Fuel

Last week I took part in the 7DRL challenge collaborating with Ido Yehieli of Cardinal Quest fame. It was my first time being directly involved in developing a game and I am immensely proud of the results.

Is a coffee break roguelike set in space - the player has to traverse an abandoned asteroid mine in search of monopoles to repair their ship, collecting ice crystals to power their equipment along the way.

For the competition we knew we needed a tightly focused gameplay mechanic and the hook we went with is a side-on game with gravity. To get around the player uses an anti-gravity belt, temporarily giving them free movement. Energy supplies are limited and your only chance to recharge equipment comes between levels so resource management is key to success.

After seven days I was feeling the strain, so my respect to all those who participated. I know Ido busted a gut to get a solid game in such a short space of time, but all the work he put in really shows in the quality of the finished article. The project was capped with original chip-tunes by John Cleary

Anyway, thats enough from me - go check it out.

v0.3 ready to download

Hi all,

Version 0.3of the tileset is good to go. To save you from playing spot the difference the change log is as follows:

Level assets

Brightened floor tiles

Fixed campfire animation

Added gold brasiers

Added anvil

Added gold doors

Added water barrel

Removed duplicate drawers

Added sideways lectern

Added small table

Added animal rugs

Darkened spells

Added blood spatter

Added weapon racks

Monster sprites

Adjusted colours on devils

Added colour variant knights

Added winged apes

Bellhop monkeys

Added  6 boss monsters

All new item and interface tile sheet - this includes single tile items and some basic interface elements.

All new ttf pixel font - I am new to making fonts so let me know if you find any issues with the ttf. At the moment it's just basic Latin glyphs, but I will expand it over time.

In previous downloads I have included a plain text index for each tile sheet. I ran out of time this time round so I have included a copy of my index spreadsheet instead - let me know if this is more or less helpful.

Over and out!

New Bosses

Got a couple of new bosses here. I'm not making these in any particular order, so I still have most of the obvious creatures to do (dragons, cyclops and whotnot).

It occurred to me that these large monsters could act in more ways than being harder than average enemies, they could also serve as vehicles or avatars for the player - It's an obvious thing to say about the giant robot suits but it could work quite well for other creatures as well. I'm thinking about the hobbits riding Treebeard in the Lord of the Rings, or the mounts in Goldenaxe. I'm not making any promises mind you...

Small Items

Hullo,

It just occurred to me today that as some of you fine folk may be planning 7dRL entries for this year, I should make a last ditch attempt to woo you! With that in mind, I'm going to try and get the next release of the tileset out this weekend.

One of the main things that the tileset lacks at present are items. While I still intend to soldier on with my grand plan for a System shock inventory system, there will always need to be symbols for the stuff that is actually on the dungeon floor. While I'm never going to depict 50 different swords within the space of a single tile, I at least need a symbol for swords as an item type.

Anyway, here is what I have so far, If you cant make out what something is, or if you have any specific requests leave a comment and I'll try and get a reasonably complete set of bits and bobs ready for the weekend.

Gore

Hi Folks,

I'm going to do a couple of minor posts on things I have shown but haven't blogged in there own right.

First up is blood. Although I don't want to tempt people into making gore fests I've found the splashes of blood in Dweller are nice touch. They let you know where you've been and help you feel your making your mark on the environment.  A few additional uses that could be nice would be tracking wounded monsters through a dungeon, or as an aspect of magic - magic spells could have greater potency in areas were blood has been spilt, this could open up a few interesting stratagies.

Any way, here are the tiles - they are intended to be used sequentially - meaning that each column represents a pool of blood as it gets wider as a fight progresses. Of course that's not really necessary, you can just spray blood all over town if you like.

Arrows

These might not be that useful to the majority of people - perhaps they would be best suited to touch screen interfaces, I dunno. At any rate, if you need a menu arrow, I should have you covered.

The second image is just to show the drop shadow - the next version of the sprite sheets will come in with shadow/without shadow flavours for sprites and furniture.