2020-04-08 21:12:51

You enter a Tower, weak and frail. You have lived in darkness all your life. There are monsters, and they want to kill you. You find a blade. You are ready to do what needs to be done. The tower must be ascended. Only then can you be free.

Hello!

Me and a fellow developer are currently making a small real-time dungeon crawler where you hack and slash enemies, learn their patterns and dodge their attacks.

It's effectively first person; You attack in front of you, move in cardinal directions and you can rotate 90 degrees.


The game is currently in EARLY alpha; Only basic movement is implemented.
The movement scheme is inspired by games like Manamon 2, though the addition of rotation complicates the player's spatial awareness.

That's why we need feedback and testing; We need to figure out how to keep the player aware of their surroundings, even when the enemy changes position. But *any* other feedback is valuable as well like answering the question "does this game sound interesting to you?"

Because we want this game to be action focused, and allow the player to feel skillful in reflexes and execution.


Some practical info;
We use W. A. S. D for moving in cardinal directions, and Q. and E. to rotate.

That is all the gameplay in the game currently; There is no way to attack in this pre-alpha stage.


We will be updating this forum topic throughout April, and are hoping to have significant features implemented every week.
The download page will always be the same.

Please give it a try and feel free chastise us for being idiots and missing something obvious. smile
Your feedback will directly influence the development of the game.

Here is the download link;
https://stealcase.itch.io/codedungeon

The page is on Itch.io. There are no malicious download links on the page, and the download button is somewhere in the lower middle of the page.

(There are 2 fields called "download". one is just text, the other is an actual download button)

The download gives you a Zip folder you need to unzip. Inside is a folder with a Build Number. In THAT folder is CodeDungeon.exe.
Don't remove any files from the Build Number folder, or else the game might not run.

We are students writing a Thesis on designing inclusive games, and any and all feedback we get will help us make better games in the future.

Working on Monsters of the North, posting gamedev stuff on Mastodon
Code Dungeon Download Link
Youtube Trailer and Tutorial

2020-04-08 21:36:09

sounds interesting, what programming language are you using to coad the game?

2020-04-08 21:46:05

I'd look at Swamp. Swamp manages this pretty well even without limiting itself to the cardinal directions.

Or Shades of Doom for that matter.

There's no particular reason to limit yourself to the 4 cardinal directions.  Both of the above games (as well as most of the other first person stuff) have full 360-degree turning.  I'm sure there's other things, but the only first person thing I can think of offhand that limits itself to only the 4 cardinal directions is Soundmud, which was really only ever a tech demo.

I suspect you're sighted.  if so, be aware that what blind audiogame players can handle is generally much more than you think it will be.  Nothing makes up for 10 to 20 years of practice being blind.  Swamp, for instance, is about as complicated as Doom levels, and there's even a minority of us who were able to successfully play Quake via Audioquake once upon a time.

When you say that you're worried about keeping the player oriented, partially what I'm hearing is "We are sighted and we get lost; blind people must get lost too".  And that's true to a point.  But with Swamp (which is the only really good online game we have to my knowledge) people are able to handle 40+ quickly moving zombies in realistic warehouse maps with shelving and all that without too much other than some basic radars.  By radar I sort of mean super-cane.

The lack of first person games around here isn't to do with first person games being a bad idea, or even particularly challenging to design.  The navigational stuff is mostly solved.  The issue is that most of the people interested in making audiogames don't have sufficient trigonometry knowledge to handle the math.

I personally think only 4 cardinal directions is a bad idea.  Things are most localizable if in front of the player.  Without being able to turn lesser amounts, you can't get different viewpoints.  The world becomes fundamentally square.  it's hard to put this into words quite right, so sorry if this is confusing.  But if you want to know exactly where something is, you need to be able to turn to try to find it.  Typically games solve the problem by providing keys to snap to the cardinal directions which you use to ereestablish a known orientation if you get lost, or announce that you're facing north/south/east/west as your forward vector crosses those points, or both.

Please don't make the mistake of deciding that your story is that the main character is the blind swordsman or whatever.  You needn't justify the additional gameplay mechanics with story, and to be honest I'm personally tired of people trying for the "but blind people can actually go on a fantasy adventure" storylines.  Whenever anyone says they're doing a project that involves the word student, or whenever audiogames are done by a sighted team, the story inevitably goes here.  I'm not saying that we want to all pretend we're sighted or anything, but I personally find it cringeworthy when those tropes get used.  It's almost impossible to avoid either landing on "blind people need magic powers" or "blind people can sense more than sighted people" if you try for that storyline.  In general I find blind characters less relatable overall in almost all media, because even when people do it well, it's still really easy to tell that they don't understand, or got the accounts secondhand; and even when done by other blind people, there's at least two primary ways of making up for being blind that I refer to as memory and senses, and people who fall into one strategy are kinda unrelatable to people in the other (this is anecdotal, I don't have research, but yes I do have a taxonomy--meet enough blind people and you can kinda see it).

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2020-04-08 22:18:42

I don't think Manamon's movement system will meet the needs and demands of your game, especially if you intend to make something worth playing. Post 3 pretty much sums the topic up quite nicely, but to add to that, you may use your eyes to do things, while we use our ears. Try an experiment for me. Get a stick, a blindfold and somewhere where its quiet. Blindfold yourself. And try and navigate your location with just your ears. The first conclusion I think yule make is that the world has more than 4, 8 or even 16 directions! smile
Good places to start for reference would be games like A Hero's call, Bokurono deboukan, which I'm probably spelling wrong, Swamp, and all the other suggestions Camlorn made.
Some navigation suggestions I can make is a sonar based movement. For example, if you're approaching a wall, you'd hear a sonar noise bouncing off the wall. But don't do it the Manamon way, because the constant tones can and will get very annoying. Another form of sonar based movement is the one in A hero's Call. Instead of hearing a constant noise, you hear it once. I really suggest you try out other games, because Manamon's system is slightly outdated, but it can still be quite functional and effective actually. Good luck, and I hope you managed to garner some feedback from that post. Good luck, and I'll always be willing to give you feedback

You ain't done nothin' if you ain't been cancelled
_____
I'm working on a playthrough series of the space 4X game Aurora4x. Find it here

2020-04-08 22:36:05

hi
i m totally agree
camlorn

2020-04-08 23:37:09

hi, sinse this is in the devlepors room, of corse I could ask, which langwige will you code this thing in, thanks

2020-04-08 23:57:43 (edited by amerikranian 2020-04-08 23:58:38)

I can't believe you guys aren't bringing Shadow Rine into this. No, seriously. That game's sonar was top notch, even if it was a bit short. It essentially told you only about open passages as you walk through with a short woosh sound matching the direction of the opening.
I have also managed to build a sonar which still behaves like Shadow Rine, but it also tells you about wall locations.
Let's say that you, the player are at (5, 0). Let's also say that there are some walls at (3, 10), (5, 10), and (7, 10).
You take a step to the left, and the sonar helpfully alerts you that there aren't any walls ahead of you. Should you choose to continue walking forward, i.e, (4, 1), (4, 2), (4, 3), your sonar will stay silent until a wall with in certain distances has been detected.
However, let's say that you decided to go to (3, 10). The sonar emits a sound to let you know that there is a wall ahead of you. Now, portraying the distance to the said wall could be up to you. Personally I represented it with volume, playing the ping at the position at which the wall has been detected. This of course would mean that, should the walls be off to the user's left or right, the sound will pan accordingly.
I found that the system I outlined above is really really intuitive and ease on the ears when compared to, say something like Manamon or Paladin of the Sky.
I feel the need to point this out once again, however. The sonar should not keep alerting the user that there is empty space around them. It should only play a sound to let them know if there is a wall. Furthermore, if the user does not move closer to that wall, the sound should not be repeated again.
Let's go back to my previous example and change it a bit.
You are still at (5, 0).
There is a wall from 3 to 10 on the X axes. I will also assume that you already heard your surroundings.
You take a step to the left and are now at (4, 0). The wall sound does not play ahead of you because you are still 10 units away.
You take a step to (4, 1) and the wall sound plays again to represent the new distance between you and the wall.
I hope that my post was helpful even if it was long, smile.

2020-04-09 00:22:37

7's system is quite intuitive. I'm going to say something a bit controversial, but In my Opinion:
Manamon's navigation system, while it does wwork is really annoying. The constant beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep gets extremely agitating after a while, and its a 6 year old nav system. You can definately use more modern means of conveying the player's location to the user than Manamon, or Paladin of the Sky, or A Hero's call. All it takes is a bit of out of the box thinking fon your part. You guys already have all the tools and resources to do something awesome, so go ahead and do it! Really. Try the experiment. and one thing, I don't want you to use the experiment as a pitty experiment. Try and navigate. Use your other senses to your advantage. I think if you do that experiment, yule truly be able to come up with something special. Keep it up guys.

You ain't done nothin' if you ain't been cancelled
_____
I'm working on a playthrough series of the space 4X game Aurora4x. Find it here

2020-04-09 00:23:15

Also, why is it every new developer comes out you guys ask what programming language its coded in? Is that really important?

You ain't done nothin' if you ain't been cancelled
_____
I'm working on a playthrough series of the space 4X game Aurora4x. Find it here

2020-04-09 00:52:57

@8
Sighted people aren't able to just use their senses like we can.  We don't have better senses but it takes a hell of a lot of practice to be able to use them as we do.

Sighted people are, generally, also not able to remember layouts and things to the degree we can either.

@9
Because everyone is hoping there is an easy path, and so when someone says they use language x, everyone goes and tries language x expecting to be able to just make games.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2020-04-09 01:39:38

Lots of great advice in this thread. Hope it's taken to heart!

Speaking for myself, I find the motion system described in @1 fairly uninteresting, and the implication that rotation might add significant difficulty a bit alarming. Were that the case, real life would be incredibly confusing! I'd only be interested in 4/8-way motion if it was a trope of the game style. I have a few roguelike concepts kicking around in my head, and of course those would use 8-way motion because that's key to the genre. But I wouldn't call that system first-person. Saying an 8-way system is first-person from a blind person's perspective, is like saying a 2-D system is 3-D for someone who is sighted. If that doesn't make sense then you got the point. smile

2020-04-09 02:59:16 (edited by magurp244 2020-04-09 03:04:39)

Another approach could be the implementation of 3D positional audio, reverb and audio occlusion with ambient sound of the players footsteps of idle sounds, clink of armor, breathing, sound of a torch, etc. same with opponents. This way you can get less irritating spacial information based on your own movement or ambient sounds. I've also suggested elsewhere that you can try making the sounds more informative to the games state, for example heavier breathing if a player or enemy is injured, more labored strikes, the sounds of drinking potions, unique sounds for weapons and actions, etc. These are much more intuitive and immersive than spitting out X damage or actions through TTS. The gameplay also appears to be visually represented from a top down perspective like a typical roguelike, if anyones curious.

@9
Intellectual curiosity. Different languages have different API's and tool chains, so learning the choice of language can help gain some insight into how they may go about developing the game, or the potential challenges to their approach. In some cases, if their receptive, the community can even offer the dev team some helpful feedback on certain coding issues that popup, or assist in bug tracking and Q&A issues.

-BrushTone v1.3.3: Accessible Paint Tool
-AudiMesh3D v1.0.0: Accessible 3D Model Viewer

2020-04-09 04:40:05

If the game is top down from the sighted perspective, then copying Shadow Line one for one will get you much further than trying to make it first person with 4 cardinal directions.  In general, top down interfaces like Shadow Line can convey much more complicated levels (to a point) at the cost of some degree of realism, since you have to sacrifice some of the things you might want to do to audio to make it happen.

I have toyed with the idea of combining some of the top-down features (like the BK3 style camera) with a first person game but never coded anything like it and don't think anyone else has either.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2020-04-09 15:55:56

Wow, I really appreciate the amount of feedback! And man the quality of it!

And thanks for the game example suggestions from camlorn @3 and Jaidon of the Carribean @4 (and everyone else!), me and Wiktor have been spending this morning checking out all the games and playing demos where available.

The main takeaway that I'm getting here is that people are not satisfied with the Grid-based cardinal direction movement, and camlorn @3 brings up a great point about incremental head rotation; Being able to face a sound source helps immensely in mentally placing it. So we are completely redesigning movement and rotation to better facilitate that.

I agree that sighted people making a story featuring a blind character who somehow "overcomes" their blindness is a rather cringe narrative, so we're not doing that.

Some background on why we chose the old movement system;
Our original idea for the game was to have every encounter be a duel between the player and their enemy in a confined space. Every step the player took needed to be deliberate; the player should be dodging attacks or flanking the enemy, and we thought that moving on a grid and with 90 degree rotations would facilitate this very deliberate positioning; if the player got hit, they would KNOW it was because they were in a space that was being attacked.

We still want the deliberateness of the combat to come across in the design, but I understand that the current implementation feels clunky and outdated.

The two options I see is either do a top-down implementation similar to Shadow Line, or a first person implementation closer to Swamp and Quake, with freeform movement and mouse rotation.

I think we are going to go with the first person rotation, because I want to be able to do the things that magurp244 describes with their comments @12, namely describing relative positioning using breathing, footsteps, armor clinking and room echo.
And using something like what amerikranien @7 describes with the "whoosh" when close to open hallways, and keeping that sonar implementation in our back pocket in case we need it.

We are beginning that process today of overhauling the game. I'm hoping we'll have a new prototype soon, and I'll post here when we have something testable. I'll be checking back here regularly, but again I really appreciate the feedback!



For those of you wondering on Technical Questions;
Here's a list of tools we're using.
Language:
C#
Game Engine:
Unity

for Audio Organization/Implementation:
Fmod For Unity

for Audio 3d spatialization:
Google Resonance Audio plugin

Keep in mind both Wiktor and me are sighted. I've seen some posts on the Unity Forums that complain about lack of accessibility when using the Unity Editor Interface, but if you want some help or general tips feel free to reach out in my DMs.

Working on Monsters of the North, posting gamedev stuff on Mastodon
Code Dungeon Download Link
Youtube Trailer and Tutorial

2020-04-09 16:11:52

Interesting. I'd thought about some sort of dueling, tactical combat simulation in audio that's a step above the usual "block or attack, front, left, or right" system lots of games use. I've never seen a sword fight, but when I read about them, there's circling/sidestepping and such. I assume that there's some benefit to not just facing each other and whacking. Like, if your opponent is left-handed, being further to their left puts you further back in their range so they can't put much force behind a strike. Likewise, having someone in front of you while you're facing their right or left side means they can't hit you but you can still hit them--unless, of course, they've leveled up some amazingly complex side-strike move that you'd only discover when it's too late. smile

So, for a duel system, you might have 5 rough areas in front of the player--far left, left, center, right, far right. Players could sidestep to shift themselves and their opponent in the combat area, maybe pivot to make more drastic shifts at a larger movement/time cost, etc. Attacks and blocks are then strengthened or weakened based on position, right or left-handedness of player and opponent, etc. So you aren't just attacking and blocking sounds from directions, but also trying to maneuver to place your opponent in a position where you are stronger and they aren't. Likewise, when your opponent moves, you're also moving so they don't have an advantage over you. Move beyond far left/right and you're now circling your opponent, meaning they can't attack but you can--obviously not ideal for them.

Doing that on a map may be a bit challenging. Or maybe not. It might be necessary to break out the encounter onto a combat map, or to change the motion controls in combat such that left/right motions take circling into account once you're far enough off to one side. Really, the only way to know how well any of this will work is to knock together a prototype and try it out. I haven't yet, but maybe these concepts might work with your game?

2020-04-09 16:45:55 (edited by camlorn 2020-04-09 16:47:09)

@15
Sighted games have had lock-on forever. You could easily do that in an audiogame, but it's mildly confusing because you rotate implicitly.  However you don't necessarily need the whole multiple positions thing if you just use the angle between the enemy's forward vector and the vector from the enemy to the player: that, plus sidestepping keys and you have this.

If you want ideas for more interesting combat, I personally want to copy Crypt of the Necrodancer one of these days.  A really silly title, but the main gimmick is that it's a roguelike where your turn lasts one beat of the music only, and for best results you have to try to enter commands on the beat.  It'd be hard to do a full top-down roguelike from that perspective, but combo systems and things to the music is an idea that'd be easy to copy.  getting rhythm out of audio files and keeping things in sync is hard but you can fake out the rhythm stuff by just analyzing the times between keypresses and seeing how closely it matches the BPM.

@14
Unity isn't just a little bit inaccessible.  Unity is completely 100% inaccessible.  Some people have found the beginnings of workarounds, but the entire UI isn't native controls and they don't implement the accessibility APIs so that's the end of that.

I would suggest looking at Steam Audio over Resonance.  As part of my most recent 3D audio project I did some evaluation of the various HRTF stuff and Steam seemed to have a better implementation.  Resonance very much seems to have been Google making an attempt at HRTF, getting 75% done, and realizing that it isn't worth it from a market perspective so how about we open source it for the PR.

But don't take my word for it: I haven't been able to find anything that'd let me do a side-by-side comparison besides just watching Youtube demos.  However given that Unity makes swapping this stuff easy (or at least easier), it might be worth attempting it.

Unfortunately everyone in sighted land doing this stuff decides to not care about the interaural time differences, grabs ambisonics, and turns their HRTF into "we simulated 12 surround sound speakers".  You can really tell the difference.  OpenALSoft still beats everyone if you want something free, and Blue Ripple if you want something paid, but OpenAL is a terrible API to start with and OpenALSoft is prone to having weird bugs just because it feels like it, so they're both kind of dead ends especially since I'm thinking Unity doesn't have good integrations.

If you want to hear the difference, find the old Aureal 3D demos on Youtube--people actually used to do this right.  But alas, no longer.

Edit: to be clear Steam Audio doesn't require Steam, and I believe has Unity integrations. But they distribute it as a precompiled binary, not as source.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2020-04-09 19:10:02 (edited by Stealcase_ 2020-04-09 19:12:52)

@15
Some of what you're suggestion matches the design doc we've had for combat, here's our ideal;
You're fighting a monster, and that monster might have a fire breath, or can cause stalagmites to erupt from the floor.
The key is to avoid being in these spaces. Monsters will always try to face you, and their face is protected by hard carapace or armor. We want the player to bait the monsters into attacking, avoid that attack, and flank the monster from behind and attack their weak point.
That's the dream combat scenario at least, but we're nowhere near that yet.


@16 I'll look into Steam Audio, thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately anything that doesn't have an Fmod or Unity plugin that's easily testable would take too much time to adapt to our needs. Luckily Steam Audio does seem to have that.

Both Wiktor and Me enjoy Crypt of the Necrodancer: I enjoy that the combat boils down to basically the movement keys only: Moving is also attacking if you face an enemy, and the skill goes back to positioning and patterns.
Easy to pick up, hard to master.

Music and rhytm is also a really useful tool for creating patterns for enemies; if we had another teammember we'd love to link the enemies to some sort of musical pattern to make them more predictable and readable to the player. At the moment I think it's above the scope of what we can accomplish.

Working on Monsters of the North, posting gamedev stuff on Mastodon
Code Dungeon Download Link
Youtube Trailer and Tutorial

2020-04-09 19:28:13

@17
For rhythm, you can almost certainly cheat, at least for that of the player:

for(int i = 0; i < keypresses.length; i++) {
    beats[i] = (keypresses[i].time - keypresses[i-1].time) / bpm;
}

Now obviously this doesn't work for enemies, and obviously it's not synced to the music, but the key thing isn't necessarily does the player hit it on the beat, but rather is the player hitting it on the same bpm as the music.  This hides both audio/keyboard latency and keeps you having to figure out how to sync game time.  Unfortunately for enemies it's a little bit harder.

I don't have enough vision for videogames anymore, and probably never did for Crypt of the Necrodancer, but I keep abreast of the sighted industry for ideas, and that's got ideas that could be used.  Unfortunately the real killer there is that keeping things down to a 4 button control scheme is probably all but impossible because you need a BK3 and/or Shadow Line style camera for map exploration and every time you explore the map the music has to be paused.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2020-04-14 18:17:38

We were rushing to get a build going today but we couldn't to get it out the door in time;
Too many little things cropped to cause problems.

But we've resolved to get a build up tomorrow; in about 24 hours it should be up.



This time we've redone the movement and gone a more traditional first person movement scheme (Mouse Rotation, WASD movement), with an option to rotate at 45-degree Increments.

We also have audio "Ticks" for when you rotate past certain points, similar to A Hero's Call and Swamp, so the player gets a sense of when have reached a 90 degree point.



We're working to on implementing different audio cues for wall collision; If you're sliding up against a wall it gives very different audio feedback than if you run into it.

We're also cognizant of making sure that hallways or doorways are made obvious. Either by howling wind when close by, or hanging a torch on either side of the doorway.


I know that these things aren't exactly "features", but it's where we're at.


If things go nicely tomorrow we might have a basic sword swing that collides with the environment, but at the moment it is too buggy so I can't guarantee it.


I'll post here when the build is up!

@18 That's a really neat cheat for rhythm input. I'll need to look into that later!

Working on Monsters of the North, posting gamedev stuff on Mastodon
Code Dungeon Download Link
Youtube Trailer and Tutorial

2020-04-14 18:23:16

@19
I haven't tried it in practice, so perhaps it falls flat.

But I've played a lot of sequence storm of late (a rhythm game that added accessibility), and I started thinking about how you could make it work in the case where you can't just flat out require the player to keep their hands on the buttons because they need to be able to hit other controls, and how most blind people aren't going to have low-latency keyboards and high quality headphones because of lack of money (and also lack of games that need them as a secondary factor).  And that's the algorithm I came up with.

It'd be cool to see someone with more time try it and get back to me, otherwise it will have to wait for my hypothetical game engine in Python using my much-less-hypothetical but yet to be finished 3D audio library.

It's just a shame it can't work for enemies too.

My Blog
Twitter: @ajhicks1992

2020-04-17 17:14:57

There! The project is now properly in first person, and no longer locked to a grid!
Sorry for the wait, we hit a bunch of implementation snags that made it literally unplayable.


Please try it out here:
https://stealcase.itch.io/codedungeon

It is still in an early stage, we are working out a lot of kinks.

Some info on Controls;
W. A. S. D - for directional movement
Hold Shift and press A or D - This will rotate your character by 45 Degree Increments.

Move the Mouse to change your looking direction.


Q - will announce the closest cardinal direction to your facing.

Left Mouse Button to Attack with your Sword.


Press Escape to Close the game.

Please note that there is no real combat; There are 2 enemy dummies that exist in the scene that you can hit, but other than that this is mainly us testing out movement.
Let me know what you think, and we'll get back to work.

Our next goal is to make the minimum viable game-loop; Focusing on making an enemy that follows you, Tries to fight you, and some sort of progression for the player when they defeat an enemy.

Working on Monsters of the North, posting gamedev stuff on Mastodon
Code Dungeon Download Link
Youtube Trailer and Tutorial

2020-04-18 10:24:25

Your work and ideas are very, very interesting.
I have to keep on eye on it, because the idea is very good tongue

The people here give to you a lot of good feedback, with a lot of interesting aprouches. So, turn now the game into a 3d based movement look interesting. Only have to wait and see how it evolve in time.


smile

So... as others sais in other post, may be a good idea have a lock-on feature. And with that, have two kind of movement.

The regular movement that is free, and when you lock some enemi, is like some fighting games. when you have a lock, if you push forward the control, the character goes directly to the targeted enemi, handling automaticalli the hangle of movement. back is for take distance of your enemy, and well; left and right may be for turn arround of your enemy. Of course a good strike can make lou loose the lock or if the enemy flees.

Is like the tarjeting system in 3d fighting games, like tenkaichi3, naruto ninja storm, victory jump stars, etc.

Is interesting that system, specially if your game will be a ak and slash; with stages with a lot of monsters, and you can perform large combos with your weapons smile

so, that is all smile

continue with your game! great work!

2020-04-18 14:12:39 (edited by JaceK 2020-04-18 14:13:54)

I feel like something's missing, @1:

Stamina. Have you considered a stamina system at all? For instance, you swing away wildly, stamina goes down quicker, block for too long?Stamina drains. It recovers over time (hrm...maybe stats a la D&D  could play into this?) and so forth.

So let's say I'm crawling through a dungeon and lock onto an enemy. I'd not lose any stamina simply by locking on if I'm stood still. By locking on, it changes the movement to be W = go toward eneemy, A/D circle left/right and so forth.

Now, for an idea I really, really like. And it comes fromHalf Life of all games. In that game one of the boss fights has a neat trick to it. There's a giant tentacle monster Gordon needs to deal with by torching it with a rocket engine. Now the problem is, every time Gordon makest too much noise the tentacle lashes out.

So how's that relatedto my idea? Simple. Your enemy would IMHO home in on noise. So if you, for instance, steered the fight to near a door and a loud whooshing sound, they wouldn't hear your swings. Of course that'd work both ways.

Also I'd suggest as well having the sounds dictate what happens. I love the heavy breathing and so on instead of hit a key and get Health 10/10 in a jarring TTS voice. Perhaps record a line or two for general health states, fully healed/hurt/near death mabe?

EDIT: Oh and forgot to mention enemies should play by the same stamina rules too, so if you can bait an enemy into wasting all their stamina, that should be a free attack for ya. Same for the enemy. Cue insert approprate sounds here

Warning: Grumpy post above
Also on Linux natively

2020-04-18 15:53:39

Hi.

One game I would check out when you want to get a feel of a good fighting system is the concept demo of planet saga.

In the side scroler mode fighting is pritty much get into range and attack your enemy.

The game also has arrias where you can move freely around a world map and you also have monsters that attack you.
The fighting system works in a way that you hold one button to lock onto an enemy and your character automatically rotates in the direction of the enemy. Walking forward or backwards will walk twwards or away from the enemy, pressing left or right will circle around the enemy so you can attack from a different angle. When you let go off your lock on key, you can again move freely around the map.

This is a system I would choose and which works pritty well.

greetings Moritz.

Hail the unholy church of Satan, go share it's greatness.

2020-05-12 14:53:23

Here I am reviving an old thread, but
THE GAME GOT AN UPDATE!
Actually the game has had several updates, we've been pushing patches iteratively, but now we'd love it if somebody tried it again and gave us some feedback!
A reminder that the gameplay demo is very small and mostly aims at testing the basic functionality of the systems we've built.
Link here:
https://stealcase.itch.io/codedungeon

This time the update is focused on combat and the Basic Loop of the game, and communicating goals.

There's still a lot we'd love to do, and we appreciate any feedback that can help inform us what we should prioritize!

Changes include:
Player audio feedback
Enemies with basic attack patterns and sounds
Map Layout
Game Feel

The controls are still the same;
WASD for movement, Mouse for looking direction, and shift + A and D


There is a Basic survey incorporated in the game that should work with screenreaders, but let us know if that isn't the case. The survey only has yes and no answers, so we value any written feedback here on the forum.
There's also some basic data like collisions and attacks that gets logged. If you give consent, that anonymous data gets sent to us. If not, then that's fine too.

Working on Monsters of the North, posting gamedev stuff on Mastodon
Code Dungeon Download Link
Youtube Trailer and Tutorial