The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

The Diasporic Crypt (WIP)

Postby beelzy » 03 Feb 2016, 21:24

EDIT: I have decided the full game will be called The Lost Catacombs. Except that name is already taken by another Unity project, so I'm calling it The Diasporic Crypt.

I'm a somewhat fan of Castlevania so I made this little demo in GodotEngine. It's not exactly like Castlevania though, and there are some minor differences, but I took some inspiration from it.

https://github.com/Algorithmus/Castleva ... ree/master

Image


youtu.be/aKJrP0A3cgw


youtu.be/KX0NlsMH6Qc


youtu.be/ZNzaBTUoHSU
(Don't mind the bleeding ladder. The graphic is just missing.)

This started off as a simple demo for GodotEngine and an implementation of common platforming elements from an article online, but I stuck in some other stuff as well. The full game implementation is under a separate branch.

I picked the platforming genre even though I consider myself primarily a point and click/visual novel/RPG gamer because platform games are more focused on action and adventure playing styles, and generally require less complicated or sophisticated storylines--which is something I'm not very good at. Of course you can have a platform game with a good storyline, but a simpler storyline is not going to ruin the gameplay or the entire game itself.

The math and physics required for such a game doesn't really bother me anyways.

The only real concept for this game that I have right now is essentially that you're a "mecenary" vampire hired to go on quests for other vampires with more money and means than you, where you fight monsters (sometimes because the client wants you to for fun), collect rare treasures, or just go out at night to stalk people for blood.

Features:
-Classic platformer game with basic platformer features and ledge and ladder climbing
-Two characters to choose from with different abilities to fit either a more adventure type style or a fighting style
-swinging and hanging on certain tiles
-attack chain system
-blood sucking (they're vampires)
-underwater motion
-moving platforms/other tiles
-translations (en and de for now)
-magic system + attach effects to attacks
-enemies
-"demonic" system
-other tiles like switches
-other RPG elements like HP and stats that affect how fast you kill enemies

Roadmap (some of this stuff is a bit complicated to explain, so feel free to ask for one. I have an entire wiki document set up for all this planning):
-gui stuff (in progress)
-level designing and planning

Right now, I'm just borrowing sound assets from places like Newgrounds and Sounddogs (I didn't pay for them; I just took the low quality preview samples), but I would eventually like to replace them with sounds from OpenGameArt or freesound.org--if I could just find the right sounds. See, I'm kind of picky about the sounds, and have difficulty finding the right ones. Maybe I'm just not using the right keyword in my search. If anyone wants to volunteer for the sound effects or make some music, that would be very nice.

If someone else wants to flesh out a better storyline than I could ever come up with, feel free to offer suggestions.

I'm doing most of the graphical assets right now as well. I'm probably not really going to need more people for the graphics, but if I had more people interested in it, it would just take less time.
Last edited by beelzy on 09 Sep 2016, 15:34, edited 7 times in total.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 11 Feb 2016, 02:09

Added more attacks. See for yourself.


youtu.be/XEc1TASGLkA
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby Akien » 11 Feb 2016, 07:35

I see you've made some impressive progress since you first mentioned it on #godotengine :)

You're doing a very nice job on the graphics and the gameplay is shaping up pretty well, keep up with it :)
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby rogerdv » 11 Feb 2016, 15:01

It is good to see more amazing things made with Godot! Keep the good work!
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 19 Feb 2016, 00:42

Thanks for all the comments.


youtu.be/q4G7kUP-cN0

I developed it further and it now has some kind of magic system.
If you're on the fullgame branch, I currently haven't protected the void spell from going out of the edge of the level yet. Just a little thing to watch out for if you try it.

There's many ways to skin that cat really. I could stick a whole bunch of solid blocks around the edges of the level, or somehow detect the edge of the level and consider that area "invalid" (not too sure how that works in GodotEngine yet, unfortunately)

Of course the game would be too easy if I made all the spells available at the beginning, so you just start off with that first projectile spell and have to buy/find the rest of them.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 27 Feb 2016, 12:06

Small update - I've added more enemy patterns and a few graphics for some of them. I've decided to hook them into the collision detection being used by the player character, so now they can roam about on slopes and one way tiles as well.

Here are some of the simpler enemy motion implementations:
-patrol - walk or fly back and forth. Flying enemies have a specified range, walking enemies just walk until the edge of the platform or hit a wall.
-follow - follow player character when they're in range. I've added a variable that allows enemies to follow a character from a distance to allow for certain attacks to be performed better.
-static - doesn't move at all. But might track the player anyways if they have projectile attacks.

And some attack patterns:
-simple projectile - fires a simple projectile horizontally in one direction
-boomerang projectile - same as simple projectile, but decreases acceleration in one direction until returning back to the original enemy
-rush - charge at player with a specific higher run speed. Works best with the follow motion pattern.

There's probably still a few bugs though. Comes with having to detect collision on special tiles.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 08 Mar 2016, 23:28

Finished implementing the demonic system. It wasn't actually that hard, but was sprite intensive, so it took awhile.

How it works: you drink enough blood throughout the level from defeating certain enemies or find a blood fountain. Once you drink enough, your character transforms into a demon and can fly, cling to walls and/or other neat stuff. But that only lasts for some time. Then you have to find more blood again.


youtu.be/Y3mm92AIxXw

Also changed the music a little. It's still probably CC-BY-NC or something, and I still plan to replace it with something more free, but it at least is somewhat closer to what I wanted for background music. (bring on the counterpoint and polyphony! Can't get enough of that...)

After a bit of research, I've decided the graphical assets can be under CC-BY-SA 4.0.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby MCMic » 09 Mar 2016, 09:14

I don’t know what the hitbox looks like but having a character doing half the screen seems dangerous for the player, on a level with a bit more enemies he will take a lot of hits no?
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 09 Mar 2016, 10:17

The hitbox is a 1x4 tile rectangle, and it stays the same. Only the sprite changes. This is actually a common trick used in many classic platformer games where the hit area is smaller than the sprite because it is more forgiving and feels more playable.

Wouldn't be worth having a powerup if it makes it easier to get hit, would it?
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 12 Mar 2016, 22:15

And now we have a few more rooms, some more tiles, and maps as well.

Sunbeams - a special tile that damages the player and certain enemies. It won't damage you if you are using the shield or in demon form. In some places, you can turn them on or off with a switch. Use wisely to kill certain enemies.

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

Postby Imerion » 15 Mar 2016, 23:06

I enjoy watching the progress on this, it looks really fine and I love Castlevania-like games. :)

Would it be ok if I posted on my foss-games blog, or would you rather I waited until you have gotten further with it?
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 16 Mar 2016, 01:54

Thanks.

If you want, you can post about it, but I am probably nowhere near completed. I don't have any regular levels yet, and there's still a lot of GUI related stuff still missing (and graphics as always). Also, I'm not sure if it's properly considered a FOSS game in its current state because of possible licensing issues with the sounds it currently has (maybe they're not free enough?). I do still plan to replace them with more compatible free licenses, but just haven't gotten around to it, or no one took an interest in that yet. On the other hand, if people not from freegamedev.net are also reading your blog, they might also be interested in helping. Depends on whether your blog focuses on games that need some support or are already completed.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby Imerion » 16 Mar 2016, 09:52

A bit of both, mostly playable games but also games in the making. I'm pretty much only excluding engines, tools and such. As long as the project strives to be open in a wider sense, a few non-open sounds is not a problem for me. Especially not if you have the desire to change them sometime. Not sure if it will attract much attention, I just found the game nice looking enough to write about. ;)

But I'll wait a bit if you want, and keep checking in here to see your nice progress. :)
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby Bertram » 16 Mar 2016, 16:56

Wow, amazing! Congrats on the job done :D
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 17 Mar 2016, 02:12

Thanks.

I didn't have time to make more screenshots or videos, but there are now some more RPG stuff added and you can actually die now. Some of the enemies' stats might need some calibration though. I'm not experienced enough to figure them out correctly the first time. Guess I'll have to play and test and see.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 25 Mar 2016, 16:46

Now with NPCs and simple dialogs. Don't have a sound effect for that yet as it's been really difficult to find a good one. Probably just not getting the right key word again.

Image

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

Postby beelzy » 01 Apr 2016, 01:12

Now has some more GUI elements for the pause menu. You can look at stats, current items, magic spells, the map and scrolls you've collected.
You can now also change the keyboard controls or control SFX/BGM volume.

Image

Image

Image

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

Postby Akien » 01 Apr 2016, 06:51

This is really starting to be a lot more than a Clone Demo :D

Awesome work, I like the steady progress that you're making and it shows well the power of Godot ;)
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby palrogg » 01 Apr 2016, 13:35

I wish I heard about this game engine earlier, it looks really great! I just installed it and I ran both the demo and the full game. Project import worked fine on my computer under Mac OS 10.10.

It’s impressive how the demo is fluid. I also enjoyed exploring the full game. I love when Kaleva says “Please excuse the emptiness, for the tileset is missing” in the Catacombs :-) I still have to try the demonic form.

The ability to deploy both on Android and iOS is very exciting. I read the “Exporting for iOS” procedure, but the documentation tells me to use “export templates” which points to a 404 error [Edit: I found them :-) ]. Did you plan deployments on mobile OS?
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby Akien » 01 Apr 2016, 13:44

palrogg {l Wrote}:The ability to deploy both on Android and iOS is very exciting. I read the “Exporting for iOS” procedure, but the documentation tells me to use “export templates” which points to a 404 error.

Oops, that's a mistake in the docs indeed as the website has been modified.

The download page is now here: https://godotengine.org/download

I've fixed the docs, it should be updated within a few minutes: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-do ... 881d3043ca

If you have any questions about Godot, don't hesitate to use its various community channels: http://godotengine.org/community
Or just create a topic on this forum in the General category, I'll be around to try to answer.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby palrogg » 01 Apr 2016, 14:13

Nice, thank you!

I'm running Castlevania it on my phone, it's so great! Of course, I can't use the default controls, but that's another problem. I just recorded a video if you'd like to see what it looks like.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 01 Apr 2016, 17:22

Thanks!

Yes, the full game is a lot more full featured than the demo is. I just haven't really found a better title for that (and I guess calling it a Castlevania clone gives you a good idea about what content and genre the game belongs to). Maybe it will be something like the Lost Catacombs? I don't think that name has been taken yet.

Personally, I don't really have any interest in porting to mobile devices myself because it's not a good fit for this type of game. It relies too much on keyboard controls, especially if you are playing Friederich and need to chain attacks (I think I've made the delay for the key presses a little too long, but that should be fixed eventually anyways). I suppose you could connect a keyboard or gamepad to some mobile devices and play it that way (I've only ever seen this done on a BlackBerry 10 device though), but it's not something I'm seriously considering. But since this game is FOSS, anyone is free to attempt porting it. I think the only restriction from my experience with building Krita is that it might not be possible to release the game on iOS because the GPL license is incompatible with it. Maybe on jail broken devices or not in the app store? I mean technically, there's nothing stopping people from building it themselves and exporting it to iOS on GodotEngine directly.

However, I would entertain the possibility of this game on a handheld console device like the Nintendo 3DS, since it does have button presses, and the controls fit right in. Admittedly, I kind of modelled the controls after common Nintendo controller controls during development.
(Wikipedia claims GodotEngine can export to 3DS, but I couldn't find any documentation concerning that. If that's wrong, I hope someone fixes it.)

I guess since you're running a Mac, can you tell me if your device has retina support? I haven't gotten a device with such a resolution, and have no idea how it looks on that.

Feel free to share your video. I'm a little curious.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby palrogg » 01 Apr 2016, 23:11

I couldn’t resist to add mobile-friendly inputs :-) Here it is:


youtu.be/Dr49qeSa_ZA

I'd love to see a good platform game on mobile devices… Actually, I was so tired of stupid platformers full of ads, where your only choice is to jump or to wait, that I started to make a game with my best friend who is graphic designer. We choosed LGPL (as VLC did in 2011 for iOS) and CC-BY for the assets. MLP and MIT licenses also gets accepted (see the Wikipedia and the Firefox iOS apps). I can tell you if our game gets published, it'll be a good test.

Yes, my computer has Retina support, I’ll make screenshots tomorrow
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby beelzy » 02 Apr 2016, 00:48

Looks like I forgot to update the tileset. Just awhile ago, I found out GodotEngine 2 centers the tiles a bit differently, and I updated it in the fullgame branch, but didn't do it for the demo.

How does the input actually work? Is it touch screen or did you use a gamepad (no idea if that works in iOS?)

My main concern with mobile is that it relies primarily on touch, and that can cause certain limitations with the controls. It probably works okay if the controls are intended to be simple, and you don't require any touch input that covers important areas of the screen, but anything where you have to time button presses correctly or in a limited window of time is very difficult to do right in touch. Rather than fighting with it and delivering a poor experience, I'd rather not get people's hopes up over this falsely and just concentrate on the target platforms. For me, that's desktop OSes. Of course being FOSS means you don't have the issue with advertisements in the game, but that wasn't actually the thing that bothered me most about platform games that rely on touch controls.
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Re: Castlevania Clone (working title, demo for now)

Postby palrogg » 02 Apr 2016, 22:52

I like “Lost Catacombs”! Here is how the input works, but the code is bad, I made it really quickly:

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}
(player.gd, lines 40-42)
var move_left_requested = false
var move_right_requested = false
var jump_requested = false

(line ~290)
      if (Input.is_action_pressed("ui_left") or move_left_requested):
(…)
      elif (Input.is_action_pressed("ui_right") or move_right_requested):

(line ~440)
      if (Input.is_action_pressed("ui_up") or jump_requested):

(line ~738)
func _input(event):
   if (event.is_action_pressed("ui_attack") && event.is_pressed() && !event.is_echo()):
      attack_requested = true

   if (event.type==InputEvent.SCREEN_DRAG):
      # here we could see what kind of drag event occurred
      attack_requested = true

   if (event.type==InputEvent.SCREEN_TOUCH):
      if(event.pressed and event.y < 300):
         jump_requested = true
      else:
         jump_requested = false
         
      if (event.pressed and event.x < 400):
         move_left_requested = true
      elif (event.pressed and event.x > 200):
         move_right_requested = true
      else:
         move_left_requested = false
         move_right_requested = false

   



So I add booleans, because I didn't found a way to add touch gestures or touches in specific areas in the Input Map. When func_input is fired, we check if one of the booleans gets true. For each “Input.is_action_pressed” trigger, we add the boolean as an alternate condition. (Not sure if it's the tidiest way to do it)

Of course, it would be a mess to make a full mobile version of the game. But maybe you heard of “Infinity Blade”? Their attack combos work very well on mobile phones.

Here are the screenshots (15.4" Retina display, 2880 x 1800): http://imgur.com/a/VYlmH

Edit: added two lines in the code (attack when a dragged touch event occurs)
Last edited by palrogg on 03 Apr 2016, 20:55, edited 1 time in total.
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