Spikes, quests and rats!

hol2_feature

Breezing through with the development of Heroes of Loot 2! There is still a lot of work to be done here, but it’s amazing how far I’ve gotten in such a short time. Right now I’m only happy with the castle-look you see on most of the screenshots, and not so happy with the other environments.. so I’ll need to come up with some new level graphics soon so that we can actually create a complete game with different zone’s to loot through!

A lot of work has been done this week on interface stuff, mostly on the backend with me creating a bunch of code to easily add dialogs, buttons and stuff like that. Sounds boring, but I’ve been having a blast with how cool the code looks that drives it all (game developers are basically a bit crazy).

hol2_wallspike

Also a bunch of work on the enemies and content done these last few days, I’ve added some old favorites of mine like the wall-spikes and the rats.. so expect them to re-appear in this sequel! I did make the rats more of an animated distraction, as they do very little damage this time (still enough to make them nasty), but I might create some bigger rats for later levels that will hurt you when you don’t need it.

hol2_magiccandle

I’ve been also working on some of the quests, the plan is to have a large list of possible quests, and the level-generator will then just pick them. I’m extremely pleased with how this quest system worked out. It’s fairly simple adding new quests at the moment, with various parameters. The one you see above is some randomly placed candles that need to be lit with magic before the door opens. The candles are randomly placed in the rooms you can already access.

With every game my procedural-level generators get better and better, and this one is really the most impressive one, not just creating the castle but also the quests, adding shops, special rooms, etc.

hol2_morecoins

The shop is now also working for the most part. These shops can pop-up in various places in a level and it will offer a few random items. You can then either buy one, two, or none at all (depending on your loot).

I did make a few changes to the inventory system. I was planning on having each character only capable of carrying one item. So if a character had a shield, he wouldn’t be able to also pick up a key. But I now changed that system into two items per character. So you can have an item on your back, and one in front.. this means you can have a “usable” and a “carrying” item (like a shield and key) at the same time.

Still in the development stage, so I’ll just give it some game time and see how this system holds up.

Finally, I made some tweaks to the gameplay. Originally I had wooden doors between different area’s, but this also meant that monsters would always stay confined to the rooms they spawned in.

The fun in the original Heroes of Loot (in my opinion) came from the fact that you could have wondering monsters in hallways or separated from their group. So I removed all the wooden doors, and will only leave them for special cases (like the shop always has a closed door). This improved the gameplay as monsters now come less as a group and more as individuals at you, also moving through hallways..

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