The multiplayer code when not paired with anything else works. Even when connecting from outside. Thank god Spacewar exists lol.
I’ve been lurking the thread, hope you have fun developing your game.
The fixation on a “reason to go into the dungeon” had me brainstorming. What if each player controls a character, each with their own reason to descend.
For example, p1 just wants to conquer the dungeon and defeat the bad guy, p2 wants revenge on a monster that killed their sibling, p3 wants all the riches, and p4 wants to study the dungeons architecture for historical purposes.
Any player can quit whenever. If they succeed in their task they can choose to quit and get their reward or account points whatever, or they can gamble their reward by going deeper / helping other players.
Unless you had in mind something more open ended than explicitly giving players objectives and instead letting them decide on their own, allowing for “organic” dungeon crawling.
The game is more “story aligned”. I mean that in the sense that the game starts when you enter the dungeon. It ends when you get to the bottom and do what waits in store for you there. That’s how it is and will always be. No one has their own objectives cause that’s against the games concept. The concept is ultimate interdependency. The entire party is one entity with one goal in a certain sense.
I have a big game design update to share.
On the topic of environmental game design changes, THERE WILL BE NO MONSTERS. This likely sounds confusing but hear me out. I thought a bit and thought if you were to enter a dungeon of some sorts it would have it’s own ecosystem, not just a load of rabid monsters. Ecosystems don’t work off of only bloodthirsty human eating creatures. Especially massive ecosystems with barely any human contact. So I decided to scrap monsters entirely in favour of a different design. There will be 4 creature types. The different creatures will have small differences and get smarter the deeper down you go but in essence there are only 4.
- Prey. Those creatures have no interest in fighting you. They frequent places with natural food and water such as ponds and foliage.
- Predators. These also have no interest in fighting you. They however hunt the prey. So when you see prey expect a predator nearby. If you fight them they will fight back.
- Apex predators. These do have interest in fighting you. For them you are a party of juicy adventurers, that taste delicious. They are basically minubksses that are roaming the world. They are each much more unique than the prey and predators and will likely spot you before you spot them. Expect to require at least 2 party members to deal with these.
- Bosses. Highly intelligent enemies that are not a natural part of the ecosystem. You will require an entire party to even attempt to challenge these.
The more dangerous the creature the more use you can get out of them namely for food.
Om the topic of the map design. I won’t spoil too much but I have designed an incredibly unique and I think the most alien strange looking map and creatures I have ever seen. You should be looking forward to these. (I’m not tho lol, this is going to be a pain to animate)
On the topic of classes. All four classes have been decided and the design behind the classes has changed. Previously each class would have a use for both survival and combat. This has been changed. All of them are useful for both but 2 classes are specifically catered towards combat. And 2 are specifically made for survival.
The classes are as follows:
- The tank, as should be obvious this one is very combat focus. Using a massive near impenetrable shield the tank can block damage from reaching the other party members.
- The bruiser, this one deals the most damage, a pure combat class designed to just fight.
- The hunter, this one is good at sneaking and tracking and works as the one who would likely hunt prey and predators and scout for the way to the next level. However against larger mor epowerful enemies alone they aren’t of much use.
- The cook, this one prepares meals keeping the entire party nourished. I am trying to figure out how to make food super important without creating annoying tedious hunger systems but I do know that the better the meals quality is the stronger it makes you. Equally the chef has some debuffing abilities yet in combat is the weakest and acts as more of a support for the rest of the party.
Those seam good ideas, and this will require a lot of testing and balancing to work well, but could end in a great gameplay ! ![]()
The discord is in a state where I’m happy enough releasing it.
I likely forgot something but if you are interested in the game here take a gander:
Here’s an invite with the card:
Yup. But I know it’s a joke. But decided why not just see. Maybe. As you said. Not zero.
We are officially partnering with the Monkanics discord!!!
We will be practically cross pollinating on our discord servers.
Ok so this isnt an insane update since my crippling elden ring addiction is slowing progress ever so slightly (I promise this isnt my black 2) but the game is coming along, steam multiplayer is working well even though it obviously has some issues. The project is going well.
Hi guys been a bit since the last update but I thought I could walk through the stuff I have done now.
I don’t really have any more actual project stuff to show right now but I have spent a while designing systems so the dev will go smoother so here are the interesting ones mainly enemy ai.
So let’s look at enemy ai first:
Prey:
This is how prey will work. It’s a pretty simple system following a few core rules.
Protect the nest, feed the children, don’t die. Every animal follows these except that prey do it most of all.
How the prey works is it has a nest designated in specific spots. The nest has that creatures children/family. This nest has 2 timers one for water and one for food. They are set in a random value between a min and max range at the start. When either timer gets low the prey creature will search for the nearest source of the nourishment be it water or food. It will go to the nearest one and look for predators if withing am alloted time period it doesn’t seem any predators (that includes the players) it will go to the nurishment source and spend an alloted time period there before going back to the next which will reset the timer to another number between those two min and max values.
If the creature spots a predator it will search for the next nearest source of nourishment and go to that one. If the timer hits 0 the prey will disregard any predators and immediatley go to the nourishment.
Predators:
Predators have different goals yet work semi similarly. Predators also have a nest, family to feed and want to survive.
Predators have the same two timers running although tweaked for how long the predator takes to get food. The predator will when a timer gets low find either the nearest place with water or food (prey food), they will go there and look for poth prey and apex predators. If there is prey it will start stalking them for a certain time period. If there is an apex predators there it will always search for a different place unless the meter is at 0 in which case they only care about prey. Predators can also choose to stalk preys nests waiting for the prey to leave so it can eat the children.
Apex predators:
These are practically the same as predators with only two key differences.
- Unlike the predators the apex predators don’t care about any creatures being at the areas as they are at the top of the food chain.
- Apex predators will when they see the players enter a stalk routine trying to follow them waiting for a good moment to attack.
All creatures will when threatened either run (except the apex predators) or especially when you go near the nest will attack you even if they are prey.
Classes:
This isn’t as in depth but the classes have become more fleshed out:
- The tank is pretty simple, the tank is about 1.25 times larger than the average player and has a shield which is large enough to block the entire party from harm. The shield is practically impenetrable and no attacks will bypass it however due to the slow nature of the tank enemies can bypass the shield by running around the tank.
- The bruiser is pretty simple. I haven’t decided which weapon they should get yet however they hit stuff, really hard. That’s kinda it.
- The hunter, they use a spear it has melee but mainly they can throw this spear Infinitley of course with a small cooldown. Due to this range they are good for killing prey or scouting ahead.
- The cook, slightly smaller than average can cook up meals. Hunger systems will be addressed in a second. But depending on what is used they can buff the team. They also have a frying pan to hit stuff with, isn’t very useful but they might as well feel included.
Hunger:
This I have struggled a lot with. I don’t like most hunger systems in games so I decided on this. A hunger bar will slowly decrease. It cannot kill you. However your passive regeneration will be less the lower you hunger is. When it hits 0 you will be debuffed.
Just eat and it will replenish an amount depending on the meal.