I’m back
It has been a while since I’ve posted an update, and a lot has actually happened since then. First of all, I’ve changed what exactly the game is going to be as I finally settled on what it will be. I’m no longer designing it as a platformer, but rather as a top-down twin stick shooter, similar to titles like Binding of Isaac and Geometry Wars 3. Additionally, it was a New Year’s resolution of my mine to devote more time to actually working on the project, so I’m proud to say that I have actually made some decent progress.
The above is a video showing off the pathfinding capabilities of the enemies, which I’ve implemented with the help of an algorithm called A*. I’ve also already implemented some basic shooting and enemy death mechanics, although of course all of the above will be reworked and refined.
So what is the goal for this game? First of all, I’ve decided that in order to reach the goals I’ve set for myself, the art of the game will need to be extraordinarily simple — hence the minimalist, simple geometric shapes you see in the example I provided. The game itself will essentially be a dungeon crawler — I’ll procedurally generate lots of rooms, and within each room there will be collectibles and enemies. The end goal will likely be a boss of some kind, but when it comes to that and the “story” of the game it’s all still very much undecided.
What’s shown above is some brainstorming I’ve done that encapsulates what I hope to have done in two months time. In the top there’s a full-fledged dungeon, with 8 rooms connected by various corridors. The bottom left corner shows how I want to handle the camera, and the bottom right shows the HUD, which I’m going to try to keep unobtrusive and simplistic by just showing health, a minimap, and current “upgrades”, as well as captions for voices that may or may not be implemented later on.
To put it concretely, here are the goals I want to accomplish in the next twelve weeks:
- Three enemy types
- Procedurally generated dungeon
- Camera movement
- HUD (health, minimap)
- At least one upgrade
- Fully replayable standalone
That last point means that I want to actually have a title screen and make it so that launching the game leads to a seamless and engrossing game experience, as opposed to what I have right now, where the standalones just drop you immediately into a room and when you “win” nothing happens. The most difficult one will probably be the first two points, but the thinking goes that if I get those done than the rest of the game is just building off of them really.
So hopefully this semester is much more successful than last semester!
