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Topic: Poncho [Unreleased] [Pre-Development] (Read 190828 times) previous topic - next topic
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Poncho [Unreleased] [Pre-Development]


"You are an adventurer delving deep into the dungeon to find out what's at the bottom! Have at it!"

v1.0 Features:

  • A roguelike adventure, with a focus on exploration!

  • There are no standard "experience" or "levels", all your stats are initialized by your class and buffed by the items you find.

  • You get better loot the deeper you go, but you can't go back to a floor you've left.

  • Overworld town for selling your loot and buying rare/unique items that don't generate in the dungeon.

  • Go straight from the current floor up to the town, no need to retrace your steps. Convenient!

  • Permadeath, with quicksave. This is a roguelike, but no need to play it all in one sitting.

  • Randomly generated map, items, and character spell. No two games play the same!



Planned Features:

  • Pet to act as support, such as killing nearby enemies or buffing you.

  • Character customization as simple as picking hair style, hair color, and eye color.



Development Progress:

  • Player creation: 10% (TODO: Classes, Sprites)

  • Items: 99% (TODO: Magic Items)

  • Spells: 10% (TODO: More Spells)

  • Menu System: 0% (TODO: Basic Menu, selling, buying, equipping)

  • Turn Order: 0% (TODO: Implement FFX style turn ordering)

  • Music: 90% (TODO: Get more music together, continue testing of sound manager)

  • Map Generation: 30% (TODO: Implement Algorithm, Map manipulation)

  • Tile based movement: 50% (TODO: Matrixes representing generated map to determine items and obstruction positions)

  • Saving: 1% (TODO: Map Saving, Saving functions, Loading functions)



Screenshots: (v0.01_pre-alpha_badart)


Credits:

  • mezzoEmrys - Project Manager, Programmer

  • ChocoHugs - Creative Director, Artist

  • Eevables - Musician

Re: Poncho [Unreleased]

Reply #1 –
This sounds pretty cool. Rogue-like is by far the easiest presentation style to work with. It makes mapping, and animations so much easier. It's how I made so much progress in my game 'Amp'd for Health Potions".

I'm also liking the fact you went ahead and scoped a part of your game right here. It's always good to have a list of things to add prior to making them. That way you know exactly how much needs getting done prior to doing it.

Looks promising. Screenshots soon. (I'd say get a test map up before you make the random map generator).
If you use code to help you code you can use less code to code. Also, I have approximate knowledge of many things.

Sphere-sfml here
Sphere Studio editor here

Re: Poncho [Unreleased]

Reply #2 –
The dungeon map, in 1.0, will only be maybe 5 tiles, which is easily implementable, assuming I can make good quality tiles. The complex map is going to be the overworld map, which is constant. I also lack any sprites at the moment as my art asset person is currently entrenched in their end of summer schoolwork, which I won't hit for another few weeks. I am trying at the map tiles, but I am not good at making repeatable tiles, by any metric.

Re: Poncho [Unreleased]

Reply #3 –
Quote
There are no standard "experience" or "levels", all your stats are initialized by your class and buffed by the items you find.

Can I imagine this as a Zelda-like effect? Find better sword, now you're stronger; get better armor, now you have more defense?

In any case, sounds interesting. Permadeath sounds harsh, though. :P

Re: Poncho [Unreleased]

Reply #4 –
@DaVince: I was under the impression permadeath was pretty much par for the course with roguelikes...

Re: Poncho [Unreleased]

Reply #5 –
Quote from: DaVince – on

Can I imagine this as a Zelda-like effect? Find better sword, now you're stronger; get better armor, now you have more defense?

You could imagine it like that, but it's not quite accurate. It's more like standard rpg "find better sword"->"equip better sword"->"get stat buff from better sword", except that your stat buffs depend almost ENTIRELY on finding better equipment. You also get three "accessory" slots where you can equip different types of items; each of which has some manner of random stat buff, so you can (somewhat) control your stat growth by equipping weapons with buffs that align with the type of character you want to play.

Re: Poncho [Unreleased]

Reply #6 –
I take it this project is dead? The icon looks really cool, I can imagine it being a huge-selling indie game.

Re: Poncho [Unreleased]

Reply #7 –
It's not dead, it's just taken a back seat to my first year in college. I've been poking at it every now and then, but between my art person's computer being broked and me having reached a planning issue, things have kinda gone on hiatus for the moment.
I've also been encountering other issues here and there regarding my turn structure and saving/loading, so I've been doing bugfixes.

Re: Poncho [Unreleased]

Reply #8 –
Ah, alright. I'm looking forward to some updates, eventually.

Re: Poncho [Unreleased]

Reply #9 –
So am I. Maybe we could at least have an update of what you've finished for now that we haven't seen yet? :)

Re: Poncho [Unreleased]

Reply #10 –
Graphically, the game looks almost exactly the same, except for the ability to (in code) set a skin tone over top of the plain white body.
Which reminds me, I can make the opening New Game/Continue screen pretty easily right now, if I can remember all the stuff about menus and how they work :P

Re: Poncho [Unreleased] [Pre-Development]

Reply #11 –
Well, after a good amount of time spent drafting out code, I realized that I didn't really have any concrete plans for the main content of the game; we had a vague idea of what amounted to a "puzzle roguelike", which, in the prototyping stage, proved to be more repetitive than fun. After a bit of going back to the drawing board and looking over our original ideas, we realized that we had planned for a roguelike world which was meant to be explored - and that is not something easy to make "fun".
I've built out a framework for a simple combat system, which under the original idea would have been almost superfluous - hence its purposeful simplicity. The main point was to let you sit down and explore something new every game. While at first it seems interesting to have a "new world to explore every time you sit down", putting that into code and making it an engaging experience for the player proved to be a bit more difficult, especially when mated with the rougelike permadeath, making exploration of the world something which would only really effect the player, and wouldn't be able to have a lasting effect on the character. Currently, I've pushed this game back into the Pre-development so that we can get the main body of the game built out, instead of having a paper thin game with lots of bells and whistles on the side.

So, if you want a short explanation as to the lack of development on this project, the game seemed like it could be fun to play, once we get the main body of the game into something that doesn't seem painfully repetitive.

As much as I'd love to launch into a discussion of rougelike games and their implications on story telling and world building and exploration, I don't think that the documentation thread for my project is the best place for it.

Re: Poncho [Unreleased] [Pre-Development]

Reply #12 –
That's cool, take all the time you need so long as it's good time spent. :) I'm notorious for taking forever on projects and not finishing them. But at least they get better and better with each game made. Here's hoping you develop something remarkable.
If you use code to help you code you can use less code to code. Also, I have approximate knowledge of many things.

Sphere-sfml here
Sphere Studio editor here

Re: Poncho [Unreleased] [Pre-Development]

Reply #13 –
Hey mezzo, just wondering if there's any updates on this project?

Was interested in seeing a release - I would be happy to lend help if necessary

Re: Poncho [Unreleased] [Pre-Development]

Reply #14 –
I've gotten a lot of the ideal gameplay worked out with a spiral notebook containing all of my notes. My current blockade is working out dynamic hitboxes for things like weapon swings and spells in real time, instead of in a turn based format. I've tinkered with it in a couple different test projects, but haven't found a good way to create a sort of general form of it that I could use in multiple games as a simple add-on.
I think that it'd be easier to do with minisphere once it has typescript functionality, though it still doesn't solve problem of having a generic way of defining hitboxes quickly. I've got some notes for a hitbox overlay type system to let me create the hitboxes and see their range and effect visually, like a fighting game hitbox overlay.
I've also been considering moving away from sphere to make use of 3d models, but that's a bigger box of worms than I can handle right now, so I'll probably stick to creating the first iteration of the game in sphere.

Also, I'm bad at spriting animations still. But that is coming along! I'm getting better at drawing those poses, which I can use to make the individual sprites with some neat tricks.