Devlog # 2

Topic & Description

Dungeon-crawling roguelike game, in which the player is tasked to navigate outside of a maze-like dungeon, while managing their hunger & thirst and surviving enemy encounters.

Combat

Combat is to be simple and fast-paced. The player has a limited amount of possible attacks, them being

• Main Attack - primary attack sequence with the weapon the player has currently in hand
• Off-hand Attack - utility attack done with the weapon the player currently does not have in hand
• Dash/Roll Attack - a dodging roll/dash followed by a quick attack with the weapon in hand

The weaponry of the player is limited as well to only two weapons at the same time.  Each weapon has upgrade slots into which the player can put upgrades found throughout the dungeon. These upgrades modify the weapon stats or add extra effects to the attacks.

Hunger & Thirst

Traversing through the dungeon takes a toll on the player character and each traversed room has a cost of hunger and thirst points associated to it (traversing through already-explored rooms costs less). The player starts losing HP each room if hunger/thirst are too high. Throughout the dungeon, the player can find food and water (on sale, for free, collectable in exchange for higher hunger & thirst). 

Map

The dungeon is composed of rooms layed out in a grid, where neighbouring grid cells may or may not be connected, leading to a maze-like structure. The player starts with an empty map that gets filled in as they traverse through the dungeon.

Room Types

• Empty Room - Already explored rooms
• Enemy Encounter - Room with enemies inside. The player has to defeat them all before advancing
• Treasure Room - Room with a weapon upgrade/food/beverage to be taken for free
• Exchange Room - Room where the player can exchange a weapon upgrade/food/beverage for another item

Visual

The game is to be top-down/isometric with following picture being a mockup of how the game-screen for the player might look like.

The above screen shows that the camera is statically set to look at the middle of the room and the player has to keep track of their character during the combat, as they run around the room in real time.The UI elements shown are visible during combat, where after the combat is finished (or in a room without combat), the player will be able to interact with other elements of the room through pop-ups.

Main game loop

Inside one run (from start to death/dungeon escape) the player is either in a room that has been cleared (enemies killed / treasure chosen) or one that needs to be cleared.

Above is a graph of the series of major game-states/major game-checks that control the flow of the game.
As the focus of the game is on smooth combat, let us expand on the combat node as well (movement node allows the same things).

Plan how to achieve R, C, and A requirements

Baseline

• [R1] - Platforms will be PC and Android
• [R2] - The soundscape is to include ambient music & sounds for traversing through cleared rooms, treasure & exchange room music and combat music & sound effects. Obviously UI is to have satisfactory sound effects as well. 
• [R5] - I will be using DOTweens extensively
• [R6] - I will make an editor extension for the items the player can find 

Complex

• [C1] - The intention is for the game to be fully 2D and utilizing given tools to a great extent
• *[C3] - The combat's intention is to feel quick and responsive, which requires making the animations fairly interesting and flexible
• *[C7] - Depending on the state of the game and the speed of progress, one of polishing foci is to play with rendering to make the player feel more immersed in the environment

Additional

• [A1] - Saving the current run (which rooms have been cleared and explored, player's current loadout and health/hunger/thirst bars).
• [A3] - I intend to use particles for effects in combat and to spice up the rooms.
• [A4] - The dungeon itself is to be procedurally generated, creating a maze in a square grid. The rooms themselves will be created by hand, but they will be assembled algorithmically to create a map that is different each run. 
• *[A10] - With the simplified combat the intention is to make the game feel polished and finished by the end.