Welcome, dear readers! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? A
lot has been decided and made in the meantime. I hope you’ve had a good time
while I’ve been quiet. Now, I hope you’re fully awake, because I’m about to throw
a whole lot of information at you.
I’ve told you what our theme is, but that’s only a
small part of it. I mean, you can have a nice setting all you want, but that
does not immediately give you a good game. No, what you need is details. That
is what you’re about to read.
I’ve already told you that the game will be based on
the game Rogue. This means it’ll have
procedurally generated levels and permadeath. First, I shall tell you a little
bit about the level generation.
The floors will generally be made up of square rooms of
the same size, placed in a rectangular grid. Sometimes, that grid will even be
square. Some rooms will be empty, meaning that it’s basically a square you
can’t go into. There’s the possibility of rooms connecting to make a larger
room, and there will be hidden rooms with fake walls. Hallways can also span in
place of rooms. There are a lot of details that I will not go into now, but
that’s the gist of it. I’ll allow you a sneak peek at a level generated by our
level generator. Bear in mind that this is very much not representative of what
the game will look like.
As you can see in this image, there are three different
enemies. We might add more if we have time left, but these are the ones we
have:
The bee
Bees buzz around randomly, going this way and that in a
random fashion. That is, until they see you. At that point, they come charging
toward you, and you’d better kill them before they come too close. You see,
once a bee touches you, it pretty much explodes
in your face, damaging you quite badly.
The beetle
In this game, beetles are sturdy creatures. They take
quite a bit of damage to kill, and can hit quite hard if you’re not fast
enough.
The spider
Spiders are sneaky little things. They stay at a
distance and spit at you. If you get hit, you’ll be both poisoned and slowed,
so be careful!
At the moment, we have two weapons: a sword and a bow.
These are pretty self-explanatory, but the general idea is that the bows fire
ranged shots and the sword is for melee damage. You can only have one of these
at a time, so choose what best suits your playstyle. Monsters can drop stronger
weapons, though, so you can always switch later on if you manage to find a
different weapon.
It’s not just a swing of a sword or an arrow shot that
depends on your choice of weapon. No, our combat system is a bit more than just
that. See, next to your basic attack, you can have up to three abilities, which
you can use by using your mana, and one of those depends on what weapon you
choose. If you have a sword, you spin around, swinging the sword around you in
a circle. A bow, on the other hand, allows you to unleash a rain of arrows onto
your enemies.
Of course, I did mention three abilities, didn’t I? The
other two abilities can be found in treasure chests and enemies can drop them.
At the moment, we have four different abilities, but more will probably be
added:
Shield
The shield makes you invulnerable for a little while.
This’ll be useful for when you’re charging into a group of enemies with your
sword, or maybe you’re trying to get away instead.
Boost
This ability allows you to boost your damage for a
little while. In fact, it doubles the
damage you can do!
Trap
This ability allows you to lay down traps for your
enemies. Once an enemy gets caught in it, it slows it down and damages it.
Snipe
With this ability, you can fire high-damage shots at
your enemies. However, the mana cost of this is quite high, so make sure you
don’t miss!
Now, weapons and abilities aren’t the only things that
can drop. No, you can also find stat upgrades. There are upgrades for the
following things:
·
Health
·
Mana
·
Damage
·
Health and mana
·
Luck
·
Damage over time (this adds a small DoT to your
attacks)
·
Mana regeneration
·
Mana and mana regeneration
·
Damage and damage over time
·
Health, mana, mana regeneration, damage, and
damage over time
Of course, you can also find food. This allows you to
heal, which you’ll surely need as you progress; this game is many things, but
easy is not one of them.
Sweet readers, we still have much to do the coming
weeks. For example, the AI needs to be improved, because the enemies sort of
keep bumping into walls. Right now, this is pretty much the only thing keeping
you alive most of the time, though, because the combat system right now is a
bit broken. That’s another thing we’re going to be working on. We are also
going to create our own custom sprites, which will take a bit of work.
Furthermore, we are going to add a line of sight-lighting system. Then, we
still have the menus we have to put in, not to mention the music and sounds,
which yours truly will be working on.
I’ll see you in a while with further updates, but not
before sharing another interesting piece of ant trivia with you: there are entirely
female colonies of ants that only reproduce asexually. This means that the queen
somehow turns eggs into larvae without the use of sperm. This brings with it
both risks and advantages. If you want to find out more about this, I have
found an interesting little article here.
