I’m having too much fun playing with Cube Slimes and Burning Trees!

Desining emergent gameplay is awesome!

Attention loyal supporters of HexDev!

<crickets>

Ahem, ok, so I made the link to HexDev at the top point directly to the game on Kongregate.  This will help me save some web space and generate a bit of revenue (hahahaha), ahem… as I keep developing.  At some point, if Kongregate supports the Shared Content API for Unity, I’m ready to integrate it into the game so people can share custom maps.  Someday I may have to write my own content sharing API if they don’t deliver.

Here’s where you come in!  If you have a Kongregate account, I need a few more votes on the game to see how people like it so far.  The problem with Kongregate is that once games fall off the “new” list, they never get seen again, unless they are 5/5 star games which make the front page.  But at the same time, that makes sense for their business because a lot of garbage and prototype stuff gets put there, so they have to.

So, long story short:

1. Go vote for HexDev on Kongregate! (so I can see the score)
2. If you dislike this change for any reason, comment below so I can reconsider the change.

Thanks!

Posted a new HexDev build with sound! Filesize went up quite a bit. Also debugging ore collection, so if you place any mountain tiles, you might see some ore spawn. Right click to gather, but that’s all you can do for now.

Oh, and I reverted some of the graphics back to smooth shading instead of flat shading to get the nice outlines.  I think I like it.

Enjoy!

I’m starting to work on implementing a resource gathering system for the game, because I think it’s fun to collect things in an RPG.  At the moment, my current design plan is to have Mountain Tiles spawn Ore Nodes which can be harvested and returned to the Blacksmith so he can produce metal for things like Swords!  All of this got me thinking more about dependency chains with my current set of tiles.  So here’s a quick graph that shows some of HexDev’s tiles and their interactions:

I guess there’s a couple things to point out about this sytem:

1. Some tiles don’t interact with anything yet.  Water for example is utterly worthless aside from aesthetics at the moment.  Swamp tiles (while they have an added DoT feature) also do not interact with other tiles.
2. The tiles that do interact and pretty linear or are 1:1.  Forests for example only produce content that is consumed by Library tiles.  1 without the other is kinda lame.  Same goes for Grass and the Bounty Camp tile.

I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with this, but my thought is to provide more tile:tile interaction possibilities, so that different tiles can interact.  Some off the top of my head ideas:

1. A Forest tile next to a Swamp makes the trees corrupted and come to life as treants.
2. If trees can be harvested, putting a forest next to water will make the trees regrow. (Thanks to Geti from TIGSource for that idea)
3. Crystals from forests can be taken to the blacksmith, where he can forge it into a unique item that gives a new ability or a special item.
4. Swamps can spawn items that give players objectives or reasons to enter them, maybe even spawn some creatures for the Bounty Hunter to desire.

I guess I want to avoid just going to town creating new enemy units and clever ways to defeat them.  I want the game to be more than just smash the enemies, and designing a system to create emergent gameplay is tricky.  I’m super un-experienced at this and I don’t have as much time as I would like to work on it, but that’s what’s on my mind!

In the last week or so, I’ve been extremely busy with other things, but managed to implement 2 new Tiles with 2 new game mechanics!

Swamp

Game Mechanic: Poison AoE
Description: Swamps are poisonous tiles that deal damage over time while the user is within the noxious gas that the tile emits.  Don’t linger too long!
Future Mechanic: Possibly adding a mob spawner or an item spawner to give players a reason to enter swamps.

Mountain

Game Mechanic:  Obstruction
Description: Mountains are simply “pretty” obstructions” that prevent players from passing through the tile.  This allows TileSet designers to create divides or paths that the player must walk around or through.

Until next time!  Happy Hexing!

Posted a new build with the updates that I mentioned in my last post.  With this build, you get not only 1 new Debug Quest, you get 2!   Try em out, comments below if you have feedback.

Thanks!

Try Gauntlet Now!

No new builds lately because I’ve been working on quite a few small features. Here’s a brief list of things I’ve been working on and you can expect to see in the next patch.  Thanks to everyone who supplied feedback so far, it’s been really helpful!

Quests

• Added Debug Quest 2 – Collecting Items.
• Quests now highlight in yellow when they are complete.

Combat

• Weapon Proficiency – Your skill with “bare hands” now improves over time as you defeat enemy units using it.  At the moment, every 5 points in proficiency gains you 1 new combo counter.
• Action spam clicky support – I got some feedback about the combat system.  1 person summed it all up: “If I’m not holding down the mouse button, I’m doing it wrong.”  And I think that person was absolutely right.  So, I’ve revised the mechanics a little bit to allow combos even if you’re not holding down the mouse button.  I’ve done this by adding a small delay in between combo attacks.  If you have more combo points available in your combo chain, a small delay will be started (for example 1 second).  Within that 1 second timeframe, if you attack again, it will continue the combo.  I think this does 2 things:  1) it allows you to spam click because the tolerance window is much greater and 2) it allows you to time your combos if you want to elongate a combo chain for some reason (probably more valuable later when certain attacks can stun or knockback).

Game Mechanics

• The game now supports 5 saved worlds instead of 3.
• An Inventory System – To support Debug Quest 2 and the item collection mechanics.
• Carrying items – Added support for “carrying” items as well. (like pots in Zelda).
• Physics Based Mechanics – Just messing around today, I added a sphere with a rigidbody in town and I spent a good 20 minutes today kicking around this soccer ball with my little avatar and I had a ton of fun, so I want to add more things like this.  So, maybe town tiles will spawn children that play soccer and want you to play with them or maybe add a castle with physics based walls that you need to crash down to get in?

So, I leave you with a screenshot of the avatar carrying the crystal.

This weekend, I let my 4 1/2 year old son play HexDev while I was working on some new gameplay mechanics (none of those are really shown here). While he was playing, I documented his thoughts and captured his experience on video to share.

Some of his thoughts (not shown on the video):

• It needs a tile # 9 and tile # 10 – He wants a train.  (Spirit Tracks?)
• He creatively surrounded the graveyard tiles with water so “you have to cross water to get there”.
• Seeing a bunch of purple slimes spawn right next to him made him exclaim “wow!” when entering gameplay mode.
• He doesn’t like bomb towers, so he didn’t add any. Although, he did come around after playing for a little bit and decided he wanted to add some the next time.

Here’s his experience. I personally like the last 15 seconds.

This afternoon I had some time to play with a few things, so I posted a new build.

• Updated almost all of the textures – hopefully it’s more consistent, solid/blocky and cartoony and not as photorealistc.  Thanks @Geti from tigsource for the feedback.  Still working on this one.
• Dying no longer crashes the web player.
• Added the Graveyard Tile.  If your scene has one of these, you will respawn at the graveyard if you die.  If you don’t have a graveyard tile, you’re SOL and you go to heaven.
• Updated the Bomb Tower model a bit, nothing fancy.

New Build: HexDev Latest Build

I made lots of little tweaks to HexDev and decided to post a new build with a couple new features!  Let’s see, the last build I posted I believe was the introduction of WADS controls.  Since then, here’s what’s new:

• Progressive Combat (currently you have 15 proficiency with Bare Hands, so you have a max combo of 3!  Punch-Punch-Kick!)
• Library Tile – Hands out quests (right now the librarian only gives out 1 quest to kill 10 cube slimes, so go do it!  There’s a surprise if you do!  Comment if you complete it for a Twitter mention! )
• Water Tiles when placed next to each other will share water space again and they have ramps to match terrain.
• Cube Slimes are now green.  For serious business slime butt kickin.
• Improved Editor (buttons now displayed for each tile type, not just keys, but keys still work)
• Entire GUI re-skinned!

And!  Last but not least…

Debug Quest 1 has been included to give everyone a 1-click preview of some of the game’s mechanics without having to create a custom map.  You are however welcome to create your own custom maps.  In a future build, you’ll be able to share those custom maps with friends.

So what are you waiting for!  Go.  Play.  Debug Quest 1.  Now!
And tell me what you think in the comments below!

Thanks!