The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby Akien » 05 Jun 2016, 21:59

palrogg {l Wrote}:It looks pretty good with the original color. I wanted to give a try and see if the ladder is bright enough, but I can't find the “CastlevaniaClone-fullgame” repository anymore. Did you move it somewhere?

It's still in https://github.com/Algorithmus/CastlevaniaClone but you need to checkout the `fullgame` branch there, the `master` branch being the demo version (might be worth making the `fullgame` branch the new master btw, unless there's a will to keep the demo around as a kind of easy to understand Godot demo project).
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby palrogg » 05 Jun 2016, 22:26

Sorry, I forgot. There was so much progress! I discover the new map and the Cape Crypt right now.
Suggestion: maybe the thread could be renamed “The Lost Catacombs”, if it's the final name, with the working title in parenthesis? (Btw, I saw this Unity-powered dungeon game has the same name, in case it may create confusion)
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 06 Jun 2016, 19:12

I didn't actually push the new tilesets because I wanted to test them a bit first. But I guess if other people want to look at them, I can just push them up anyways. They're up there now. However, they're not really levels so much as just rooms that contain the tilesets, and they don't prevent the player from leaving the level by accident just yet.

Good idea about the branches. I've updated them. Never thought I'd be getting this far along with it. I did decide to keep the demo for an easier more basic platformer implementation, since a lot of the stuff that's in my current game is more involved and specific, so I didn't think it was worth it for other people to be looking at that, especially if they're beginners. Surprisingly, I've still had a few people say they liked it and got something out of it.

I was wondering how to change the title of this thread to reflect the title I picked for it. I actually thought that no one else had taken the title, as a search engine search didn't reveal very much. Maybe I didn't find it. Would it be an issue if I named my game the same, even though it has a different origin?

I called it The Lost Catacombs because the game centers around this "lost" catacomb, which is actually a portion of a larger set of catacombs that broke off, and it acts as the hub the player uses to restore health, buy stuff, change levels, etc.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby palrogg » 17 Aug 2016, 18:04

I have no clue if having the same name may cause any issue, but maybe a close variation could be fine? The doomed catacombs, The wild catacombs, The dark catacombs? Otherwise, maybe you could ask the developers if they don't mind? It seems they released this game in 2014.

It's really great to see the full game take shape. I'm just a bit confused with the "a" key when we navigate to a catacomb (I always hit "enter" instead). I'm eager to see what the Central Mausoleum will be: such an impressive name :)

[Edit: made it shorter]
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 01 Sep 2016, 09:57

Well I suppose I could also call it The Diasporic Crypt. It's a more unique term, and it kind of fits how that catacombs works.

You can change the button mapping controls in the menu, but I didn't want to have too many controls mapped since they were intended to be configurable. I used the SNES controller as a model. Any more keys required, and I was afraid it would get too confusing.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 06 Sep 2016, 21:41

First level is up now. Feel free to play test. It's intended to be a Friederich level. The map isn't masked yet though, so if you get enough of the map covered, it won't display properly on the menu. I'll fix it eventually. I'm still undecided on what the goal items for non boss levels should be.

There is now a new generic NPC, but I haven't decided which NPC it will be in the first level (I'll figure that out eventually). The generic one just gives you random hints or sells stuff when you find it.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby palrogg » 08 Sep 2016, 19:14

Great! I just tried this new level (the name is “Dungeon”, for the other testers). I love the place where a skeleton triggers the light ray, and when you can trigger light rays yourself to kill skeletons. However I had a strange bug: most of the time, when I jump, the "woosh" sound plays twice and the frame rate seems to be slower for a quarter of second. I recorded a short video in case you don't see what I mean.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 09 Sep 2016, 08:55

Thanks for trying.

Ja, I think I know what that issue is. I just upgraded to the stable release of Godot 2.1, and there's this feature where you now have to pick the trigger mode instead of linear when you have sounds in the animation player if you don't want them playing on repeat. I just fixed that (and another issue with str() on arrays, so combos should work again) and it's been pushed. Feel free to try it again.

I don't think I spotted any other animation player sounds like that, but if you come across them, feel free to let me know.
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 14 Oct 2016, 11:38

Adela's first level is up now. It's an ice cave. It's very barebones now though, so there aren't any icicles or other fancy graphics tiles.

There's also a new feature: a gate you have to unlock with a gem key you get from a boss. Unfortunately, the boss level you need to get the key for the gate in Adela's level isn't exactly complete, so you can't really return with that key. You can change the key required for that gate in the source code if you wanted to test it though.
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby c704710 » 28 Nov 2016, 03:09

Is one of the two characters female?
I only bring it up because #womenareeasiertoanimateonlinux
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 01 Dec 2016, 21:49

Yes, one of them is female. Although I don't really know if they are easier to animate. In my case, I'm actually worse at drawing women than I am men, so I feel like it would be harder for me. I don't know about Linux, but there's just been too much attention spent on animating boobs in games. Not sure that's considered easy.

Anyways, I completed another level. Some of the assets are missing, and are just duplicated from other assets, but the level is more or less functional. Also did some artwork for the title. It's also going to be part of the upcoming Krita artbook (There's some really awesome stuff in there from other people, so if you're into that kind of stuff, it might be worth your while to get it anyways).

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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 04 Mar 2017, 22:44

Some other levels have been completed in the meantime. Here's another new one.

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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 11 Mar 2017, 07:31

Decided it would be a good idea to do loading/saving sooner since people on Discord chat suggested it.

Turned out not to be too bad. Here's how it works: There are save points which look like familiar statues throughout the game. There's one in the "home" catacombs area and a save room with these statues just before a boss room. You can manage your saved games at any one of these points. I haven't bothered with encryption yet, but considering my game is FOSS, I'm unsure that really matters.

The game also now tracks your play time. I was trying to decide what the best way to count play time would be, as I wasn't sure whether or not showing the "pause"menu should be considered part of the play time or not. Got some opinions online about other games that count playtime from some other gamers, and the general consensus appears to be that the "pause" menu where you look at stats, change options or equipment should be considered part of the play time, but that there should also be a way to actually pause the game that doesn't increase the playtime counter because waiting for a save point to become available isn't always convenient. Another suggestion was to track how long the player is idle for, and if there isn't any input after a certain amount of time, stop the playtime counter. Since I ran out of extra buttons to use for a "pause everything" screen different from the menu that's already there, and I didn't want to make the game more complicated, I decided to use that feature. Also, the game automatically pauses and shows a pause screen and stops the playtime counter when you focus on a different app and resumes when you focus back.

Gameovers have also been updated. If you die, you can try again, but the game will track how many times you've died if you save.

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Another enhancement: Apparently, I've had problems with the player's collision box not allowing the character to slip through gaps 1 tile wide. For reference, the player's collision box is exactly 1x4 tiles in dimension, which also means passing under a 4 tile tall gap is not possible because the gap is exactly the same size as the collision box. I thought this would cause problems for collision if I were to make the collision box smaller as the game is based on a tile based (smooth) implementation, but it hasn't caused too many issues, and now players can slip through 1 tile gaps.
I also found out about the camera smoothing feature offered by Godot, so now it feels nicer.

(Unfortunately, I forgot my login for the Youtube account, so I'm using MediaGoblin instead. The conversion appears to have messed up the audio timing, so excuse that; it was just intended to show the whole passing under 4 tiles thing and the camera smoothing.)
http://roaming-initiative.com/mediagobl ... smoothing/
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 14 Apr 2017, 19:36

Added a few additional levels. These levels are considered hard, so if they're longer, more confusing or take more HP from you, don't be surprised.

Also added a new main menu for starting up the game and global configuration. If you're on a first run, the game will ask you to configure your controls, sound and language. Unfortunately, it's a little difficult to change the language on the fly, so it's only available from the global menu. Every new game you start uses the global configuration as the default settings. You can also quit your current game or the entire game itself as well.
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The global menu now also has a new character select screen.
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I also added some back button hints since the UI doesn't make it obvious that you can just use the cancel/jump button to close some menus.
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby Imerion » 15 Apr 2017, 10:15

That's some really nice artwork, both ingame and in menus! I'm really getting into the mood to play this. :)
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 28 May 2017, 14:42

Thanks.

Fixed some bugs in the meantime, and new levels as always. There is now a debug mode so I can switch it off to make demo releases and turn it back on for testing. At the suggestion of some people at a gamedev meetup, I was told it was a good idea to make an itch.io page, so here it is: https://beelzy.itch.io/the-diasporic-crypt
Unfortunately, the HTML5 export isn't quite where I want it yet, so I'll wait until Godot 3 for that.
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 21 Jun 2017, 22:07

New Friederich level is up. I managed to find someone who makes the kind of music I'd like in my game. Unfortunately, they don't have time right now to make music for my game, so they've allowed me to use their previous music by licensing it under CC. I'll probably just use it for now so that people have a better idea of the kind of stuff I'm going for in case anyone else still has interest in making music for my game.
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 04 Jul 2017, 10:30

Now for a new feature: The game now tracks where you've been on the map of each level. It works a bit differently from typical Metroidvania games though because the discovery tiles on the bottom and right sides can be smaller than the regular tiles. I kind of didn't restrict the sizes of each level to fit in a grid originally, so that's why it's that way. Additionally, there is the possibility to blacklist tiles from the total count since some of them are not reachable. I made a tool to help with this, as well as counting the sizes of the edge tiles.

Originally, I wanted an algorithm to draw the fewest rectangles for rendering the discovery tiles to reduce the number of objects on screen required to display the tiles, but this becomes an NP Complete problem especially when your grid can have holes in them. There wasn't really a good way to do this, so I ended up just writing the pixels into an image texture. Unfortunately, this isn't very fast, even though I only update the tiles when a new tile is discovered, and it gets worst when you load a game save and have to render all the tiles at once anyways. Instead, I used draw_rect. It's still faster, even though you have to render the entire grid every time update gets called rather than just the new tile.

The game also now tracks your game progress. It also counts the map discovery stuff, but also other things like items collected, quests completed, magic obtained, etc. You can see this in the load/save menu.

Please note that if you have game saves from previous versions of the game, this feature will break those saves. You might even have to clear out stuff in your user folder (something like $HOME/.godot/app_userdata/The Diasporic Crypt/saves)

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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby charlie » 04 Jul 2017, 14:52

Very nice progress.
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby palrogg » 16 Jul 2017, 11:11

To be honest, I'm not sure about the color inside the map. I found it nicer in version 0.5, with new rooms appearing without color. Another option, to be precise without drawing too many elements, could be to reveal the rooms progressively using a mask. Here's an example of this in Descent's 3D map: screenshot. There could be a mask on the room sprite. When the player's position changes, the masks gets extended.

Do you have this problem for the discovery map only, or also for level tiles? I saw you use 32px / 64 px wide tiles. I couldn't see the resources in the binary, but I suppose you use texture atlases. If not, it would improve the loading time and the framerate drastically. Maybe I had a similar problem. To solve it, i used a square hitbox for most of the tiles and a pixel-perfect alpha-determined hitbox for round walls, slopes and fences.

Keep up the good work!
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 21 Jul 2017, 18:38

Well, I did consider revealing the rooms continuously, but that would mean I'd have to use a different algorithm, as I can't see saving every pixel of the map to be a good idea. I kind of wanted to use the grids idea from typical Metroidvania games, and it does behave more or less the same way, except for the rooms not fitting exactly into a grid. I'm not entirely sure if it would be a good idea to use texture atlases as the textures for the discovered rooms is just a flat color, and not a bitmap or anything like that. The level tiles are created with the tile editor, so they're probably already mostly optimized. I've tried to keep item count to a minimum by making use of region repeats and scaling, but there are some items like spikes I'm not so sure about because you need to know exactly which object collided. I guess I could pick a different color for the discovered tile than purple, but I'm not really sure what would be a good color. The only real issue I had with the loading times with the original discovery implementation is that it would show everything on the screen after the loading screen disappeared. It's not really an issue with loading resources to begin with but rather that it has to render the set_pixel() function many times. Instead of doing that, we use draw_rect.
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby palrogg » 21 Jul 2017, 23:49

Ok, I understand better, it's tricky. No, texture atlases wouldn't bring anything...

Would it make sense to draw behind the map's background? I mean having an opacity of 0.5 for the background of the undiscovered parts of the map, then adding the color for discovered parts behind, so that walls and spikes are still visible without the need of precise collision detection?
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 04 Aug 2017, 19:57

Added another Adela level.

I'm not sure I get what you mean?
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby palrogg » 13 Aug 2017, 12:09

Here's what I mean in html5: the blue color is added behind the walls and spikes, which are in a png image with alpha channel
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Re: The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 19 Aug 2017, 16:02

Oh, I see now. Except mine doesn't detect walls or spikes; just the room boundaries. I suppose I could try having the undiscovered areas without the background color. I wanted to highlight them because I was worried it would confuse players.
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