Games Smash Dungeon

Here's a quick video of a game I'm developing with my son.
Its a procedural top-down(ish) Dungeon crawler in a similar vein to the latest Gauntlet game and Smash TV.

The dungeons are generated using a cyclical dungeon generator as described by Joris Dormans.
We use a number of pre-baked rooms of different sizes and careful placement of lights allows it to be seamless - or at least that's the plan.

We've used a bunch of assets from the asset store including a few from Synty for the main Dungeon environment and also the characters.

A few animation packs from Explosive, Kubold and ootii along characters to life.

We also used ootii's motion controller for the main character and created some custom motions but coded our own system for enemies.
Behavior Designer currently controls our enemies AI but may switch out to custom once we've nailed the behavior, although BD is handling it quite well at the moment.

For VFX we're using packs from kripto289, Hardworker Studio, Archanor, Effectcore and others along with customizing some of these we have created a few of our own.

Rewired for controls, Amplify Shader Editor for custom shaders, Cinemachine for camera control and a few other things I can't remember right now.

Phew.

Yeah, spent a few quid on assets over the years but putting them to good use.

We're currently working on balancing enemy difficulty and procedural difficulty progression which is more difficult than it sounds.

 

I really like the art style on this. It looks like its coming along well. Keep at it!

 

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/in-to-or-into

 

Haha. I'm usually quite careful with things like this but I must admit I missed that one.

 

This looks excellent. I don't mean visually I mean it looks very solid and interesting already. It does look nice visually too. The pace seems pretty good. The most disappointing thing would be when you shot the group of enemies with the overpowered energy whateverer thingamabob and it did massive damage to them they just stood there because you weren't in range. I definitely think realism isn't needed but it would be more interesting if the enemies reacted to getting a knot on their head no matter where you are.

 

Happy to be of service
Looking good. Best of luck with it all.

 

I played the latest Gauntlet game (Slayer Edition) to the end together with three friends, so you can guess I liked it very much!

And yours is shaping quite well! Maybe some more contrast between light and shadows would make it more gritty and sinister?

Congrats, keep it on!

 

Thanks for the kind words.

Its been a bit of a slog to get it where it is due to trying lots of different ideas and tech, most notably animation instancing and LWRP both of which were later abandoned for different reasons.
The game is originally intended for iOS and Android and runs at 60fps without post effects and 40+ with bloom and colour grading on a Samsung S7.
Animation instancing game a significant performance boost and allowed for more enemies but it was glitchy on device, while LWRP required us to write our own shaders for the particle effects we wanted to use (from the asset store) and this was proving too time consuming as we were unable to just test new effects from the store without rewriting the custom shaders first - at the time shader graph was not available.

Yes the AI is more functional than complete at the moment but the lack of intelligence does come in handy for testing
I still need to create an idle AI so they shamble about when not alert to your presence.

One of the ideas we had early on in development was to have a point light above the players head and make the levels darker. This worked really well but the down side was the FPS drop when adding post effects so at the moment it seems like we either go for the light above the players head or have nice post effects.
I'd like to take another look at LWRP once we have finalized the effects etc.

 

I was getting a bit lost with a direction for this so I took a couple of days off and played some games to get my focus back.
The smash tv approach was not doing it for me so I've decided to go down an exploration route and I'm creating a persistent overworld but keeping the procedural dungeons - ie the dungeons will change if you start a new game.

I've started to block out the overworld and here's 2 of roughly 32 sections showing a couple of secret areas and jumps. I find breaking the map in to sections easier to cope with



And here's a quick video.

 

I've gone full circle. Welcome to Smash Dungeon! (previously Into the Dark)
While I was really enjoying doing an over world and had a story developing, it was simply taking too long so for the last month or two i've been focused on bringing it back to a faster paced dungeon hack n slash.

I thought I'd share the current wip.
The plan is mobile first then rework some of the visuals and add couch coop for a PC version.

Let me know what you guys think.

 

Ah, really cool!
I also implemented a cyclic level generator based on dormans theory, damn interesting!
Good luck with your project

 

Thanks @PhilippG
Yes I remember reading Biosignature WIP on it. Very interesting and a lot more in-depth and complex than my implementation - full 3d rooms
Mine is very stripped down now because of the nature of the gameplay but its still in there and I do plan on reviewing it to add secrets and improved enemy generation based on paths.

BTW Biosignature is looking great, quite atmospheric - not enough couch coops IMO. Good luck with it.

 

Thanks It's currently on hold, I got pretty much zero time to work on it at home. I'm using my lunchbreaks to work on a mobile game that is based on an altered version of just that generator now though. Anyways,

Implementing around a level generator really gives you a new perspective on what makes a "good game". You can't just handcraft everything and tweak it until it feels right, but you have to put the essence into an algorithm somehow. I'm watching lots and lots of vids about gameplay mechanics, maybe that'll help you too if you want to go further down that road

 

may I ask how do you make a "cyclic dungeon"? because I'm doing research on that

 

Its been a while and I've since reverted to a branching algorithm but as I recall it was something like this...

Choose a grid size (eg 6x6).
Choose a start position in that grid and a path length you desire. The minimum path size would be 3 excluding the start positon (eg S is start pos and x would be path.

000000
000000
000Sx0
000xx0
000000
000000

Create an algorithm that starts at you start pos and moves within the grid to the North. If it moves out of the grid or over a taken slot you can reject this as a valid path.
Repeat this process until you have used up your path length. If the last position you landed in is next to the start pos then store this as a valid cyclical path.
The algorithm should repeat but next time instead of just going North you should make the first node go east and then subsequent ones go north, Next run the first node goes south, and next run it goes west etc. Next run change the direction of the second node so it east east instead of north and so on until you have exhausted every posibility.

By the end of that process you should have a list of valid cyclical routes which return you to the start pos and you can randomly choose one of those.

You can then choose an end position somewhere on that path or hang it off the end of one of the path nodes.

You can repeat the process to create other minor paths (smaller path length etc).

If its not the actual dungeon layout you are referring to then your best bet is here

 

thank you so much. it really help.