jakemakesgames

[jakemakesgames]

DON'T STOP, YOU'LL DIE! Devblog #5 Adding more level variety!

Now the level generator is playable to a degree, I thought now would be a good time to start adding variety to what rooms are included in the generation!

Being a roguelike, you want to ensure that each run is new and fresh to the player in some way, and in the game's current state the easiest way it to have a large variety of rooms for the player to explore and fight enemies in! When creating these rooms, I've catagorised them in 2 ways; Small, Medium and Large rooms. Small Rooms are, well, smaller; Close quarters combat, tight spaces to dodge and putting a low amount of pressure on the player to make every shot and dodge roll count!

Medium Rooms are slightly bigger and give the player a bit more breathing room. These rooms are suitable for a higher amount of enemies, as well as ranged enemies that like to keep a distance from the player.

Large Rooms are for bullet-hell madness (bullet hell aspect still to come)! These rooms will be packed to the brim with enemies, traps/ hazards and environment assets the player can take cover behind to avoid taking damage!

Next up, to accomodate for the various room sizes, I had to create different length corridors to join those rooms, and with a bit of tweaking to the generators variables, these are some of the levels I am now able to create!

Thanks for reading! - JakeMakesGames

[jakemakesgames]

DON'T STOP, YOU'LL DIE! Devblog #4 Making the Level Generation playable!

Off the back of my previous post, it was now time to get the level generator working. The Edgar Pro level generation asset is a super powerful tool to be using, but i wanted slighty different functionality when it came to how rooms behaved.

In this example scene, upon entering a room, the player is lock in with the enemies; The doors appear mid way through the corridors and can only be unlocked when all enemies are defeated.

This works well, but visually I wanted something else. I adapted the old room scripts I had created for the old generation and tacked that into my rooms. This way adds a black border around the edge of the room, which upon contact will damage the player.

Lastly, I added the "Level Exit" object prefab into the exit room, as well as a small minimap on the top right hand side of the HUD, which is also paired with the level's fog of war post processing, which doubles up as revealing rooms on the map upon entry!

I've still got a long way to go, but I'm happy with the progress so far! Thanks for reading! - JakeMakesGames

[jakemakesgames]

DON'T STOP, YOU'LL DIE! Devblog #3 Procedural Level Generation

When first working on "DON'T STOP, YOU'LL DIE!" back in 2022 I always had visions of it being a roguelike, with procedural level generation, but with the brutal deadline I put on myself to release the game, it never happened... until now!

I've dabbled in a few different types of proc-gen before - the two main being a more simplified yet rigid system found in game such as The Binding of Isaac, or the walker method like Nuclear Throne. For the initial prototype, I decided to use a dungeon-like approach similar to TBoI. If you want to know more bout how that generation works, check this video! This system only took me a few days to complete, and for the purposes of a rough prototype, it worked. But I wanted more. As my level generation was fairly rigid, and not flexible AT ALL, I decided to use the "Edgar Pro Level Generation" Asset, which can achieve generation similar to Enter the Gungeon. This combines a hand crafted rooms and node graph based approach to level generation; This was the process:

BUILD THE ROOMS AND CORRIDORS:

2. CREATE THE NODE GRAPH: I also had to let the node graph what prefabs to use for the rooms and corridors

3. BOOM, PROCEDURALLY GENERATED LEVELS!

In it's current state, it's generating levels that look *very* similar, BUT this will drastically change once I add to the pool of available rooms and corridors for the generator to choose from. I still have a bit of custom coding to do in order to get the level playable, but this has saved me a bunch of development time! Thanks for reading! - JakeMakesGames

[jakemakesgames]

DON'T STOP, YOU'LL DIE! Devblog #2 Weapon System Overhaul

When creating a Bullet Hell-ish, Action Shooter you need to make sure that the weapons feel GOOD to shoot. That's exactly what I spend the past few days doin!

I have a pretty barebones weapon script that I use as default for a lot of my top down shooters, and it takes a LOT into consideration, such as Bullet Spray, Recoil animations, Fire Type (ie Single, Full Auto, Burst etc) just to name a few. I decided that, to add a new layer to the gameplay, to add the ability for weapons to take their own ammo types, so the player has to now think about whether or not they try to scavenge around for ammo for the gun they're currently using and *really* like, or do they take the risk and switch it out for a different weapon that they have the ammo for? Now, on paper - in theory, this was a good idea, and I quite like it but OH BOY was this an absolute nightmare to get working. I spend a few days adapting the weapon system I had to take this into account and after wrestling with Unity, as well as old reddit posts, forums and [shamefully] ChatGPT I found myself in a mess on a plethora of scripts held together by spaghetti code. In the end, I had to weigh up the pros and cons of this; Did i want to spend an infinite amount of time *trying* to get this ammo system to work? Or do I take the loss and cut it from the game (for now, as I would still like to implement it), continue on with the next task and not stunt my progress as much? I decided to eventually remove the ammo system, and move on to the next thing, which is Procedural Level Generation!

[jakemakesgames]

DON'T STOP, YOU'LL DIE! Devblog #1

Okay, let's try this again.. Back in 2022, I released my first commercial game on Steam, titled "DON'T STOP, YOU'LL DIE!"; a top-down arena shooter with bullet hell and roguelike elements where if you stop moving you die. The idea behind it was to learn *how* to publish a game on Steam as well as how to actually finish a small game from start to end, and from prototype to release was a 6 week development cycle, the result was an unbalanced, not-fun-to-play mess.

After trying numerous attempts at post-launch updates, and even complete overhauls and rebuilds, I eventually pulled the game from Steam and buried it for good.. or so I thought... About a week ago, I dived head first into re-developing the game.

This time around, I wanted to develop the game with a solid vision in mind. Some core aspects I wanted to achieve were; Procedural Level Generation, Multiple Playable Characters as well as a solid foundation to build upon. So far, this prototype has ALL of those to some degree. I don't want to ramble on too much, so for topics such as level generation, or how the characters work, I'll write up seperate posts. Thanks for reading! - JakeMakesGames