New Idea!

So yeah... um.... New Idea!
Remember I was trying to mix a dungeon crawler with a shoot-em-up and blah blah blah? well I talked to a friend and realized I needed to add something else because just A + B wouldn't be so interesting, so there has to be more! something fun, something that can make you say "OMG I'M AMAZING"  or something like that, I'm sure you get what I mean.

Anyway, the idea I got was to give the player some sort of special skills, but not just those ultimate skills that when you use them you have to wait 3 hours to use them again, I'm talking about something with a much lower cooldown, and yet fun to use. The player's primary way of offence is shooting so I don't want to do a special skill that makes you "shoot faster" or stuff like that, I thought about something even better! I don't know how to call it yet but it is some kind of boost mode, were the player moves faster, but not only that, while the player is in that state he becomes invulnerable and basically turns into a human bullet. So, think about this for a sec: you are trapped in this room where dozens of monsters are coming at you, thirsty for your blood, and you are just desperately running and shooting because you just can't do anything else! WRONG! YOU CAN DO SOMETHING! *activate supa-dupa magic thingy that turns you into a freaking human bullet* and whoosh!!! you are flying everywhere trampling those suckers that just wouldn't give up on you, and now the room is perfectly safe, how do you feel? that's right, you feel like the boss.

Of course there are some implications when implementing such an overpowered weapon in a game, but here's the thing, my friend told me something incredibly true. If the enemies and the player in the game are not OP (overpowered) then you may think that the game is balanced well enough, and probably it is but... it just won't  feel that good to advance through the game, but if you turn the enemies and the player OP then nothing is OP, so... what's the point of that? the feeling of awesomeness. I dare you to tell me that it is equally fun to kill a zombie with a pistol than it is to kill it with a flamethrower! you see? this is the OP and not OP thing I'm talking about. So to balance things out for the enemies I will do something like... spamming lots of them and putting the player under some stress.

I even thought about how to give the player this special skill, it won't be something they will have when they start the game, it will be like the weapons you get before the boss fight. My idea is to do something like this: the player will get the skill while fighting the boss, I know it sounds a bit excessive but I thought about it and doesn't seems to be a bad idea. The player gets in the room, and 1 spawner starts.... you know.... spawning... and the player will be like "nothing to be afraid of", but when he gets to destroy the spawner... 2 more appear! :O!!! "aw come on!" the player will say and with a bit more of effort he will get to destroy those spawners too.... FOUR SPAWNERS! "what the hell?!" and the player will start to get stressed because they know they won't be able to take down the spawners with all the monsters running at them, they will start to get hit, lose hp, feel kinda helpless too.... but then.... when the player's health has gone a little down (say half? maybe 1/3?) some message appears saying that you suddenly remembered how to use that special skill! (I still have to figure out how am I going to fit this into the lore of the game, but I'll deal with that later) and now the player has something that can actually save them! and with a quick movement *WHOOOOSH!!* the player has now destroyed the 4 spawners, winning them the fight! YAY!

So that's what I've been thinking about these days, sadly I don't have any screenshot to show you :'(, but I am working on it, right now the boost thingy skill is almost done (also I have to give it a proper name :D) and I think after that I would just need to setup all the first level's events and.... DEMO! wohoooo!!!

Thanks for reading, I hope I can do this soon since I got a lot of work coming this weeks, including the global game jam, but I'll do my best ;)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

YEAH! NEW YEAR! AND NEW STUFF COMING! YAY!

It seems like I'm finally getting closer to a decent demo of the game, I'm gonna show you a couple of things I've been working on these days.

• New sprites: I love new sprites and I love them even more when they actually look good or at least decent, I decided I should keep the enemies as simple as possible since a lot of enemies = a lot of sprites = a lot time animating them = x.x

Well, since one of my friends though it was a bunny (wtf?) I must say it is NOT a bunny, it's a Wisp or at least something similar to one. I know they don't have eyes and blah blah but I don't care :D.

This is the sprite I made for the Orbiter, I'm really happy about this one, I think I finally managed to keep it simple and did something easy to animate and that looks good in my opinion.

I must admit I was lazy about this because it's kinda one of the hardest things for me to do, but I finally made the walking left and right animations for the wizard! that's half way to go!

• Finally I can work on game stuff! What I mean is that I can finally work on game mechanics since I got rid of most of the bugs. For example, yesterday I was thinking about how was I going to add the shoot-em-up mechanic into a dungeon-crawler, at first I was thinking about doing something like oldschool Zelda: Big rooms interconnected by doors, so there would be space to move and shoot, but I'd rather not do it like that. So today I came home and almost the first thing I did was play Spiral Knights (I'm in love with this game) and realized that the game is very similar to what I want to do, so I got an idea... Big rooms..... Long corridors! That's it! Awesome isn't it?! I know it's simple and maybe obvious but that's one problem solved.

I know this entry might be smaller than it should be, but probably I'm so excited with all the things I can finally add to the game that I just forgot other things... Anyways here's a screenshot!

This are the Orbiters shooting a lot of fireballs at the player, I seriously want to remake that fireball sprite but for the time being I'll just enjoy running around for my life from these annoying guys :D.

That's it for today, soon I'll post entries about a much more complete game and probably a demo so you can try it and alpha test it if you wanna call it like that :). Thanks for reading!

 

Oh Boy, It's been a long time!

I was REALLY busy with College but now that I'm on a break I got the chance to get back to work on Little Wizard for a while.

So let's talk about what I want to talk about. Remember the last entry? about my TODO list??? well I've changed it a bit. You see, I've been thinking and noticed that to get the feeling I wanted from a shoot-em-up I need way bigger spaces, like... HUGE SPACES, not just some freaking corridors. So, I'm not saying I'll throw away the level I made but..... I won't be using it for a while.... *sadface*.........

Aaaaaanyways.... ENEMIES! I want to talk about enemies. Remember they where in the TODO list? well, I decided I'm going to work on them now.... and I just did! yay! So here's what I managed to do:

• Health and Mana Bar!!!! Well not such a big deal, but it makes a game look more like a game so much that it's ridiculous! And to be honest I love it <3.
• Mob spawner: I love this thingy, it'll just spawn enemies till you die or just get tired. But that's not the point of it, I just wanted to make one but obviously its objective will be... spawning monsters... reasonably.
• New Enemy! DemonSlime! OMG! it sounds amazing!!!!.... not so exciting I know... It is a pretty basic enemy, it just moves towards the player and hits them when in melee range.
• New Enemy! Orbiter! (Oh God I'm just so good at naming... well not really, I just named it after the special feature it has: Orbiting around the player). It's a funny fact how I got it to Orbit around the player, I was playing around with the Sine function to make it move like... well... the Sine function. And then one thing led to another and BOOM the enemy is now orbiting around the player, wich is not something you can accidentally do... but I apparently did haha!  I'm using the DemonSlime's sprite as a placeholder for the time being.

These are the Orbiters, with the DemonSlime's sprite orbiting around the player.

Well thats it for now, I hope I can go a bit faster now that I have more time and hopefully I'll be able to write a few more entries :).

Thanks for reading!

TODO list complete

Well as the title says, the TODO list I talked about is now done:

• The crosshair works now.
• I updated the map editor to have a lot more of functionalities and now there's a lot more of feedback concerning the state of the editing tools, changed a bit of the map's format to include information about the player and enemies located on that map, soon I will add more information on this map format to store special tiles like doors and chests.
• Updated to XNA 4.0 and now the drawing problems are magically gone!
• Created a "first level", right now I wouldn't say it's going to be used on the game once I finish it, but I tried to make it for that purpose so lets see how it goes. Heres a screenshot of a draft I made on photoshop to give me an overall look of how the map would look like.

              These are only the walls obviously but I made this to see if the dungeon looked good and I think it kinda does.

Now my new TODO list will include:

• Improve the enemies (make them smarter when moving and shooting): I will have to implement a BFS ( breadth-first search) algorithm to be able to do this and I'm not quite sure about how hard will this be but I hope it doesn't get too tricky, I think the worst passed when I fixed all the collision bugs and stuff and I hope I'm right.
• Make special tiles like doors: these will lead to other maps obviously but since they do not behave like other tiles I will have to make another line on the map file to store where these doors are and where do they lead. 
• Make chests and usable items on the map: I like this part because the items are obviously and extremely important part of the dungeon-crawlers, so I'll start working on them soon.
• Modify the collision box for the player and enemies: Right now all the collidable objects in the game use a collision box determined by the very sprite they display, meaning that if there's a 15x15px block, it will use that 15x15 box to collide. I wanna change that because I want the player and enemies to only ocupy 1 tile and not 2, so it's easier for them to move and that will help me get a better top-down feeling.
• Change the weapon system: I think that my actual weapon system (the code that handles how the weapons are defined and work) is a bit inefficient and complicaded so I wanna change it to something more flexible that will allow me to handle weapons better.
• Add more enemies: YES! I do wanna add more enemies, specially because I have some ideas about different behaviours that I think will add a lot of fun to the game.
• Show a GUI: I do wanna get this one done, this will include a hotkey bar that will show the selected weapon or "spell", HP bar, Mana Bar and an Energy bar, just to keep it simple for now because you know... the player needs to know if he's about to get killed or not right?

Well that would be all for now... oh wait! SCREENSHOT TIME!!!!!

Bullets working 100%!

I know I was supossed to deal with the TODO list I wrote before but I started testing a bit the bullets because previously I had noted a weird bug, but now the problem is completely solved and here you can see 4 enemies (remember that first try to make a wizard? well that's how it looked, anyways I'm just using that sprite as a placeholder for the time being) that are standing still shooting those fireballs at the player, and the numbers you see on the screen are damage dealt to the player/enemy.

Everything is running smoothly and there are no signs of any invisible devil's wall so I consider this a success YAY!