This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Note: Meandering post as much to get my thoughts in order as to share.
Been bopping along on my roguelite (Basically the core idea is Hades gameplay meets Path of Exile/DotA style build diversity. You start with 1 character unlocked and the rest as NPCs and unlock more as you progress). Currently working on getting a dialogue system setup, and deciding how much player choice I want to provide. I'm kinda in an awkward spot because the whole point of a story heavy rogue-lite is that you keep playing the same save. You experience the story over the course of a lot of runs, and playing more runs, rather than starting a new save, is where the replayability value comes from. Which is great, and the original intent, but it does mean that it's very unlikely players will ever see the results of a second dialogue choice.
I'm considering ways to get around this, because I really like the idea of fleshing out character relationships and giving people choices for how to roleplay the characters. But it would mean really altering the design of the game and doing something like giving you a permadeath failure condition, or letting you start the game as multiple characters, instead of making them all unlockable over time on one save. But permadeath defeats the purpose of a progression focused roguelite (You'd lose all those unlocked weapons and trinkets!), and playing clean runs as different characters doesn't actually solve the multiple choice dialogue only getting seen once issue, since I'd get to write a fuck-ton of dialogue from everyone's perspective and you still probably only have 1 save per character.
I'm probably gonna add dialogue choice options for normal conversations anyway, but they'll end up being mostly for flavor and largely useless. Maybe a couple for 'makes unlocking character easier/harder depending on if you read their personality right' or 'choose between rewards/different character's favor'. I need dialogue choice as a concept anyway for hub and spoke style 'ask character about things' interactions, and I'm big on choice and customization in general.
Anyway, after I write the integration for that (Using Inkle's Ink and it's simple unity api. Everything else was too big and writing my own fancy GUI looked unfun, so I'm just gonna build features off Ink tags), I'll be working on simplifying my code for melee attacks. They're a slightly awkward feature because I built them within my framework for 'abilities'. That works well for things like attacks where you charge and hold, and one off attacks, but it's kinda weird for attacks that have mechanics like a 3 hit combo (Because mana cost and cast time is configured at the ability level, but I might want different costs or delays per attack in the combo). Also the way I handle animations currently isn't very flexible, so I need to figure out exactly how I'm handling animators and animation clip swapping between enemies/players.
Anyway, once I get all that done I'll be swapping over to art mode for a bit to flesh out the first biome and it's first miniboss. And add some clothes, so I can take screenshots and not have nude humanoid models everywhere.
If you split multiple characters with shared progression where each character gets their own version of the story you could accomplish this. You'd have a team level and your team could consist of several characters. The team could level up rather than individual characters making switching between them less costly and allowing for gear drops to be shared where most useful, maybe your ranger finds a sword and you decide to play your knight for a few levels. Think Path of Exile SSF mode but with shared character levels. Lot of narrative ways to fit it in, maybe split universes shared souls or something.
Could even have some incentive to go different narrative paths by having group level rewards gated behind certain paths if you wanted although that a pretty big gameplay decision.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking just doesn't fit within the design and 1 person scope. Hah, thinking about this reminds me of how dedicated you and Nathan were to the idea of making your own game after college.
Yeah, sometimes I still think it'd be fun. I have a couple frameworks installed on the computer but suffer from a lack of motivation. Not super interested in coding after a long day of coding. Moving across the country also doesn't make collaboration easy. I've gotten to the little dudes moving around on a screen stage a few times and just can't sustain interest. Maybe I'll take another swing more aided by LLMs soon.
Yeah, I found that really difficult too back when I was working full time.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link