I’m primarily an artist, which might be obvious from the images I included, but I also think I finally progressed far enough in my understanding of coding and other game design elements where I can reasonably try to include some more complex game mechanics.

The game would consist of three main parts:

1 Various caves and underground areas where a large variety of monsters can be found and captured. These monsters can then be used in various ways depending on the type: some can be weaponized, others can be used to improve weapons, to be used as crafting materials or simply as fuel, to be sold for currency etc.

2 Bosses throwing waves of monsters at you to battle. Winning these challenges can unlock further monsters, grant skill points, unlock further areas of the game and also unlock a higher tier challenge for the same boss.

3 A hub area that has access to the caves, the bosses, some NPCs and also just look cool and help in introducing lore about the game.

I have some work done for all three of these, but right now I would like to mostly talk about the caves and the monster capture part. I have the most done in that area.

Setting

This takes place in the far future where many things are grown instead of being built resulting in various monster-like creations. Monster ARE the technology.

Also all this takes place on a planet divided into 4 quite distinct nations with different paths to creating these monsters. Each different approach has resulted in monsters that adhere to the theme of each faction: robot, horror, fantasy and cartoon. Additionally there is an area on the planet where all 4 factions manage to more or less collaborate in the interest of improving various technologies known as the Testing Fields, which is our hub area and where the game takes place.

Capturing monsters, exploring caves 

Take a look at the short gameplay video I included, I’m basically explaining the game mechanics you can see there.

The caves can be explored by controlling a small drone which has the abilities to capture monsters, navigate narrow passages and to destroy smaller obstacles. Monster are captured by deploying Capture Lines from the drone and hitting a marked weak spot on any given monster. Higher tier monsters need more Capture Lines and also each monster has a movement pattern so capturing might be easy or challenging depending on circumstances. The yellow weakspot on the monster has a different number of pointy bits to indicate how many Lines you will need. For example: skeletal monster on the left needs two Capture Lines, while the mouthy one on the right only needs one. Some monsters need more Lines than you start with.

Monster Behavior

The monsters have fairly simple behavior patterns, but there are many different looks ( right now I have around 40 horror monsters and starting on fantasy ones). Also some monsters are rarer, the locations and specific encounters are somewhat randomized so my hope is that it will be exiting to go and find out what you can find in a new or previously visited part of the caves.

Some monsters also have extra behaviors like the bouncing eyeballs you can see in the video, or these slimy territorial creatures. Each has an area marked as a circle around it, circle getting larger depending on monster tier. If you enter the circle the monster will move to the center of it and then pursue you until you leave their territory or until you loose the drone.

Failing a Capture

You start with 4 Capture Lines and if you use up all 4 without capturing a monster, it will either run away or attack you. It’s all good though, you can try shooting down the monster before it damages the drone too much and try again with another creature. Captured creatures will appear in the pause menu where you can see the monsters name and the tags it has ( I’ve shown this in the vid) and the monster will always be transferred to the Collection Area in the hub/Testing Fields even if the drone is destroyed right after a capture. You can learn more about the monster and how it can be used in there(tags, flavor text, tier, type). Some monsters have evolution lines like the slime creatures above.

Laser Explosion

The Cave Drone you control is also equipped with a Laser Explosion, which can destroy smaller obstacles and damage monsters. However, each time you use it you risk decreasing the Cave Stability, which is another resource besides Cave Drone’s HP which you have to pay attention to.

Drawing a Line Path for the Drone

Very importantly, there is also a way for the Drone to squeeze past various gaps and passages that are normally too narrow or to avoid monsters. You can draw a path starting from the drone and the Drone will follow it while being invulnerable and fitting into narrow gaps. If you’re not careful doing this, you might get stuck and once again reduce Cave Stability or run into monsters.

Caves and Cave Stability

You start in the first cave called the Abandoned Archives. The plan here is to hand craft the entire area, with very few repeating parts. Basically I’m approaching it less as a tileset and more as a painting of the entire level. This means that each cave wont be huge, but it will be dense with various details and encounters and at least to me that seems quite appealing. I tend to get bored of oversized empty levels in games myself and it’s simply fun to design a level like this from my side of things. Also I plan to add some amount of randomly appearing rooms and details, which together with randomized monster encounters should make each run feel different.

The cave is fully stable at the start of a run, but there are a few ways to reduce Cave Stability mentioned above. If the cave stability falls bellow 25 percent, the cave will start to collapse and rocks will start falling possibly damaging the drone. However, game is not lost even if Cave Stability falls to 0, it only ends if the drone is damaged beyond repair and cave stability can potentially be brought back up. Right now I have a resource that can be found that increases cave stability, but I might include other methods as well or maybe make the instability temporary, we’ll see.

Finished part of the cave:

Rocks falling on the drone ( yeah, the falling rocks asset is still a sketch):

Where I’m going with this

So yeah, this is just one of the things I want to talk about the game and I plan to keep updating this devlog as I complete them. I have a million ideas and for me an uncharacteristic amount of enthusiasm for this, the only limiting factor is time. There are also many smaller aspects like a simple story, the reason for capturing these monsters, drone upgrades, skill system for fighting the bosses and other things I haven’t mentioned but already started on, but one thing at a time.

Right now I want to make a fully working demo with two or three caves, a single fancy boss and partially finished hub area and then see how much content I can reasonably add to it before I call it finished. And even a demo is a lot of work, but it continues to be fun making this so hopefully some people like it and give me extra motivation.

Some more monsters I designed – the main reason I decided to make a game like this:

More horror monsters, some fantasy monster sketches

Here are some more horror monsters I finished for the game. All these also have a specific tag "tentacle" in the game. Monsters with specific tags will be suitable tor specific upgrades and such, so I was thinking about using the "tentacle" tag to upgrade the Cave Drone's Line Catchers.

I'm also starting to do more work on the fantasy themed monsters and these are some sketches of Paper Elementals. The cave where these will be found is called the Abandoned Archives, a large part of it has an old library vibe, so I thought this would be a nice theme to go with some of these monsters. In game I plan to call these Paper Stichija, Crumple Stichija, Fold Sichija, or something similar, Stichija just being the Lithuanian word for Elemental.

Cave lighting and paper monsters

I did try adding some lights to the 2d cave environment, and I kinda like the look. I wanted to sooner or later add lighting effects to some attacks and such, so I guess it’s for the best I found the motivation to look into and learn the basics now( thanks for the idea).

I do want to keep the lighting fairly subtle and let the 2d assets I painted to speak for themselves though, if that makes sense. Also if I make the shadows more prominent, the background art starts looking flatter, which I don’t want. And I didn’t plan for this, but the shadows help with understanding what counts as an obstacle: if it casts a shadow then it’s an obstacle. So that’s useful.

Installing the plugins into Unity to make these 2d lights work was easy, theoretically, except that like always there were a few extra steps missing from the official documentation. So I had to extract that forbidden ancient knowledge from debts of reddit, random 30 minute long youtube videos of which 5 seconds were useful to me and 4 or 5 random forum sites I never heard off. At this point I assume this sort of thing is the intended method.

I also painted some paper monsters from the sketch earlier as well as a couple others. I haven’t put them into the game yet, but here is the artwork. The names starting from the left: Crumple Stichija and Ancient Knowledge Stichija, Paper Stichija in the middle, Fold Stichija and Origami Stichija on the right.

I do like the idea of calling these fantasy themed monsters SomethingWayTooSpecific+ Stichija ( elemental ). I will probably continue with that naming convention for these, it amuses me.

Monster Designs

I've been sketching a lot of monsters these days. Here are some sketches for more fantasy monsters, this time wood elementals.

After I have a sketch and more or less know where I want to go with this, a monster in the general detail level of these or the paper monsters from before usually take me 1 to 3 hours to paint. So I can keep making them fairly quickly when I have the time. Of course that doesn't take into account the time it takes to add these into the game, adding any special behaviors, finding and adding sound effects and making a couple frames of simple animation for each of these.

Speaking of animations, here's a preview of the paper monsters with very simple animations added. I am not an animator and fully animating anything would murder my motivation to live, but adding small things like these is not too difficult or time consuming and I think it still makes the game feel more alive:

I also made another sketch for the wood themed monsters which I like the most from these: the Bramble Stichija. I wanted to do something with brambles and I also stumbled upon some strange white and black stripped flower while googling rare plants for inspiration. That gave me an idea for the head of this critter and combined with the bramble thing we get this design. I think it's a fancy enough design to be used as a higher tier monster than all the other sketches and I will spend more time on this. If I treat it like a detailed character painting then it might take two or three full days, but hey, it's fun though.

Adding monster behaviors

I’ve been coding some monster behaviors to add some complexity to the encounters. First thing I added was the slime monsters shooting damaging slime at you while in range, which looks like this:

I might increase the range later if they seem too easy to bypass. The slime shots only damage you a tiny bit, but there might be a lot of them coming at you from various sides depending on the situation, so I think that’s for the best. Also the same shots keep healing the monster shooting at you and any other monsters it manages to hit( you can see tiny text “+1” rising from the monsters). I purposefully didn’t limit that either, so monsters can just keep rising each others max HP while you’re close. Also the slime projectiles can be destroyed by shooting at them or by using Laser Explosion( I added light effects to that, I think it looks way better now).

I always try to set these things up in a way that it’s easy to alter later on if I want to, ideally by simply ticking some boxes when possible to change the monster behavior. This is how those options look in engine now, I only need to choose a few things and variables for a script I wrote. I made sure the circle marking the monster territory gets resized automatically depending on the monster tier and also it automatically increases the projectile count based on same tier.

For targeting the slime projectiles I slightly altered the same code I use for Cave Drone facing the mouse( which is just a couple lines I found in every single coding tutorial ever, and it involves trigonometry so I’m glad I didn’t need to figure that out from zero). The trickiest part was making sure every extra projectile was automatically rotated a few degrees so they all don’t shoot in the exactly same direction. I ended up kinda brute forcing that, but hey, it works.

It might be hard to see at this size, but the slime projectiles keep changing between three sprites while moving. I wrote a very simple Gif Maker script a while ago and I use that all over the place in the game. It just cycles through an array of sprites using a co-routine. It’s very convenient being able to just throw on that little script onto any object, adding a few sprites, choosing the speed between sprites and it just works 95% of the time. I also coded in an option to switch between the given sprites randomly or in sequence.

Another seemingly simple piece of code I added is spawning some prefabs either on monster hit, or on monster death. I think it will have many uses, below you can see a monster spawning rocks on hit and a larger amount of them on death( I want to later have Elemental Rock monsters essentially bleeding rocks, but I used any monster I made earlier for testing). The rocks don’t damage you and they can be shot to pieces, or pushed aside using Laser Explosion, but they might block passages when you are trying to quickly escape or such. Also I think it’s just satisfying shooting them apart and little pieces flying all about the place.

I used the exact same code to make higher tier eye monsters spawn low tier bouncing eye monsters I already had made. Anyways, I will keep adding new behaviors and I’m planning a couple fancier ones as well.

More Elemental Monsters and Monster Evolutions

I finished painting the wood creatures from the earlier sketches. The names starting from the left: Bark Stichija, Splinter Stichija, Split Trunk Stichija, Branch Stichija in the center, Root Stichija, Burl Stichija and Rotten Trunk Stichija.

Also I had an idea to make the Paper Stichija monster from earlier into an evolving monster, here are my sketches for that:

Each monster has a tier assigned to it in the game, and a minority of monsters also have evolution lines. However, I want to have different number of evolutions in many cases and also some monsters might skip a tier instead of rising in them one by one. I think that would be a need little game mechanic to try to figure out which monsters do that and potentially get access to some more powerful/useful monsters quicker if you can do it.

In this case specifically the monster would evolve from Paper Stichija ( tier 1 ) to Book Stichija ( tier 3 ) to Codex Stichija ( tier 5 ) to Archive Stichija ( tier 7 ). Tier 7 is the highest  for now, but I might have some monsters later on that go higher.

Planning out the hub area- The Testing Fields

In the first devlog I briefly mentioned that the action in this game is supposed to take place in The Testing Fields – an area where all four major factions in this world with very different approaches to technology collide. The idea here is that, for example, while one of the factions is very fantasy-like, that’s actually just their approach to make advanced technology no single person understands more intuitive. So while the Robot Faction might have devices similar to smartphones, the Fantasy Faction would instead have the same functionality in special moving tattoos they control using speech resembling magic words. Everyone knows it’s not actually magic, but more like a coding language made more approachable.

This is the sketch of Testing Fields so far, I’ve been slowly planning it out for a while now. Everything to the North East of the center monument is the Horror area, South East is the Robot area, South West is Fantasy and North West the Cartoon. I haven’t sketched that much for that last one yet. 

Even more precisely you start the game just next to the monument in the very center of Testing Fields marked by a small statue and a tree from each faction. The trees ( from left to right ) are to mark the Fantasy Faction, Cartoon Faction, Horror Faction, Robot Faction. 

Also the Center monument is where all the monsters you capture in the caves will be located. Each tree can be raised to reveal your collection of the monsters matching the tree and you can see more info about the monster here- its tags, name, how many you captured, some descriptions, maybe gameplay hints and such.

I have mostly horror monsters now, so I started with that tree. At a push of a button it raises enough to show all the monsters you captured and you can then raise the tree more if you want( I want to add slots here when I make the finalized version to show how many monsters remain and also to give some sort of indication which monsters have evolution lines).

The way this works is that I have all the monsters, even the locked ones in there already and before raising the tree, the code checks which ones are unlocked and shows only those. Then it raises until it passes the lowest unlocked monster by a little bit. I will probably make the center statue turn transparent when the trees are raised later on, I think it gets in the way too much. Also if I coded all that correctly then it should be fairly easy to make the other 3 trees work the same way too, but I might be jinxing myself there a bit, haha.

Anyway, there is a lot to plan out here and to make it as cool as I can, but here are a few other details:

You will be able to talk to the first NPC here, right bellow the center monument, giving you the basic rules of the game:

This will serve as the entrance to the first cave where you can send the drone and capture monsters. Also there will be another NPC here to explain the cave/monster capture situation:

In the horror area I have these digging monsters which can’t be captured, but serve as a little bit of world building. They are connected to a giant artery/intestines to quickly get rid of the dug up materials they chew up. I want to add a little animation to have their teeth spin like some living tunneling machine and also I will be adding little optional notes to explain that. I want to add a lot of little things like this, because it’s fun for me and because I think it will help to make the mismatched and strange area feel a little more believable

More about the hub area, a little bit about character design and naming conventions

So while in the caves you control a little robot drone, in the hub area – the Testing Fields you will be controlling a cyborg man floating around on a mechanical Control Platform. This means you will play as him when interacting with NPCs and when fighting bosses. The cave Drone is supposed to be piloted remotely by this character and I will at some point make a little animation where a drone is released from this platform whenever you want to enter a cave area.

The idea for this character is that he’s a human currently occupying a very basic cyborg body. I designed it like that because I wanted to add unlockable customization clothing/body options for him, though I will leave that idea for later for now. I do know I can make it from the technical side of things, but it is quite time consuming. I had quite a lot of character customization in Human Upgrade Labs, my previous game. 

I’m thinking of naming him Halcyon Days. I have different naming schemes for each category of monsters/characters. So for now the names work something like this:

Fantasy names: must include a Lithuanian word( excluding Lithuanian only letters, I don’t want to torture people) e.g. Branch Stichija

Horror names: a somewhat normal name + “the” + something edgy or fancy. E.g. Cornelius the Judgmental Gaze.

Scifi names: basically just bad band names, haha. E.g. Halcyon Days or Glorious Sycatrix. I will stick with somewhat possible names for characters, but I want to go really dumb with these for monsters. Cause why not.

Cartoon names: still figuring this out, but probably 3 or 4 word names, each word starting with the same letter.

There’s no real reason for these, it’s just nice to have some sort of theme to make it easier to come up with names, especially when I need a lot of them for each monster and I chose something I like. I named all characters in another game ( Dream Mechanic) using references to various UFO encounters but it took some serious digging to come up with 25-ish names to go with that theme.

I honestly think Halcyon Days sound kinda cool. It’s an old expression basically meaning the good old days and also I first heard the word “halcyon” in an electronic song called Halcyon Plus On Plus On, or some such, by Orbital, and it stuck with me.

And here is another character I designed a while ago. He is supposed to be the first NPC you encounter explaining some of the basics and I imagine him kinda like an old colleague of the main guy, just more serious( as opposed to the more casual and a bit apathetic main dude) and more into massive cybernetic, bicep heavy enhancements. I’m calling this guy Evergreen Dreams:

Also here are a couple of gifs of how I painted the artwork for these. I designed both months ago actually, so I have uploaded those to my portfolios and such already:

Does anyone else have some unusual methods for naming things, I’m curious?

Level Design

I showed off a partially finished cave level before called the Abandoned Archives and now I have been trying to complete it.

The point of this cave is to explore and to find and capture different monsters, so I don’t want to make it a single path towards the end. I added multiple branching paths that all eventually lead to the end of the level at the bottom left and you can use any of these or even all of them, depending on how you want to play. The white lines mark all the possible passages and everything bellow the dotted yellow line are the new parts I recently planned out. I will also need to place something at the end of the level to mark the spot where you can finish the level or continue exploring. I want to make a simple crafting system where you can upgrade or exchange the monsters you captured, so most likely a device for that will go there.

I have been painting the final version of this cave for a good bit already actually( I kept forgetting to upload this sketch) and I already spent probably around 80 hours on that. A yellow rectangle marks how much of the cave you can see in a single screen, so I think it’s gotten quite large. It’s a lot of work, but I’m quite close to completing it so it’s somewhat manageable. If I painted every little bit completely from nothing than it would likely be way too much work to complete anything in a reasonable amount of time( by reasonable I mean before I get bored or burned out), but I am reusing smaller parts of the environment quite a bit. I copy and modify parts to make it not obvious and paint from scratch where that’s unaplicable. I think this approach works quite well, I can put a lot of variety in these levels and not be limited with a strict grid like I would be if I used a tileset.

The next thing to do will be to add randomized extra rooms to really expand on the variety, I want to level to be replayable after all. I left some spaces in the level where those can fit and also quite a few of those will go around the sides. Note sure how many of those I will be including yet, but I definitely know I want to have that mechanic.

On the right middle I have an arrow marking passage to another cave. That cave is still in the concept stage, but overall I think it would be cool to have all the levels I add in the future to connect to this one, so you have larger and larger single area to explore, as opposed to several separate levels. At the beginning only the Abandoned Archives will be unlocked, but you will be able to permanently unlock the connection between caves if you enter that passage from the other cave, once that’s available.

Rock Elemental Monster Sketches

I like to switch between working on different aspects of the game, so I took a little bit of time away from painting background for a cave level to sketch out some more monsters. I knew I wanted some more elemental monsters after working on the paper elementals, so this time we have some rock based ones:

The one on the left disguises itself as a stalactite and charges the player if he gets close enough( should be easy to incorporate that, I essentially already coded monsters to do something very similar).

My drawing program crashed in a new and exiting way just after I sketched out the bull looking guy in the middle and deleted a whole layer full of stuff, so I ended up redrawing it. Luckily I had a backup for most of it and I only lost that one sketch but now I’m paranoid.

The turtle has stone structures on it’s back similar to what I saw Carlsbad Caverns in USA. They have some really strange and cool rock formations, so I wanted to use something like that for a monster for a while. I should make a rock jellyfish, now that I think about it, those rocks already look like it.

And I wanted some sort of symbol to add to the slate guy on the right, so I ended up googling an alchemical symbol for Earth. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a symbol for Rock or such, but it’s close enough.

I showed a sketch of this critter a while ago and here it is now finished. I think the design is fancy enough to make this the highest tier monster from the fantasy themed monsters I have so far.

Abandoned Archives level art is finished!

I showed of around third of this before, but now the first level artwork is done!

I worked on this in several sessions and drew other stuff in between of course, but overall just the painting of this took around 150 hours. Luckily integrating this into the game engine, adding all the colliders and such is much faster.

I'm actually quite happy with this and the next thing to do will be to add some smaller randomized rooms to this to make the level a bit different each time. Also I'm sure it's hard to get the scale of this, so take a look at the secondary images, those represent how much of the background you will see in a single game screen.