Your suggestion are all valid and I will definitely work into it in the near future!
Here is the storyline of this game as a prelude:
There were a intelligent humanoid race created out of human biological test curiosity. They fluorished, until human race decided to pick up the fight over the Earth stagnant resources, and they lost unprepared over human armed with tactical nukes. The remaining humanoids scattered under the Earth crust, relying on the geothermal energy and other animals living next to lava, to live. They built cavern mazes for the sake of defending against human attacks. Some traits of humanoid families were on the other hand manipulated by humans and loyal to human forces. They fuel suicidal covert ops mission with their own manpower due to their personal strength and agility advantages. They are notoriously recognized as genocidal Cavernivores.
This prelude describes you as a brainwashed protagonist assigned to storm a cave of humanoid slaves, attempting to stop a potential revolt.
Mouse aiming / Mobile touch joystick aiming / XBox Joypad stick aiming, sounds very great! Hit-and-run mechanism was also initially a skill I wished to add as a Sword Upgrade and pretty much the rest of the weapons (double sword skill is actually a workaround) Then I need to revamp my animation logic by AnimationTree (otherwise I cannot separate body and leg animations) but I don't have time to do for the jam yet. :D
Already rated 2 days ago but add some comments here now
Stunning graphics! Always feel the warmth from the sun! So relaxing yet exciting gameplay! Brilliant animated stage transitions! Clever and creative! I feel like I am watching a National Geographic documentary - life of a pixelated rogue planet
I just successfully fixed its highscore system! When you beat the game, your heroic name shall appear at the highscore board - ranking by how quickly you defeat the boss!
In an actual Roguelike perspective, the game was far from being complete:
- Much treasure hunting needs to be added, but in my game there are only Golden aura pickups available
- Much more enemy varieties need to be added -> bats, dragons, soldiers with actual armor equipments
- Even weapons should be more extensive -> how about a family of guns , pistols, SMGs, rifles, snipers, bombs - and how about picking up a whip as well as swords - make it feel more like Indiana Jones
- Different runtime character states like: Stunned, Poisoned, Sleepy, etc.
Yes you're right! The enemies AI feeing a bit slow is both my intention and a workaround. The AI sensitivity in fact represented by how frequently an enemy updates its path to the player by running A* pathfinding. If enemies always run the A* pathfinding, then the enemies will always stick to the player without any rest. That'd be a real difficult mode.
But the main reason is that the NavMesh A* pathfinding is a CPU killer and I didn't know of any way to optimize. The larger the map is generated x more enemies on map, the more likely the game is going to get laggy. Thus I did 3 things:
- Make map generation smaller in room / corridor sizes
- Make AI pathfinding less frequent
- But I am able to discriminate different AI's reaction time (green guys react slower, red guys / boss react still fast enough to catch up with the player) Attempt to keep the boss intelligent enough.
Also If playing in browser feels laggy - maybe download offline version and try again - usually performs better!
Oh wait - you mean - you are able to beat the boss with like 2-3 tries? Man that's awesome! You're a legend! You've nailed it. In order to optimize the defeating time as well as conserving precious hitpoints, one should skip unnecessary fights as demonstrated in my walkthrough video.
And there's one roguelike thing I have missed putting in - the presence of corridor traps, spikes, rope plants, poisonous mushrooms, speed mushrooms, locked exits, teleportations, sentry cannons - which should be able to enforce speedrunning players into some battles - prevent players to run freely while allowing 3rd-party methods to execute the enemies. This would preserve some fun for pro players.
A a big con for Roguelike games is there's no way to conclude the officially fastest speedrunning time other than by luck - the same applies to Minesweeper speedrunning. My solution is to hold time-limited competition events with Fixed Seed Numbers so I have Fixed Proc Gen Maps for fair judgement
I just successfully fixed its highscore system! When you beat the game, your heroic name shall appear at the highscore board - ranking by how quickly you defeat the boss!
Classical game logic and brain-challenging! Fun! Reminds me of "Chip's Challenge" - Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows 95. Long gone my childhood :(
A bunch of Steve Jobs clones of the Apple Inc. resistance! LOL nice crowd control and the live news atmosphere, and love the Paperboy style presentation, hope the riot soldiers exert some more challenge against the crowd though
Feel free to ask me when feeling difficulty beating my game! So far only 1 friend and me have beaten this game. Will you be the 3rd hero? spoilers: 8 floors total
Although the exit spawn bug was never my intention, I must mention this inspiration of my game:
Our games share the same issue - the exits may spawn just 2 squares next to my starting point 😂 thus allowing me to break my speedrun records - unlocking more Newgrounds badges
And this game is in fact the root inspiration of my game! This is the first roguelike game I’ve ever played. They even share the same issue - the level exits may spawn just 2 squares away from my starting point 😂 thus allowing me to break my speedrun records
By me walking toward the wall , I could create a deathball of shooters. I love creating Protoss deathball army in Starcraft! I wish the queue companion could shoot as well simultaneously with the leader instead of just acting like a meat shield. That would ruin the game balance but I wish they’d die for some more meaning - But I just can‘t think of any better alternatives they should do, So let them be meat shields 😂
A mutation of Snakes, Nicely executed, This game is a piece of art
Thinking back, the monster wandering habits to your stay command is sort of a human act - some children are active, some are quiet, some are always hyped up over new things, some are cautious to potential dangers ahead. Some are fat, some are thin
Then, I could imagine different monster wandering behaviors would gift them different skills and reactions you are able to assign or even procedurally generate e.g. A difference of movement speed, maximum hitpoints and Aggressiveness between each monster, that would determine how likely the monster is prone to hitting spikes when chasing a nearby enemy
more like The sims: Monster edition 😂 Low IQ SIMS are prone to electrocuting themselves by bathing as well
If you are able to defeat the boss, your heroic name may appear on the highscore, ranking by how quickly you finish the game!
But there might be a bug while submitting high scores to my server. In that case, remember to take me a screenshot, then I will help you enter the name into server!
If you feel desperate defeating it, look at the below comments to discover any walkthrough / spoiler!
About the audio muffling - it might be caused by the game performance hit spike during enemy respawnings and NavMesh pathfindings tasks. You might wish to download & play offline version, performance will get better than browser play.
I may make the player able to shoot wherever he points to, that way the game will still be compatible with desktop/console/mobile envs, hopefully support 360 degree joystick to allow fine grained shoot aiming, and the game becomes more playable!
The movement and aiming control is actually one of my biggest concerns, I spent so much time on it still not getting it executed correctly, you hit the pain point!
I may make the player able to shoot wherever he points to, that way the game will still be compatible with desktop/console/mobile envs, hopefully support 360 degree joystick to allow fine grained shoot aiming, and the game becomes more playable!
On the other hand, I may rather start investigating how to replace the current animation system with AnimationTree support - thus creating some Hit and Run ninja style attacks!
Totally agree with you. That applies to my gameplay as well. When I was surrounded, I find it hard seeing my body so pretty much gave up resisting. This is not a design intention rather like a design flaw I could foresee since game development starts. I could think of a few ways to improve the situation:
- increase player’s capsule physics collided radius by a little bit
- add new skills for player to push back the enemies / sweep clear
- add new skills for player to immediately retreat to another spawning point of the map / go back up floors
It seems it’s due to the performance spike when creating new enemy Actor instance - quite a lot of resources are being loaded; Thanks so much for your error report! I have just got my Parallels VM set up for testing in Windows environment. Will update you when I have any more findings!
This game has revolutionized my thinking of a typical strategy game design - it can still be playable & enjoyable, even without any grid system or rules. As a game designer I should always become more creative and think out of the box. Thanks for your inspiration.
The characters pixelated look cute, and the UI is quite intuitive! I don't mind the poor readability of the font, that won't hurt my ratings for this game. This ARPG needs some brain power to play! Well done!
