Crypts of Avaritia - roguelike dungeon crawler under utveckling

So I have been working on the spirit side of magic, and of course a central part of that is the summoning of creatures. First up is the same skeleton that was used for the enemies AI, but it will pretty much work the same for other creatures. Keep in mind that the summons are overpowered in this video (they kill the enemies with 2 hits) and that is done for display purposes. They also seem to disappear into thin air, but they have a set life time before vanishing, will add a particle effect to enhance this event. Again I am aiming for less chaotic battles in the final product, but it is more fun to have small groups duke it out

And if you like what you see you can vote for me on IndieDB : http://www.indiedb.com/games/crypts-of-avaritia

Just a little video with a swarm of enemies following the player and put on a world of hurt (god mode is on though). The new addition is the tiny creepy spiders. They have just a basic poor animation to try stuff out, it will of course be changed later on.

Efter extremt mycket jobb, semester i 2 veckor och viss sjukdom har jag äntligen fått lite gjort under dagen, försöker få lite kläm på 3D-modellering vilket är svårt men kul, fått ihop lite efter några timmar iaf, förhoppningsvis blir det bättre med tiden

Och ytterligare en:

Och en till, denna gång en fyrfotad:

Tack ska ni ha, jag ska försöka jobba hårt de kommande dagarna innan man börjar jobba igen, förhoppningsvis blir det lite gjort.

Jag målade texturer för första gången idag, jäkligt svårt men det blev ok, går så klart att få det mycket bättre men det ser ok ut för tillfället:

Tanken är att vildsvinet ska användas för att utveckla "hunting skill", den enda skill jag inte programmerat ännu. En högre skill kommer att innebära att man får mer kött från djuren.

Tack ska du ha, om du är sugen på att göra lite med Unity så finns det 1000 tutorials och liknande, bara att sätta igång!

Kan även uppdatera lite snabbt, har fått in pilbågar hjälpligt i spelet, allt funkar men ser och låter inte så kul. Har även putsat lite på mining skills så det ser bättre ut. Har även börjat trixa mer med det kosmetiska och börjar få in ett bra workflow för delar till grottor osv, så det kommer att bli ett lyft grafiskt.

Får bli en video på det hela också, i tur och ordning:

- The three types of arrows (so far), iron, fire and water. The bow is also being picked up.
- The way the bows work is that the lead hand (equipped hand) tenses and aims the bow, the other hand (as in mouse button) releases the arrow. So you do not have to shoot the arrow even if the bow is aimed and ready, just release the button and the bow is lowered.
- The normal stuff with fire and water items/magic, water put out fires, fire ignites fire.
- Forgot to do it, but you can pick up the arrows again unless it hits an enemy, then they are used up.
- Time to do some mining, picking up the pickaxe. Also picked up some other stuff, mainly the shield which now positions better. The view is blocked on purpose to give a sort of penalty when the shield is active. The shields have passive and active armor rating, active being much higher. Might change to only apply armor value when shield is in place.
- Give the wall a few wacks and it will crumble, if your level is to low there will be a message saying that you are not experienced enough to dig here (I am maxed on everything in all videos).
- The rock passage is just a test of new texturing and modeling techniques, looks way better than before at least, will do a ton of these more organic shapes and put in as details to cover the plain rough geometry.
- Some other graphical stuff, I have experimented with simple volumetric lighting, looks pretty OK but with some tweaks will look even better.
- Just showing that the bow can be equipped in any hand and function accordingly.

Det var allt för denna update, kommentarer som vanligt ytterst välkomna!

So a new feature has found its way into the game, the grappling hook. Not sure if it make the final cut though since it can easily become too powerful compared to the rest of the equipment, but with some proper balancing I think it will be fine. I really love the sense of freedom and the possibilities for exploring it gives.

The bow has now been improved with a zoomed mode while aiming, makes it look and feel better as well as functioning better, all in my opinion of course. But before it just kind of hanged in front of the player, now it feels more intimate and realistic.
You can now also see that the arrows are possible to pick up after being shot into a wall or other stuff except enemies.
I also show of the grappling hook and use it while climbing/jumping between parts of a lava pit. And as a reminder, this is in no way a final implementation, just a quick and rough test of the concept.

I have done some tinkering lately to improve a lot of stuff, been working on attributes and skills and the effects of those. Since that work is not completely done, I give you a video of some other stuff meanwhile.

In the video you see:
- Improved graphics settings, a lot of Unity games just use the default quality settings but I think it is important to add as much as possible, so I have added most of what Unity offer.
- FOV settings works for those who like to tinker with that, I just think it looks weird
- Just demonstrating the new stuff on the character, if you are close to a wall the weapons/hands will move back a bit to make it more realistic, since I use 2 cameras to avoid clipping you got some scale issues before and the weapons looked tiny since they were actually far through the wall...
- The player can now lean slightly around corners just to peek before entering a room or whatever.
- Like mentioned before you cannot climb while having your hands equipped, to solve that I added holstering/sheathing of weapons.
- Some results of the attributes and skills are shown, in this case reflexes and luck that is used for the calculation of avoiding enemy attacks, this is still being tuned and my stats are maxed out as always, but you can see that you sometimes will evade the enemy attack even if you stand still.
- Now to get some sleep, we fin a cozy little shelter where we can rest our eyes a bit, the problem is that its location is unsafe... There will be 5 different states the sleeping place can have; dangerous, unsafe, uncertain, safe, secure. All have different percentages per hour of you being discovered, so a longer nap at a unsafe or dangerous place will probably end in an encounter with a enemy. A secure place will be just that, so sleep tight in those places.
- You get woken up by a enemy that passed by and made some noise, time to fight for your life.
- Since you were still tired, you take another 1 hour nap, this time nobody finds you. (If it looks edited, that is because it is. Those damn just kept popping up... Need to pick a better place to sleep next time.)
- Some floating platforms that are static, while jumping on stuff like that you can use the shadow as reference on where to land.
- Some new arrows, one for each magical element. All enemies have different resistance/weakness to different elements, this can be used to your advantage if the player knows those weaknesses.
- A little refinement to the aiming, looks a bit better in my opinion.
- Again, pick up arrows that weren't shot at a enemy. Had to fix some bugs with that but now it seems to work dandy.

- And lastly something a bit different, the generation of the dungeon. I have now made it possible to input words (strings) instead of integers which can be way more fun. As you will notice there is not much variation (except the width and length of the floor that is shown) since there is only one tile to draw when the algorithm is taking a random tile, this will of course be changed once the work with adding content begins.

And I would also like to of your opinion on something. Perception in the game is supposed to determine if enemies and hidden stuff is nearby and tell the player, but I am not sure which way is the best to go.

1. The first option is system where all hidden objects/enemies get a rating from 1-10 (the same as all skills), if the player perception level is higher or equal to the object/enemy, the player will be prompted everytime, that is 100% discover rate if equal to or above in level..
2. Option number two is to have no ratings, only set a object/enemy to discoverable. Then the player perception skill level determines a chance between 0-100 % chance (0 skillpoints give 0%, 10 points give 100%) to discover this object every time the player is close to the object/enemy. The potential downside to this is that the player can "spam" the skill by going back and forth in a area hoping to discover anythings that might be there. But on the other hand it is more like throwing a dice than the first option.

So what do you say? How does other games do it (both pen and paper games and computer games)?

In order of appearance:
- Picking up some items that will be used later (placeholder graphics in many cases in case you wonder what the white blocks are, the same goes for icons in the inventory)
- New menu/options for opening doors. All doors that are locked by a lock (can also be locked by a trigger/latch, remote trigger or puzzle) can either be opened with the correct key type (iron, bronze, silver and gold keys) or be lockpicked (if the player is skilled enough).
- First door is lockpicked.
- Second door is opened with key.
-We find a water source. Here you can take a sip or use the water for various things. In this case we just fill up a empty bottle, but yiu will also have to rinse/clean eatable plants/vegetables. If you do not clean your vegetables you might catch a disease such as hepatitis (working on diseases at the moment).
- Take note that water sources can be clean sources or contaminated sources. The player does not now if the source is clean or contaminated, so to be sure you must boil the water. The same goes for meat in the game where Trichinella and other stuff might be present. Bur the player will at least know if the meat is rotten.
- Equipping a rock (use your imagination on the visuals).
- Picking up lost of other equipment.
- Throw the rocks, this will be useful for tricking enemies to check out movement/sound and thereby luring them away from their position if the guard something. It is implemented but not working 100% all the time so some more work is needed.
- Equipping a weapon and a shield, picking up arrows and move stuff around in the inventory.
- Equipping torch and light it up to demonstrate a critical function, swapping weapons between hands. This is very important since once you unequip a torch that is burning it will have to be ignited again, now the player can move it to another hand without having the need for igniting it again. Might sound like a minor thing but is crucial for immersion and realism.
- Find a fire source check out the possibilities. You can cook/craft items but also close wounds if you have no bandages to fix them. This will close the wound but also inflict some health on the player.
- Combine some water and salvia just to demonstrate how to make potions, in this case we create a minor healing potion. Recipes use a base ingredient at the top and then one or several other components to make something new. The recipe is sensitive to the order which ingredients is added, this makes it possible to make more complex recipes (and lessen abuse or trial and error, the combinations simply become to hard to find).
- Demonstrate the new way items are consumed, they have to be dragged and dropped at the use "button". This lessens the chance of accidental use of stuff.
- Just random messing around in the inventory.
- Video ends.

And one issue I want some input on, do you think that a failed attempt of crafting something always (or with chance) destroy the ingredients? Or should the ingredients only be consumed/used with a successful attempt? I am leaning on the first one because it seems appropriately punishing, but it might be pain in the ass to implement since not all ingredients should be spoiled, for example containers such as bottles, that means some property has to be added. Might be worth it though...

Grafik är inte det primära i detta spel, men jag köper att folk kan tycka att det ser gammalt nu Till viss del är det det jag siktar på med mina begränsade resurser, enkelt men funktionellt. Dessutom är allt uppbyggt så att det inte skulle så vara svårt att uppdatera all grafik om den möjligheten skulle uppenbara sig.

Men jag tror att merparten av spelare som intresserar sig för denna typen av spel inte bryr sig allt för mycket om grafik utan mer underliggande spelmekanik

Efter ett bra tag har jag tagit tag i detta på allvar, hade inte tänkt att det skulle bli så omfattande som det håller på att bli, men det passar bra i spelet och grovgörat är gjort, nu ska det bara läggas till "recept"

Systemet ser ut så här i stort:

- Det finns tre platser där man kan utföra saker, vid vatten, vid eld och vid en arbetsbänk.
- Vid vattnet fyller man på vattenflaskor och sköljer saker som skall ätas (plantor/grönsaker) annars riskerar man att få hepatit eller liknande.
- Vid elden kan man brygga potions och laga mat, koka sitt vatten så att det blir rent osv. Även göra om t ex "iron ore" till "Iron" så att man kan använda materialet.
- Vid arbetsbänken kan man bygga/uppgradera vapen och utrustning samt ta i sönder vapen och utrustning för att kunna få ut materialet och bygga något annat.

Jag funderar på att ha enkla "recept" som går att göra utan att vara närvarande av något av de ovanstående, detta blir då för att tillverka enkla småsaker som inte behöver värme eller verktyg.

Kommentarer?

Liten sneak preview på vad jag jobbar med, procedural terrain generation. Fortfarande i tidigt stadie men jag återkommer förhoppningsvis inom kort med mer detaljer

Colors/textures are not right (only used for value indication) but what you see is the wind and moisture system in place. The wind (comes in from the left towards right) brings moisture from the sea, then the moisture decreases over land depending on height, then picks up moisture again if the wind blows across any new water (as seen in the little lagoon). Again, horrible z-fighting but that is editor only.

Har jobbat lite på "badlands" biome, efter en mindre lyckat algoritm så har jag skrivit något som jag tycker börjar se ok ut.

Biomes som jag kommer att göra är tundra/mountains, forest (cold pine forest), desert, badland, swamp och volcanic. Kommentarer?

Och en ny, träsk (swamp). Alla träd, gräs och texturer är placeholders som vanligt, men det är en fingervisning av vad jag är ute efter.

Some changes, also started working on day/night cycle but it still a very much work in progress.

Small update on my day/night cycle, still a lot missing like the moon, effects for sun rise and sun set, fading between clouds and water etc. At least I wrote my first shader.

Tack, jag hade lite Morrowind i åtanke när jag gjorde den videon, så det är ett ytterst gott betyg, man tackar!

Tanken har varit att ha ett helt klasslöst system, det finns så många attribut och skills i kombination med begränsade resurser för uppgradering så man kan ändå inte bli bra på precis allting. När jag kommer till balansering senare så kan det bli så att man får fördela poäng innan man startar, men det är fortfarande klasslöst.

Har i övrigt arbetat lite på dynamiskt väder och lite bättre dag/natt cykel:

Tack! Har gjort en del sedan sist jag skrev här, postar lite härmed lite gott och blandat:

Small update on something new, been writing the dungeon generation algorithm for a while and wanted to start implementing some features. From the very beginning I wanted to impement a stealth system that was similar to Thief but I just could not come up with a good way to do it (without using light maps). But today an idea just popped up in my head, and 4 hours later it was prototyped and working quite well. All "art" is placeholder, the orb that indicates the light on the player was the fastest way I could think of to get visual feedback, this will change later on.

I have been working on a new procedural way to generate dungeons (threw the old one out altogether), here are some samples:

And the latest update, might be hard to see but "looped" sections are now possible:

Tack! Och så vitt jag vet så är en av fördelarna med Unity att man just kan kompilera till Linux

Liten update:

Not anything new, but i realized that I did not show anything with occluding objects, so this video highlights that. Also, since users might not be able to use shadows (I was actually not planning on using them at all for performance reasons, but is is better to make it an option I think to satisfy everybody) I show the difference with or without shadows. Shadows give you more of a visual que, other than that they work exactly the same.

So do you guys think it looks to weird when shadows are not used? Or is it possible to expect that the player have some imagination and understand that you can occlude the light behind a pillar?