The dungeon is getting crowded as we enter the 7th week of development. It’s been a productive week as I added monsters, hazards, an outdoor area, and a bunch of tweaks and fixes.
I also worked on a new animation system to handle the cut-scenes. Often I feel silly adding these to my games, because we all know hardly anybody sits through them all and the skip button is the most loved feature of those animations, but I kinda enjoy adding them and they also add to the fun of the game. Keeping it all fun and not taking it too serious
With every game I recreate an animation system, because I usually tie them into the game system. So that all the animation stuff uses the same graphics and AI as the monsters in the game itself.
This weeks developer video shows a bit of the code that handles the intro animation, it all comes down to adding 4 player entities, and one soldier-avatar to the scene. These are then animated by simply mimicking the controls of a player, so to start with we “press right” on all players until they are at a specific coordinate, then we trigger some speech-effects (which are simply special-effects like explosions, debri, puffs of smoke, and in this case chat-bubbles).
The coolness of this is that everything that’s in the game can be easily used in the animation. So creating an animation with a big fire-monster would simple require me to add the fire-monster to the animation scene, add some funny lines of text, and possibly make the fire monster shoot or the player shoot, what ever pops up in my mind when I create the animation!
This time I also plan on having the dungeons be a bit more interesting when you are not battling monsters. So I added these floor-spikes that are pressure sensitive. The fun part is that they can also be used to damage any monster foolish enough to walk behind you when you run over them!
Besides adding these, and other hazards, as feature. I also update the level generator to create “special rooms” so not just randomly placing spikes, but creating a specific case where you have to watch your step. This all helps to keep the game interesting as the levels that are being generated can come with more variation in rooms.
Special rooms can also be shops, a bedroom, or even a bar full of avatars.. why not.. I should look into that!
My main goal with the sequel was to lean a lot on the original one. Basically like Mario games always have the same types of monsters, there is no reason the Heroes of Loot can’t have the same. It creates a world of familiarity. So I recreated the Cyclops of the original game, altho he looks much better in this game and he replaced his baseball-bat with two huge fists.
It also means I get to recreate the Minotaur, he will just be a bit more fiery this time! Speaking of fire:
It needs a bit of cleaning up, as the fire is extremely wide-spread in this gif, but you get the idea!
So that’s been a productive week, and in case you missed it, the game could still use some help on Greenlight, so make sure to help with little vote or a tweet or a what-ever-helps kinda thing by checking this link: Heroes of Loot 2 on Greenlight!
At this pace, I’m starting to believe an April release (or early access release) becomes a reality!
