Reboot / Remake / Restart

Although the roguelike project was going well I had a few issues with some parts of the code, and the sheer size of the project was something I could see stretching away in front of me for years with no guarantee that people would actually want to play it when it's finished.

It's time to try something a little less ambitious.
I'm going full rogueLITE!

Using a lot of the code from the roguelike project, I started making a more limited game.
There will be a single character, combat will be more arcade like, there will still be a chance to upgrade and develop your character's stats, but they represent only a single class and have fixed equipment.

Introducing the Lady Grenadier.

I've got a fun character, an interesting setting and an exciting story lined up. It still utilizes my low poly style, but things are going to be a little more cartoony.

Game play involves mostly chucking bombs at the enemy.

Bombs away!

But there's also a lot of platforming, jumping from multiple levels is part of the game. And you can use energy collected from defeated enemies to power up for a melee attack too.

Charge!

The idea of this attack is that you have to make your attack in a line, you keep going until you stop, either by reaching a wall, or falling in a pit or hitting an enemy that won't die.

Both types of attack require some thought about how to deliver them. You can't just spam bombs, or you risk blowing yourself up. The charge attack is very powerful, but you can run over traps or end up in trouble if you don't plan your attack run well.

I know people in the roguelike community tend to look down on Roguelites, but I want to make a fun game, and it would be nice if people other than me wanted to play it. It would also be great if there was a realistic chance of me ever finishing it! :)

Here's a video of last week's progress:

I've added a few extra things since then, but I'm not ready to do another development diary yet so it will have to wait until the weekend.

Comments

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.

Automating Level imports from Blender to Godot

Recently I've been making some levels in Blender an importing them into Godot. There are only about 7 or 8 shaders for each level, not counting dynamic objects which will be added later. But to improve rendering performance, it can be a good idea to split the meshes up into sections. At that point you might be faced with a list like this: Or it might be even more chaotic, if you didn't use simple names for the objects in your level. So it can take a long time to sort out all the meshes, make them unique and add textures and so on. Blender imports with simple Blender textures, or with placeholder materials. This is sometimes OK, but if your Godot shaders are very different to those used by Blender, it means applying new materials to every mesh object in the level when you import the scene. I found that during the design process, I was importing and readying a level several times before I was happy with the final layout. So at first I was wasting a lot of time. In Blender, I us

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra

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