Stealth action project

So, new project, still very WIP! Originally born from LD 25’s theme >You are the villain<, this one has you play as the last surviving Imp protecting his dungeon(s) from greedy Heroes that come to raid your treasure chambers. It’s a tower defense-ish fps stealth action game and I’m dubbing it “DaggerQuest”. Still a lot to do, but major gameplay components are in place. Here’s a short video of the prototype in it’s current state:

Feature description:

– Heroes spawn in waves of 1-10 and move towards your dungeon’s treasure chambers, grab some loot and then flee.

– Player can defeat enemies either:

• in open melee combat, which is near impossible to win without taking damage and of course exposes you to other enemies
• performing a take-down which requires catching the enemy unaware and unable to block
• building traps from gathered resources which will incapacitate an enemy

– Different enemy classes react differently to attack styles, requiring indiviual tactics:

• enemies come with different types of combat abilites, from melee sword fighting to fireball casting magic
• enemies’ vision is limited to the light cone of their torches
• enemies can hear uncautious movement of the player
• enemies have a set of characteristics that define their behaviour such as speed, tenacity or their quality of hearing
• when suspecting the player around they will search or even chase him, depending on their properties

– Environmental conditions of the dungeon provide different ambushing possibilities:

• natural ground to move on quietly vs paved floor on which causes different levels of noise
• obstacles to hide behind, approach enemies without detection
• shortcuts to cut off enemies’ routes
• regenerating resources to collect off the beaten pathes

At this point I’m considering more enemy types, combat and AI need various tweaks and I have figure out a general visual direction. So enough left to do.

Survivalism – Post competition

Before showing off new stuff I thought I’d post the last state of Survivalism – my entry to Ludum Dare 24.

After the competition I felt that a lot things could be done to take the game a little further. Looking back now it’s been quite big packages that I added and even bigger things that I still wanted to do. But before completely polishing all the drive out of the project I’ll just tie things up and move on. Next LD maybe?

Added Features:

• Enemy and item gfx overhaul
• Progressive unlocking structure of genes, slots and enemies
• In-game Tutorial
• Score system
• Particle system extended
• Improved UI and feedback
• Game pad support

Download the latest version here

Screenshots:

 

Ludum Dare 24 Entry ‘Survivalism’

So here’s my entry to the Ludum Dare compo, a little action thingie that has you pick up alleles to configure your blast attacks to match your enemies vulnerablities.

Sadly the capturing slowed down the game a bit, it’s faster and smoother if played alone.

Get it here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?81r031c8e7pxif3

Ludum Dare – Day 1

A quick one

Been tempted to take part in game jams lately and in order to get myself in the blitz-dev mood I threw together this fairly spontaneous design.

You play as an energy-based lifeform – the Entroper – that leeches various forms of energy from entire planets. Goal is to gather enough bio energy to be able to leave the current star cluster, the levels of this game. You may also choose to convert planetary energy into weapons. These you will need to defeat the other hostile lifeforms with which you compete for the planetary resources.

The base types of energy that every planet provides in variing amounts are biotic energy (health), photonic energy (basic ammo) and kinetic energy (booster fuel). Your goal is to gather energy but combat and self defense require you to spend it strategicly for weapon production and protective measures.

Besides the black hole-type moloch in the video I also want hunters that chase the player through the star cluster and drive him forward. Also, as the game is ment to play in geological time scales, I’d like to include cosmolgical events, like sunstorms or supernovae, that might even be triggered by the player as a weapon.

I’m also considering various orientation aids to tell the player where he came from, where enemies are, etc. But I’m kinda cautious to not banalise the simplistc setting.

At this point the star positions and most parameters are randomised and there is no actual level setup, but I imagine with more deliberate planet compositions and timed spawns I’m able to get to a somewhat decently paced experience.

Touch Device Game

I’m working on a little something for touch screens. Going for something accessible and fast-paced, key feature is drawing symbols with your finger to cast spells.

You’ll shoot your way through hordes of monsters by tapping them on the screen and once you earned enough mana you can cast various fancy spells on the battlefield.

Mechanics for casting, shooting, spawning, inventory etc. are in place and I’ve got an early test level going. Now to tune gameplay some more, it’s not as fast and frantic as I’d like yet, I’ll see how far I get by adjusting some speeds and damage points.

I have a bunch more spells and enemies I want in there, so I’ve got some things to do before I think about how to deal with grafics.

Video #03

Here’s the new video, documenting the development progress of my game project. The clip illustrates the core game ideas, all basic gameplay elements are now in place and working.

Quite  a few ideas didn’t make it into this version, not sure whether to implement them just yet or rather move on and start modelling (plus a little more concepting 😉 ).

I’m quite pleased with interaction and movement, whereas combat might need some more variation – more and smarter enemies basically. I’ve also been thinking of additional ways to interact with the drone, e.g. “blind firing” it’s laser while beeing attached to it or wicked combo attacks and such. An additional research feature (similar to the existing harvest-feat.) could allow the drone to inspect specific environmental objects and upgrade it’s weapons or even level up certain abilities. Would add a nice gameplay layer and incite exploration and goody hunting. I might throw in some of those ideas occasionally, but most importantly I’ll get started with the graphics now. Should allow for more frequent updates – so long!

picking it up again

been distracting myself for a while and now trying to get things going again. so I’m posting these older concepts before I completely abadon them.

in fact this is merely a teaser for things to come cause  I’m in the middle of debugging my demo level right now. things have actually progressed quite a bit since the last video. will soon post a video of that and then finally move on to graphics!

Project Concepts

I’m contributing some concepts to a good friends game project, a steampunkish medieval horror shooter using unreal engine 3. Gonna be pretty badass and hi-res, be sure to check his blog here

Some more scribbles

Getting closer. I think number three on this sheet is pretty close to what I was looking for. Imagine that one popping out of the ground in front of you, getting on it’s hind legs, it’s underbelly opening up (S.King’s Dreamcatcher anyone?), revealing the full lenght of those alleged tiny feet. Already afraid of animating that..