[WIP][Roguelike] Realm of the cursed

[timblegoorn]

Lately I've been working on a game, without any sort of engine. I am using pure JS, HTML canvas, and Jquery.

The name is not final but the features currently in are as follows:

-Melee Combat

-Multiple enemies with different stats and AI A* pathfinding aggression if they see you.

-Loot and loot tables

-Random dungeon generation with an exit that leads to another randomly generated dungeon, with the dungeon generating differently (more enemies and few other features) the higher you go.

-FOV

-Minimap

-Basic inventory functionality

-Autosave function

-Saving/loading function to and from unlimited number of slots

-Fully functional log with timestamp

 

The planned features are as follows:

-Magic and Ranged combat

-Health bars above enemies and the player

-Improved UI

-5 Bosses

-After each boss is defeated, the dungeon has a visual change along with more difficult enemies and obstacles

-Traps (they generate, yet there's no art or function yet)

-Merchants and random NPCs scattered around to explain the lore, story, and mystery

-Basic crafting and alchemy

-Randomly generated items to loot

-Level and XP system

-Pet system (pet that follows you and aids in combat)

-Multiple starting classes

-10 to 30 hours of gameplay through multiple playthroughs

-Sounds and music

-Mystery type story

 

I am sixteen years old and this is my first major project. I'm doing the entirety of programming by myself and in my own created engine, I am also doing all the art. Upon completion I hope to port it into an .exe and put it on Steam greenlight and sell it for around $2-$4.

 

Now, as this is my first project I'd love some criticism and feedback regarding my goals and current features, as well as any tips from people have already completed games that may be helpful to myself.

 

[mattstyles]

Looks like super strong work, particularly for a first major project! The screenshot looks great.

Have you got a url so we can actually give it a bash? Can't give much feedback without it.

A general tip is to be determined and dogged to get this to a place you call it MVP (minimum viable product) or MMP (minimum marketable product), or, in other words, a place where you could ship it as a playable game, even if you have more features planned. On that subject, be brutal in your definition of what MVP is, avoid scope creep by keeping MVP minimal (hence the name minimum viable product), this allows you to ship early (even if its an alpha, beta or whatever, if its playable then its ready to be played by somebody), get feedback and keep moving forward by picking the most valuable features to implement next.

Quote

You never really finish any project, you just choose a suitable place to stop working on it

(if anyone can tell me where I picked up the above quote I'd be really grateful, possibly Sid Meier?)

Out of interest, which method are you using for your fov/visibility/lighting?

[timblegoorn]

5 minutes ago, mattstyles said:

Looks like super strong work, particularly for a first major project! The screenshot looks great.

Have you got a url so we can actually give it a bash? Can't give much feedback without it.

A general tip is to be determined and dogged to get this to a place you call it MVP (minimum viable product) or MMP (minimum marketable product), or, in other words, a place where you could ship it as a playable game, even if you have more features planned. On that subject, be brutal in your definition of what MVP is, avoid scope creep by keeping MVP minimal (hence the name minimum viable product), this allows you to ship early (even if its an alpha, beta or whatever, if its playable then its ready to be played by somebody), get feedback and keep moving forward by picking the most valuable features to implement next.

(if anyone can tell me where I picked up the above quote I'd be really grateful, possibly Sid Meier?)

Out of interest, which method are you using for your fov/visibility/lighting?

Thanks for the kind words! Nothing is uploaded yet but when I get a better UI set up I'll upload it and share it, hopefully within the next few days.

Thanks for the tip, I'll look into that more. I'm somewhat against early access games, particularly because they automatically get branded as buggy and unlikely to be finished, as well as the developer often receives hate, whether they update it or not, and similarly I don't want to feel tempted to start making money in a form of a paid beta and just drop the project and take off. Steam Early Access has a bad name in that sense, I may consider it, but not until I have a more solid base of a game first. As it is now, the basic framework is in, but there's virtually zero gameplay and there's still many features to implement. Working on the UI currently and hope to get drag and drop set up. But again, I may consider, but not until the core mechanics and gameplay are in for a rough taste of what it will be like.

And great quote, very true haha

I'm using symmetric recursive shadow-casting. I spent several days trying to develop my own algorithm for it but just settled in modifying someone else's to suit my needs. I used this person's algorithm: https://gist.github.com/as-f/59bb06ced7e740e11ec7dda9d82717f6 . I just assigned a 0, 1, or 2 value to every tile in the game, being unseen, in shadow, and currently visible, and I changed them as I went, using a separate "fog" overlay, which essentially just has transparent black, regular black, or cleared out tiles for the appropriate lighting. It's simple, but I'm happy with it. I may possibly try adding in fading to the view, causing it to get progressively darker the farther away the tile is. But I'll see. Anyways sorry for the long answer haha, I have a tendency to do that xD 

[mattstyles]

1 hour ago, timblegoorn said:

I'm somewhat against early access games, particularly because they automatically get branded as buggy

Yeah I agree thats a good thing to consider, I think maybe that's why the term MMP is banded about more frequently now as MVP is often too early for general release whereas MMP is starting to look more like a polished product. It's a tough call when you release publicly but even if you could release to a url requiring authentication and grab some eyes wherever you can it can help structure your project and, sometimes, make it feel more real as people besides just you (or your team) are looking and commenting on it.

1 hour ago, timblegoorn said:

I'm using symmetric recursive shadow-casting

Nice, I've just implemented some visibility and lighting stuff for a roguelike I'm slowly working on, so far I've just plumped for brute force line of sight at the moment, which is more than fast enough currently but might become restrictive later down the line. It's got fall-off based on a bezier curve based on and I'm toying with the idea of adding light tinting (i.e. a red light source makes everything a little red etc etc), it also does additive light so 2 weak lights sources will combine to create brighter tiles. Fun stuff.

[jopcode]

Wow, really great and nice work, i want play it when available(please notice me when it ready for play), and you know how i can destroy a only one bullet, of plugin weapon? 

[PhasedEvolution]

Looks great! Keep with the good work!

[timblegoorn]

Thanks guys! I've been hard at work this weekend setting up the UI, I'll have a demo link out soon