For day to day brief updates, skip to the “Progress Makes Perfect” section or my twitter!

Setting

You are a soon-to-be guild owner in a small town. The town is center of a land in turmoil as the dungeons that were once cleared out and safe, are now teeming with danger.

Gameplay

Getting Started

When you start the game you will be briefed about the state of the land you live in. Years ago there was a guild of adventurers and after all the monsters were killed, the guild split up and went it’s separate ways. Going forward the evil began to creep back and there were no adventurers to be found.

The Guild

Your character is not a brave adventurer, but you are a person on a mission to rid the world of evil. You open up shop in the old run down Adventurers Guild and are tasked with recruiting Heroes to clear dungeons.

The Dungeons

This is a rough cut version in my head but I am considering 10 dungeons with 10 floors/levels to each – followed by a boss room. I haven’t settled on it but I’m leaning towards a non-linear approach. All the dungeons will be open, and gradually get harder until the 10th floor and the boss. This way I think the gameplay will stay fresh, and the repetition in the dungeons won’t be so in your face. But I will also try to incorporate story lines, journal entries, old artifacts, etc in the dungeons to keep the player interested.

The Combat

This is where it gets fun and exciting in my head. I’m making this game into something I think would be fun. The player will be tasked with assembling teams of up to four heroes and sending them off to the dungeon. Then the player will watch as his team will do their best to get through to the end with what they have. The player can only watch and not influence them, as they fight in real time. The dangers are real:

Dying of poisoning.

Being frozen or lit on fire.

Losing arms and legs.

Bleeding to death.

I hope to add to the list, but I already have a system started for the limb-loss, and it would obviously effect who you may choose for the next dungeon. A hero that dies in the dungeon, is dead forever.

Notable Features

Hiring Heroes

You are going to be tasked with hiring, paying, and utilizing up to 12 Heroes (12 is still in the air, maybe more, maybe less).

Time of day

The game will move in increments of eight hours. Your heroes need sleep too! You can send them on adventures which last eight hours, where they will return with loot and need rest. Each day the hero costs a fee, determined by their skill level.

Losing Limbs

Your hero can lose their arms and legs in the dungeon. When they lose a leg it is replaced with a peg-leg. When they lose an arm it is missing entirely. Monsters capable of doing that damage should be handled from a distance. Obviously this would mean that you can’t hold a weapon in the hand you lose.

Equipment

You will be able to equip – Head,Body, Legs ,Left Arm, Right Arm, Accessory. That’s the plan. The code to do all this is still in my brain so as I go this may change. I think it will be very possible.

Progress Makes Perfect!

The rest of December

To save the outlook of this game, I went to a much simpler art style. Obviously I’m no artist but this will let me focus on behind the scenes stuff to make the game exponentially better.

Did firefighter stuff.

Did family stuff (I have kids).

Started working on a prototype with a friend. Think Binding of Isaac meets your colon. This will be for pc and mac ideally.

Updated my children’s android app to include more unique chickens!

18/12/2016

Today I standardized the weapons/armor/accessory data so I could display it properly. Next task will be to click it and change it.

17/12/2016

Today I drew some gender specific faces, and got the Armor data structure settled, now with pants! I also made my first weekly update post, go have a read!

Made the weapons function in each hand properly, when facing right the sword is in the heroes right hand, facing left it stays in the correct hand.

Made an error while initializing the data for weapons – I left the “None” slot empty and in place of an image I placed a 0 which pointed to sprite 0 (the first sprite in the resource tree). The issue made my heroes have a light skinned arm even when they should have dark.

15/12/2016

Ran into a bump today, I made some armor for the heroes and realized that it would overlap the right/left arm — which ever was on the uppermost drawn layer. To fix this I cut the arm off and now I draw the torso,legs,hair,upper-layer arm, weapon,etc. Had to throw in a few more variables but the result looked pretty good!

14/12/2016

Starting making the data structure that will hold the info for weapons and armors. This is an animation of the first weapon (Rusty Sword) being held in both hands. Also made 11 styles of hair for the male heroes – check it out here.

13/12/2016

Began working in Game Maker Studio 2. I got a pretty good understanding of what I wanted to happen in the initial project so now it’s all been revised and restructured to work better. Particularly the data structures; they are all very standardized.

11/12/2016

Completed a system where the heroes will be generated daily. Six randomly generated heroes will be in the Tavern each day. This system will also make creating the Heroes (in code) when they enter the dungeons, or when entering the Guild screen