Games [Released] The Lost Brewery - a Digger-like game about dwarves.

Hi, guys! I'd like to share my project with you. The idea of it reminds "Digger" a little, but this game is about the dwarves looking for treasures hidden in rocks. The code and the music is my personal work. Everithing else is taken from the stocks and some of the images are made by the freelancers.

The video shows a demo level. It demonstrates the basic gameplay and (which I am really proud of) the AI of the enemies. The rats are just agressive creatures, but the dwarves' behaviour looks rather smart despite it's also simple enough, and it's really funny to compete with them.

I'm also planning to add the true nonlinear scenario, I already have it as a set of text files and tables, and I will implement it before designing the levels. The dialogue system is not involved in the given demo scene, but it exists, so the game may be considered as the one with the RPG elements.

According to the rules of this forum, I have to update the progress, and that will be a great opportunity and motivation to work hard on designing the levels and, finally, to complete this project.

By the way, how do you think, is it possible to optimize this game for the mobile devices? The problem is the light. It's not so easy to bake it to the lightmap for the sprites, although it's possible. But as you can see, I want to allow the player switch it on and off, and I'm planning a couple of quests which require working with many light sources, so the most objects in some scenes will not be able to be marked as static. And that could be a problem for mobiles.

 

Nice! Like the UI and clean design.

 

Implementation of the nonlinear scenario is based on so called clasters of levels. All levels are grouped in these clasters. When a certain progress is achieved, the clasters activate depending on the decisions of the player. The activated claster adds its first level to the list of the available levels. The progress inside some clasters has branches too. The scheme of all clasters looks like this:

Each rectangle represents a claster. There are 27 clasters and 153 levels in the game. But the player passes through ~60 % of all scenes because it skips the rest of them due to the scenario nonlinearity. The chapters are divided with the dotted lines. The story diverge through each chapter and converge to their local finals - it simplifies the testing process and allows to create thorough test cases with the due attention. Despite there are only three versions of the final, the walkthrough may be performed in many ways, and each of these way discloses the story and characters from various points of view, exposing their dark and bright sides.

Also, some of the levels should almost repeat themselves. For instance, the player should come to the king of the dwarves several times to take the new task from him. I decided to extract each of these episodes to separate levels which will differ by dialogues only. The only reason is that it simplifies the testing process significantly which is important since I am the only developer of thв game.

Now all scenes are blank. They contain only exit points and the objects which send a quest message. These messages are sent if an event happened, an attitude of any NPC towards the main character changes etc. Now all the levels look like this:


These blank levels were convenient to test the overall walkthrough, to ensure that all levels are selected properly according to the game scenario. Now each of them may be "stuffed" with content: enemies, items, dialogues etc.

 

It took me about a month, but I've made the tutorial level. It required some additional code and I decided to make new tools which will reduce the time for the level design in the future.

The main character (and the player with him) learns to survive in this world from an old grounchy dwarf. The english text has been written by myself and it's really far from an ideal But I hope to order a decent translation from Russian by the end of the development process.

By the way, before I added the textures and additional decoration, this level looked like this:

 

A new level is ready. This is a sped up fragment of a live stream, sorry for quality.

 

Wow awesome job man! This was enjoyable to read and watch. Will keep an eye on this when I can.

 

Another level is ready. It looks much darker in the game, some rooms are in complete darkness. This is the same location as a tutorial level, but it shows the left side of the cave.

 

I created a new city, it will be used for 4 levels. Its special feature is that it is divided in lower and upper parts connected with each other with a long vertical shaft. Here is a plan of the city:

I didn't show everything in the video, just don't think it's necessary. And I so like the running wheels with rats that maybe I will place them to the loading screen. Maybe not.

 

An elven tavern interior is ready. I haven't made the walls around it, because if I had, a player would think that there is nothing around this tavern - like it's alone in the middle of a mountain. Although this is located in a town. By the way, this tavern is a part of Herngermor, you may see the entrance on the image posted in the previous message (under a big square with a statue).

 

A tavern basement.

 

Some developers make female elves half-naked for the sake of fanservice. There will be a little deconstruction of this stamp in my game:

 

A new city called Yenenmair is ready. Here is a little fight in the Moneybags Quarter (actually, this is a slum):

 

There are some quests in the game which you have to walk through with a follower. This is how it looks like:

 

I've never intended to make local maps for my game. But when I designed this city, I faced a problem of how to explain how to find many different targets which may be anywhere in the location. So I decided to add a mini-game: a player should play "Hot&Cold" to find anything in the city.

 

88 % of levels are ready. This is one of the last ones:

 

100 % of levels are ready. Time to relax!

Then I have to add some features I decided I need in the game during the level design process, and then - to polish the game.
Here is the level I just finished:

The level is divided into several chamber. A player has to solve a puzzle in each one, and when he succeeds, the teleport should open and allow him to go through to the next chamber.

 

The game is ready, only English localization is left. I plan to release it after New Year. Here is the trailer:

 

The game is ready. It is completed and tested. I'm not good at all in marketing, and maybe I'm wrong, but I think that releasing a game made by some no-name before Christmas is not a good idea, so I delayed the release. It will be available on 3 January, 2020 on https://rogvevepla.itch.io/the-lost-brewery. Right now there is a playable demo available on the product page. In fact, this is a standalone tutorial level, without main menu and with some controls and functionality blocked.

 

I forgot to mention, that the game has been released on itch.io. It is available now by the reference from the previous post.