Droidnaught Development

This week’s to-do

I’ve managed to get the repository back on track, but a couple of things need to happen this week in order to get back up to speed:

• Major code cleanup; it has been far too long since I went through and really organized the engine. This is painfully obvious after picking development back up again after a month away.
• Finish the room/module editor; Before going on hiatus I had started on an editor mode to allow me to create interesting room/module set pieces to the random level generation to make gameplay more interesting. It should also help me more quickly prototype certain gameplay elements.
• More game design. Currently the game direction is rather up in the air - I have a ton of ideas for where I want to go with it, but I really need to sit down and formally flesh everything out so that I can spend concentrated time on useful development.

Time to get started!

Back to work

My apologies for being completely silent for well over a month - I’ve had a few real-life issues getting in the way of development recently, but today I’m going to see if I can pick up where I left off.

One thing that has been weighing heavily on my mind recently is whether I should completely redesign the game in light of other similar first-person dungeon crawlers being developed. In a round-about way I’ve come back to where I started, and decided that, rather than trying to rewrite everything to make a totally unique game, I should just strike out and make the game that I want to make, something I can get excited about.

Stats stats stats

A little something on character stats. All entities in the game will have the following four core stats:

• Vitality (which affects maximum health)
• Attack Power (which affects damage dealt with all attacks, including hands, melee weapons and ranged weapons)
• Defense (which mitigates incoming damage, and also gives a chance to dodge damage)
• Agility (which increases the chance of dealing a critical strike)

Player characters receive experience for kills, allowing them to level up. This experience gain may also be affected by a modifier.

All entities have a speed which allows them to act faster or slower, and this may be modified by effects like freezing.

All entities have health and a variable maximum of health, along with any applicable health regeneration/draining effects. This also applies to player energy levels (which powers things like plugins).

Weekly Update #3

Hi everyone,

Just a quick update on this week’s progress:

• Droids now only have one “hand” (To simplify the controls, droids now only hold one item at a time in their hands)
• AI Improvements (Enemies now path around each other, and now have to turn 180 degrees in two steps rather than one)
• Lots of UI work (whole new UI redesign)
• Plugin windows added (Droid plugins will now appear on top of the screen)
• Character creation (Droids insert either blank or pre-generated personality chips)
• Shelves that hold randomly generated items
• Depth of field effects

What’s next

Character creation
At the start of the game, you will connect to the droids as they awaken in a closed storage room. On the shelf will be a selection of blank, and randomly pre-generated personality chips. Plugging one into a droid will either prompt you to fill in a name, and assign skill points, or, if using a pre-grenerated chip, will assign the randomly rolled character traits to that droid.

Shops
I’m hoping to add rather “roguelike” shops to the game, where shops occupy a special room and have a shopkeeper who keeps track of what you’re picking up - you can either honestly pay for these items, or attempt to steal/kill the shopkeeper for them.

Enemy design
I’ve started putting some thought into new enemies that you might encounter. Some examples are “pit monster”-type creatures that have multiple tentacles that reach out of a hole and roam the corridors - forcing you to fight/sever them, and a “Boomer” type creature that explodes with corrosive gas on death.

Plugins
Droids will be able to install plugins that will run a variety of UI programs in the top bar, such as maps, damage meters, pathing, hacking, etc. You will be able to turn these on and off as the need arises, but all plugins consume energy while they are running.

Skill assignment
Skill points will probably be assigned to a variety of “perks” that are all available at any given time, rather than being a tree.

Coverage

Droidnaught has had some small writeups in a couple of indie blogs, pretty exciting!:

see Respavvn and Indie Statik