unusualsphinx

[unusualsphinx]

Exciting Playtesting!

Today is the day, we get to get some public opinion on Hoard.io as well as feedback. We went to eight different people and read out the same script to each so that each person was goin in with the same amount of information. We also provided a questionnaire before hand and survey afterwards. The purpose of the questionnaire was do define what demographic each player fell into and the survey was to allow each participant to share their opinion.

From the questionnaire we were ale to gather that 5 out of the 8 participants have played roguelikes before and the other 3 did not but enjoy similar genres.

We got some great insight through the survey and here are some of the things that could be improved on for future:

Health is too generous:

player always had an abundance of health

enemy attacks instantly got healed off

player didn't have to move

Difficulty doesn't increase:

difficulty of enemies doesn't increase fast enough

could be linked to the health

player didn't really have to move for the first 8 rounds

Visuals are janky:

Damage indicator wasn't lining up properly

respawn / death screen was out of theme and "janky"

[unusualsphinx]

The End Of An Era

And just like that it's all over, this journey with the team has been a great experience and was really enjoyable to see everyone get so creative and bring their ideas to life.

It's also so interesting to be able to look at the final product and see our design process hidden within it, like how the abilities came from playtesting asteroid games and adding a twist and the different enemy types were grabbed from classic platformers like Mario and Dead cells.

One thing I would have liked to change about our process however would be instead of getting each member to focus on one aspect such as enemies, have everyone contribute in all areas. I believe this would make for some really diverse and unique gameplay elements being made and really help the end product stand out.

As far as the end version of Hoard.io i am extremely happy with it, the new enemies with changing health as well as different weapons and abilities really allow the player to have a different experience every time they hit play. If I had to change one thing though expanding the roster of weapons and enemies definitely wouldn't hurt

[unusualsphinx]

Hoard.io development (Enemies)

Another day, another addition and this time its enemies! We have what I like to call two "class" of enemy, Basic and Special. Basic enemies all perform relatively the same just with different health and damage values. This structure is inspired by other roguelikes such as Dead Cells and Hades that like to start with very weak enemies and slowly introduce difficulty.

Basic Enemies:

These are the two basic enemies we have added. The first, shown in red, is the most basic of basic starter enemy the player will face. They start off with 3 health and deal 1 damage and are relatively slow.

The second one, shown in blue and green, is the heavy enemy. This enemy performs relatively same as the first but has 25 health and does 35 damage. This enemy's job is to introduce more difficulty into the player's situation without changing any mechanics up on them entirely. This allows the player to get used to the game easier without being too easy.

Special Enemies:

These are the two special enemies, ranger (left) and the swordsman (right). The swordsman is the first one to start spawning and is a fast nimble enemy moving over twice as fast as a basic one however, with lower damage numbers.

The ranger is interesting with it being the first enemy to completely add a new dynamic to the player with its ranged attack. The ranger will lock onto the player's position and shoot these blue pellets that deal 10 damage each. This challenges the player have to not only worry about dodging melee enemies but also where they stand in relativity to the project paths.

[unusualsphinx]

Hoard.io Development (Abilities)

We have been since i've last posted, we have 4 new abilities! each ability is unlocked after every round after round 3. So that is dash at round 3, shockwave at round 4, glue at round 5 and mine at round 6.

Dash:

Dash seen with the red icon is the first movement ability in the game. We felt that the slow nature of the asteroid movement system wasn't always engaging and could lead to what felt like inevitable losses. To combat this dash was created, just press space and the player gets a huge boost in speed for a short duration allowing for escape. But be careful you can still get hit.

Shockwave:

Shockwave is the second ability shown in purple and is another defensive strategy. When similar hoard / zombie games like Call of Duty we noticed that all of them had ways of controlling space such as a monkey bomb (call of duty zombies). We wanted to add a similar concept to Hoard.io and we came up with shockwave just press 1 when your ready and your character will send out a shockwave that knocks all close enemies backwards allowing you to regain some space on the map.

Glue:

Sticking with the theme of controlling space the glue ability is also the first trap in the game. when pressing 2 the character lays out a sticky puddle of glue that traps any enemies caught in it relieving pressure off of the player and flattening the playing field. This has inspiration from Bloons tower defense where they have a glue shooting monkey with the same concept.

Bomb:

And lastly but definitely not least its the bomb. The bomb is a player activated trap weapon that is the only ability to actually deal damage. Upon first activation the trap is set with a bomb appearing on the ground which subsequently blows up on second activation. This one was inspired by C4 featured in many games such as fortnite as it requires a bit of thinking ahead of time for proper execution. This helps raise the skill ceiling a small amount making players feel more accomplished and results in more play time.

[unusualsphinx]

Hoard.io Weapons Development

Welcome back and today I've got some exciting news, the new weapons are done! Below are some screenshots of them in action and i'll go through each one:

Pistol:

The weapon is the pistol. It is the most basic weapon you can have and actually start off with one. It fires every 0.5secs and has a 15% chance of spawning after every round.

Shotgun:

This is the shotgun and it is great. It fires once every second however it easily makes up for this by firing a spread of three bullets per shot, great for dealing with hoards. The shotgun has a 10% chance of spawning at the end of a round.

Minigun:

Finally we have the minigun. This weapon is the best weapon in the game firing a bullet every 10th of a send (5 for every 1 bullet of the pistol). With this great power tho comes great rarity and this beast only has a 5% spawn chance.

Next onto abilities

[unusualsphinx]

Returning to an old friend (final project)

Helloo, today is an exciting day as today catching you up on the final project and some changes to the workflow. So far i have been working solo on my projects but now we are going to be having a crack at doing in a team.

The team consists of Arham, David, Hudson, Samir and Myself. The team was formed in the workshop and got to work on choosing what game to fully develop. That decision ended up being Hoard.io! We chose this as the unique twist on the "asteroid" genre was intriguing and its infinite potential seemed awesome for letting ideas flow.

The plan is for new weapons, enemies and abilities to be added being; shotgun, sword, dash, shield and more as the ideas come. Can't wait to show you guys the progress next week.

[unusualsphinx]

Street Racers Final Thoughts

Hello Hello, First things first I'm sure your all wondering was has changed since you last heard from me. I've been doing some general polishing and the main addition, speed boosts! Speed boost pads are placed on the highway and when driven over boost the player past the camera at exceptional speeds.

Overall the development of this game was fun, especially with it being car involved. I'm quite happy with how Street Racers has turned out however if I were to do it again I'd definitely spend a bit more time thinking of how to make the game stand out and be more enjoyable for the player. This could mean having more features or making the flow of the game different but right now the game loop just feels a little empty and repetitive.

[unusualsphinx]

The Race Has Begun

Hey all, it's been a very productive time over here in my corner of the web. I've finished up some of the core mechanics of the game and getting into the design of a few finishing touches, here's a sneak peak ;)

So in terms of what's been added we have the player (in red) and multiple different NPC cars being pink, green, blue and grey. I've also got the score on the screen being how far in metres the player has traveled and an explosion animation upon crashing.

I've learned some really interesting things about Gdevelop this week but probably the best has been the Object Group's and Array's. These two both aim to store multiple pieces of data inside one cohesive yet dynamic container which has made the development process much cleaner and code more efficient especially with having to deal with so many vehicles.

[unusualsphinx]

Ready, Set, Race!

It's that time again, new project! Welcome in Street Racers a fast paced top down racer where you will be trying to weave through traffic as fast as you can on an infinite highway and set the longest distance survived. This game available for PC will let car enthusiast live out there hooligan desires all from the safety of their home.

Can't wait to get started on this one, ready your engines!

[unusualsphinx]

Hoard.io Postmortem

That time has come again where another great project must come to an end. Hoard.io with all of its quirks and bugs is still one of the more scalable and fun to make projects I've had. From day one the idea was to keep the design aspect of this game more simple and focus more on the gameplay elements and I can say that was definitely a success. the simple shapes and colours to represent friend from foe allowed me to focus on adding features such as infinite rounds, scaling health, damage and speed stats as well as med kits and collectable weapons. I feel as though this game has so much more potential but for now its onto bigger and better things

[unusualsphinx]

Hoard.io Progress Report

Heyo!

Hoard.io is swiftly underway with many basic mechanics implemented already. One that was particularly interesting to me though was how the player's weapons are aimed and fired automatically tracking enemies.

This mechanic works by first calculating the Euclidean distance that an enemy is from the player using Pythagoras' theorem. Then this is compared with a range variable attached to the player, if the distance is shorten then the range then the weapon is angle towards the enemy and a bullet is created and given a force at the same angle as the weapon. This mechanic is great as it makes the game simpler and more relaxing as the player's hand is free to focus on movement.

In the development of this game so far i have gained a much deeper knowledge for how variables work in GDevelop and especially their scopes. This came into play when trying to increase the difficulty of the enemies every round. if i used a local variable for health and speed on the enemies then tried to increase that every round it would not have an effect because each enemy would be spawned with the default constructor value given locally anyway.

To get around this i had to make use of scene variables which can be thought of as global variables. these variables are persistent as long as the scene is active so it doesn't matter if its a new or old enemy it will call from the same variable.

[unusualsphinx]

Asteroids but... people?

Hello and welcome back to my page, today we begin a new endevour into the genre of asteroid games with Hoard.io!. Hoard.io will be an io game set with simple minimalistic graphics and like all io games circles.

There has been an invasion of red circles in the scene and your job will be to survive increasingly harder rounds by any means necessary. With each new round will come new items, weapons and stat upgrades so be on the lookout. Hoard.io is perfect for anyone of any age just looking to pass some time on the train, plane or in class ;). I cant wait to update you guys more soon!

[unusualsphinx]

Post development thoughts

Now that the development of Shneaky Sheldon has come to an end i thought it would be time to do some reflection. When starting this project I was extremely focused on the visuals of the prototype making sure everything had a specific texture tot fit the environment. while this is great for the end product it takes time out that could've been used to create more interesting core features because at the end of the day player's want to have fun. In later projects I'm going to try to focus on developing core ideas before trying to polish off any sort of visuals.

Focusing more on the specific project itself i would've liked to make the boss fight more interesting. This could be done by incorporating an array of move sets that the boss could then use either randomly or in specific conditions such as if the player is far away the boss could reel the player in. This would make the game more challenging and in turn more engaging for the player.

[unusualsphinx]

Testing, Testing, Testing

After giving Shneaky Sheldon out to some play testers a few bugs were found that snuck there way in. One of which included the score display text. I haven't gone into detail about this addition however it was just meant to be a text display in the top left hand corner of the screen that kept track of the coins players collected and enemies they defeated however testers came back saying that instead of it being locked to a position in the camera view the score was instead locked to a world position meaning they could walk away from it and no longer see their score. This is an accidental anchoring issue on my end and I have been able to fix it pretty quickly.

The last piece of feedback wasn't necessarily a bug but an important gameplay feature that was missing. when the boss was defeated the player was left just wandering the level not sure if they had missed something or if the level was actually over. The testers described this as making the game feel unfinished. To fix this a quick simple victory screen was added to let the player know that they have actually done everything that was necessary in the level.

[unusualsphinx]

Quick development update

Its me again! After last weeks progress i started thinking on ways I could improve the playability of the game. To do this I looked at a big game that I enjoy, hitman, and what elements I could use.

One of my favorite mechanics from this game is how the player is able to hide in surrounding environment like cupboards and bushes to perform sneak attacks or just avoid detection. I thought something like this would be perfect in my game as Sheldon is supposed to be a sneaky guy. For this I found that using Develops actions I could set the visibility of an object to true or false so combining this with the collision condition now when Sheldon is near a bush he automatically hops in and uses it as cover. In this state enemies are unable to hurt him and track him.

Yes you read correctly, tracking enemies are now also in the game. They are like the normal slimes but with wings that when Sheldon ventures a little to close allow them to fly after Sheldon to hunt him down.

Lastly, Sheldon needs an objective, to take down Big Bad Bob. This boss is a extremely scaled up version of the slimes that can only be taken down by jumping on his head 3 times instead of the usual 1.

So after all these new mechanics new mechanics are added I think its time i packaged the game up and let some people test it out for themselves, come see how that works out next time.

[unusualsphinx]

Shneaky Sheldon Progress

Hey there! over the last couple weeks i have been busy developing up Shneaky Sheldon. To start this process I did some thinking, what's the first thing everyone sees when looking for games? The artwork! So I gathered some textures together, as you can see below, for setting the cartoony calm vibe of the world.

Next i learned of Gdevelop's behaviors system which could be used to add a almost premade pack of functionality objects. After deciding to use this for myself I discovered the "PlatfromerObject" and "Platform" behaviors. These behaviors allowed for objects to be used by the player as a character and allowed for characters to collide and walk on an object respectively.

Lastly to make everything feel less static we need some animation. Luckily the pack of textures include some keyframes that Gdevelop is able to string together into one coherent movement. animations added were idle, walking and jumping for the player as well as a walking animation for the enemies. Its starting to look so good and i can't wait to update you guys again as i start to implement some more complex gameplay elements. I'm thinking..... maybe a boss ;)

[unusualsphinx]

Game Idea

Shneaky Sheldon, a 2D stealth platformer, will take place in the bubbly yet surprisingly dangerous world of shnorb. You will have to think carefully as u will have to use the environment around you to 'shneak' your way around countless enemies and other obstacles to take down Big Bad Bob. With child friendly graphics and puzzling strategy Shneaky Sheldon will be able to encapsulate kids, teens and young adults alike.