished project on my itch page for free. If the team is working well together, though, I'm not opposed to a quick one-month dev cycle for a finished release, on PC+mobile for something like $2. I would then pay you for commercial rights, either directly for your work or through revshare as well, depending on which you prefer.
Please either reply here with links to your work, or email me at laneg [at] abground [dot] com. I'll be checking both fairly regularly, but I'll probably only respond if you put time and effort into showing me some of what I asked for here. That being said, if you're new or looking to build your portfolio and try out a new game engine release, just show me a quick example sketch or melody for what you can do. Also, Godot's recent modular skeletal animation system updates are really awesome, and I'd be happy to walk people through some examples of how that works.
Let's make a game together!
Working on a particle effect engine today, for the spells:
Each of the effects is encoded as a single string of hex codes representing the color gradient, and a separate draw function. These demos cover the three styles of effects I need: simple trails that follow a path via a circular queue, time-based positional movement with randomness, and multi-trails with a pre-defined movement and non-random separation, for the wind effect.
I still need to do water, ice, and earth spell effects, but they'll probably be variations on one of these three styles with different gradients, so it should be easy enough. Also, since I'm planning to continue this WIP after 7DRLC ends, should I move this devlog somewhere else?
Hey everyone, long time no update! I've been fighting off a bad cold and trying to take it easier than I probably should for this challenge, but making some steady progress all the same. This will likely turn into 30DRL Challenge for me, but I'll take the loss here and keep working anyway...
Since I was reasonably comfortable that I knew which colors were background reserved, I made the main character next. She has color options for her clothing so the game can unlock other starting books with different spells and play styles. Animations are compressed into 24x24 pixels of the total 128x128 spritesheet, so there should be plenty of space left for enemies and content, and maybe a fancy hi-res main menu too.
Building the basic object framework was next. The player is just a special version of an object, so she draws in the correct order with everything else. As you can see by that flickering top bar, turn order is in, and enemies would get a turn after every movement action, but not every direction-changing action. When there are no enemies on screen, walking around is seamless unless you cast a spell, which also has reserved turn order to finish its full action.
Also, I settled on raincoat witch as the main color scheme, because she is adorable. Works better with the blues in the background, too.
Oh shit guys! It's a persistent world, with fancy screen scrolling:
Yeah, I need to get those room entrances to move all the way to the first solid, but they are connected and preserved to the random seed for each area. Levels are randomly generated by the starting seed plus their grid location, so saving the seed in persistent data means they'll load up the same every time. There's also a pretty sophisticated 32-bit hash function scrambling adjacent room seeds, so regions of the map don't ever become samey if you hit the same seed in two different games...
The screen scrolling is a fancy memcpy effect of the old screen data to its new position. Since the vertical scrolls only have 14 tiles it wasn't a nice even number of lines per frame like the 16 across was, so there's a little crazy math moving it 3 or 4 pixels depending on how far the next draw will be. Was it worth it? I think so!
Probably my last update of the night, but this has been fun so far! I'll be back for day two after a good night's sleep. =)
Making progress on map generation.
It's a really cool approach I saw someone mention on the Pico-8 forums a while back, where you use a random set of unfilled rectangles to generate hallways and rooms with interesting obstacles automatically. For my game, islands are also a bonus feature, because continuity is not required when you can lift the water to make more land.
This algorithm is optimized by drawing rects directly on the screen with a special fill pattern, then copying that region to map memory for a direct tileset render (you can see that the CPU usage at the top never ticks to even 20%!). Up next is orthogonal screen connection and permanence, by calculating seeds from the current screen's x,y coords in the global map, to keep save data low (I'll need most of it for spell storage later).
Hey folks! This is my first time participating in 7DRL, and I'm planning to adapt a puzzle game I made last weekend in Alakajam#5 into a more roguelike design. Here's a gif of that project so you can see some of the mechanics I plan to explore:
Note that this image and game is just a reference for me, and I will be doing all new art and code in a completely different framework (Pico-8) for this challenge. I just liked how the mechanics worked out, and think there's potential in the concept for an expanded, somewhat puzzle-y roguelike too. Wish me luck, and I'll keep this thread updated with progress shots as I go. Starting my jam at the top of the hour...
