This month we added custom bullet and boss stage seal mechanic. By default, player has 3-way shot pattern with round bullet. Now you can change what you shot by looting different shape and property of bullet from enemies. We are still trying other bullet pattern shape and bullet property. Although shooting lots of random things is very fun, but the goal is to make bullet pattern become crazy. 😛 For connecting middle stage and boss stage, we introduce seal mechanic….
This month we were trying to deliver first playable demo for players. There are many trivial works like adjusting visual effect, user interface, config option, gameplay element. Because we want to get more feedback in early stage, now you can download pre-alpha version of Umbraseal on itch.io for free. The gameplay cycle may seems a little bit rough, but we will polish it as soon as possible. Your comment would be super helpful to complete this game, please play Umbraseal and…
This month focus on adjusting enemy behavior and bullet pattern for gameplay. For enemy behavior, we need they perform flexible movement and attack. So an enemy will chase player to the death, yet keep distance with other characters. Once in right position, enemy will start to surround player like a satellite. Also, enemy will attack constantly. Combine those movement could create a flow. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. https://fnaith.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/ezgif.com-video-to-gif.gif?w=825 For bullet pattern, we adjust fire speed and…
To solve the “game is too easy” issue from players’ feedback, we make all character can do more action. In Shoot ’em up, player can focus on dodging without distraction because bullets usually come from single direction. However, bullets come from any angle in Umbraseal. In that case, player become helpless when facing bullets unless we reduce bullet number (like we did). So that is why players consider this game is to easy. New solution is to provide a “Dash”…
In previous article, we decide to change many system for enhancing game experience. Unfortunately, AI behavior and skill are typical complex system that need access information from environment and change some status. It is hard to prevent bug when changing a system which heavily depend on the interactions with other systems. Turns out, we need testing. Because there are so many system and functionality, it is important to separate irrelevant codes and what we want to modify. To regularize exist…
In the last month of 2018, we finally finished the first pass demo and start to design polished version features. https://fnaith.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/ezgif.com-video-to-gif.gif?w=825 Fortunately, there are people would play first pass demo even graphics and UI are bit rough now. According to their precious advice, we find what players expected in this genre. Primary feedback as following: Guidance – tutorial for goal and skill, mini map Balance – enemies are too easy, need more AI behavior Aesthetics – every area looks same,…
This month, we focus on adding enemy ability and decorating generated dungeon. As Cogmind’s author mentioned, most traditional roguelike has pretty barren environment. In our game, Umbraseal, we use two process to make dungeon more interesting: Decoration for building structure Placing furnishing by area For decorating building structure, we define stage theme config by Tiled editor. Currently, each layer in tiled map present different part of dungeon skin. For wide space like wall or floor, their config layer allow multiple…
To build a bullet hell / roguelike game we need both dungeon generator and bullet pattern engine. In Tunneling Maze Generator, we build a framework for dungeon generator. Now we need to decide what kind of bullet pattern engine to use. AFAIK, there are many types of bullet pattern engine. BulletML which is used by Enter the Gungeon; Touhou Danmakufu which can make Touhou Project-style game; and other engines like STGBuilder, LuaSTG, DanmakU .etc has their own followers. In some way, all these engines use fire-subfire model. In this model, each shot is usually…
In our new game, we want a dungeon generation algorithm for bullet hell combat. Which means this algorithm should: Generate enough open space Prevent narrow corridor Most Roguelike games generate room first and use corridor to connect them. The narrow corridor and door can improve exploring experience but hurt dodging ability. So we choose Tunneling Algorithm instead of classic method like Space Partition or Graph Based. Although the generated structure of Tunneling Algorithm might be too boring, we apply Agent Based method to add more dynamic behavior and…
In the past month, I found it is hard to manage data for the wide variety of Entity. Although Unity already provides resource manage system, but it is not designed to handle object data. Components in ECS usually use a reference id to access resources or other components, so the data management tool should consider reference id as resource. Here is a list of features that tool should have: Can define schema to ensure data type ( make sure a field is Int /…