Crunch Time

Things are coming together. I've built some full levels with enemies, keys, locked doors and chests.

The XP system is also in place, so killing enemies will get XP for both the main player (HitPoints) as well as weapon (Sword, Gun) power.

The game still needs tons of balance, not only with the XP and advancement system, but also the level design.

And of course the graphics are pretty blugh.

Hopefully I can have a playable build (that works on the XBox) in App Hub playtest by the first of June!

We have HUD!

We have a rough HUD, with Health and XP Bar, Items, and Mini Map!

Now just need to wire up everything in the game to the HUD (character level, leveling up weapons, etc).

New Enemies, Miniboss

The latest build has some new enemies. In the forest, there will be 5 standard enemies:

1. Spider - paces back and forth between walls / ledges. Hits with touch.
2. Jumping Spider - Moves towards player, constantly jumping. Like the flying turtles in mario.
3. Throwing Bandit - Paces. Throws a dagger.
4. Slashing Bandit - Paces. Slashes his sword if you get too close.
5. Flying Birds. These "home" in on the player. I'm thinking of having these continually spawn from "nests" that must be destroyed.

I also added the miniboss that was alluded to in the previous post. The mini boss is the bandit king, and will "drop" the pistol when he's killed (probably early on in the game, lvl 2 or 3).

Basically, he'll try to maximize his distance between himself and the player, and if he has an open shot for half a second he'll start firing. The only way to beat him is to corner him and bash him down with a sword.

Next step is designing the HUD!

I'm still unsure whether I'll get the lvl/power up system working for DBP. Procedural levels are also looking doubtful for the DBP build, especially since the worst case scenario would be if the judges got a non-functional map and couldn't play. It's probably better to invest dev time in polishing the pure gameplay, animations and graphics.

Thats it for now!

Update - Boss Fight

So the goal for today was to get a basic boss fight up and running. Here was the "design document":

Here's the end result:



Lots of work still to do polishing everything up, but the boss can kill the player...and the player can kill the boss.

Also, got 4 directional parallax scrolling working, and locked doors with collectible keys.

The mini-boss (Bandit King) will be next.

Only 1 month left!!

Platform Hack Alpha Progress

The build is coming together. Here's a quick playthrough I put together that shows the latest features.