Shifty turns indie - "Adventures" family-friendly cooperative dungeon crawler

[Shifty Geezer]

Been rushing to try and get something worthy of entering the Game Developer World Championship, deadline this Friday. Don't think the end result will be worth anything as the gameplay's not there (kinda hard to develop multiplayer game with just one guy!), but it has meant lots of evolution(ary ideas) of the mechanics. The light system led to dynamic lights. I also changed the comment system to drag the icon onto your target with a capped range based on character stats. These combined into the idea of light sources you could throw. And now the idea of all items, keys and resources, being chuckable and now we have an inventory management mechanic. There's an idea here of a resource and decision making, like some crystals you can either use to respawn people or activate powerful skills, maybe. And so there'll be maybe some preparation, finding crystals and stacking them in a safe place. And then I can add critters that steal stuff not being carried.

It's a shame ideas can't be developed and tested as quickly as they're thought up! Days and days of experimenting await.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Another one! Monster spawners are like Gauntlet, presently just teleporting monsters into the level. Felt a graphic was needed, like an egg. Then thought, "what if the egg was an ordinary pickup item?" So now it's an item you can collect before the monster spawns. And with the faction system, you could grab one monster egg and drop it near other monsters to start a fight. Which also makes inventory management and backpack slots a more considered resource.

 

[milk]

Do you have any official devlog outside of here? You might consider posting your progress on tigsource. The comunity of fellow indie devs there might be more insightfull than us regarding feedback.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Not really. I tweet a bit and have a Unity thread which I need to add more to. There are sooooo many places you're suposed to keep updated, it's bonkers. When is one supposed to actually get to write the thing when there's blogs, tweets, tigsource, Unity forum, Steam page, IndieDB site, Instagram, Made With Unity...

 

[milk]

Not really. I tweet a bit and have a Unity thread which I need to add more to. There are sooooo many places you're suposed to keep updated, it's bonkers. When is one supposed to actually get to write the thing when there's blogs, tweets, tigsource, Unity forum, Steam page, IndieDB site, Instagram, Made With Unity...

Well, while unity forums ate good to solve engine related problems, I think tigsource migh be best for every other more general game dev discussion, and specially game design and indie game production. You don't need to update all venues, but some might be more usefull to you than others...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Here's the results of a recent playtest. Are videos of people enjoying a game suitable endorsement/curiosity generators, or kinda boring? Does it need the gameplay footage mixed in too?

A major problem still to deal with is iffy networking. I don't know if it's how I'm doing it or just Android devices, but the game servers can stop working/being discoverable needing the app to be restarted, which isn't really suitable for a final release. Still, they seemed to enjoy it which is the main thing. Especially after the first test a month ago was a miserable turkey needing a month's reworking.

Also, notice the mobile-gamer behaviour of constantly tapping. You only need press where you want to go/what you want to do and your adventurer does it, but the mindset from other mobile games is 'press press press' and that's something players take into this. I accommodate that by ignoring most of the inputs as they're duplicates of the first new command.