Rise of Dagon: What's a dungeon without a portcullis?

This week I have approximately two weeks of work to share for you.  All of that work went in to diving back in to the level editor for The Rise of Dagon and adding portcullis doors to the editor and getting them in the game.

I also added those big clunky dungeon 'wall switches' so you could open and close them.

portcullis door with switch

The material on the switch looks too simple right now but it was more important to get it in the game and working than it was to polish the texture on it.

The really cool thing about adding in the portcullis door this stretch was that it added about 25% more visual variety to the current level layouts and it really just made things a lot more visually inspiring for me - such that I've decided I'll be focusing on adding more features to the level format for the next couple of weeks as my primary focus.

In closing I quickly wanted to mention if you enjoyed reading my 3 Year Indie Retrospective you might also enjoy year 2, and year 1 respectively. I had meant to link them in-line in the 3 Year retro but forgot to  do so as it took me a week to write all that up and by the time I was done that thought was gone from my head!

Thanks for reading, see you next week!

3 Year Indie Retrospective

A swipe side-by-side comparison between a year 1 game and a year 3 of mine.

Roughly four years ago in mid 2011 ago I was working in a call center working as a tech support agent and due to some office politics (a manager got mad at one of my co-workers) and a bit of bad judgement on my part (we were both using foul language in a private chat to each other ) I was called in to an office and given my “final written notice” that if I did even one more thing wrong I would be fired immediately.  This happened in the great Wall Street induced depression of 2008 and jobs were scarce to come by (still are)!

I was terrified.

Rise of Dagon : Rings, Necklaces, Earrings, Arms, and combat log added this week

This week was pretty crazy when it came to productivity - for some reason I was just hitting goals one after another and was able to get a lot done!

I would like to think it was just from pure awesomeness, but I suspect that I have reached a certain velocity in my inventory system and therefor was able to make a lot of changes in a short time due to having set up much of my system already.

So I was able to create icons (using in part some 3D assets I purchased, and also some items I modeled myself) and then add earrings, rings, necklaces, and arm armor to the game.

Each of these items of course is part of the procedural loot system so there is a very wide variety of items that can be generated out of the combinations of prefixes, suffixes and magical attributes that can be on a weapon.

I was also able to program in the ability to restrict the type of item you can equip according to the slot it goes in. So previously you could drag an gauntlet in to a helmet slot, this is no longer the case.

Further more I was able to get my message system up to speed and create your basic RPG combat log window.  Right now I post some messages to the combat log are for debug purposes, like when a monster sees you -- this will eventually become apparent through either sound design or animations or a combination of those, but for now its a nice way to make sure that the monsters have spotted me and should be behaving as such.




Finally Unity delivered the first RC candidate of Unity 5... RC means "release candidate" meaning apparently they feel it has enough features that they are done adding new features and now they just need to make sure everything is as bug free as they can make it before it ships.

So I took another pass at tuning the graphics as every beta it seems to have gotten out of sync a little bit with my settings or the tone mapping script changes and becomes invalid etc.

Thanks for reading see you next week!

Rise of Dagon: Procedural Loot System coming together

A couple of days after last week's update where I mentioned I have been working on my inventory system for 6 weeks it struck me that was a little disingenuous because I have in fact been working on the inventory for that time but I've also been working on my procedural loot system at the same time!

So I have not tracked the specific time I spent on either one; they integrate to tightly its often been at the same time but effectively you could say I've been working on each of them for about 3 weeks.

This week I was able to really take the procedural loot to the next level by adding in the loot Prefix and Suffix type to weapons and armor!

So I have a cool screenshot of some randomly generated items  to share to show off how that is coming along

So what's not immediately apparent in these weapons is all the components that go in to making the items..

Each item has a "MagicProperty" component which can provide a "prefix" power, and a "suffix" power.

So depending on what Prefix or Suffix your item has it has a name that goes along with it. 

So a "Leeching" prefixed item is actually a vampiric property that helps heal you when you damage an enemy with it.

A Suffix of "Darkness" would give extra bonus to your Darkness Affinity - and as discussed previously any bonus to your Affinity Powers will have multiple ramifications. Stacking desired affinity powers for character builds will be a major source of building a powerful character.

Some properties provide stat bonuses, others will provide a spell like effect on attack and so forth.

The properties can also be blank of course meaning they convey no bonus in that case but that's not as quite fun to show off!

So the title of the weapon or equipment item reflects the Prefix/Suffix of the MagicProperty and this is the only way the player currently knows that the item contains some additional powers to those that are listed on the inspector itself.

So below that of course is the normalized Attribute (stats) that an item might have bonuses to your Strength, Dexterity or other attributes.

I created a system where the item can have from 1-5 of these bonuses but currently since I'm designing for the low level end of the game only 1-3 can actually show up.

Furthermore I hope to fine tune it so that if you kill an elite or boss monster you will be much more likely to get an item with better range and value of Attribute bonuses on it as a reward.

So that's it for this week - the procedural loot system is in very solid shape right now it just needs polish and some iterations to make more variety and interesting combinations come out so that the loot will seem interesting and varied.

Thanks for reading,see you next week!