Reliquary - a procedural rpg shooter - New Demo!

Current information starts halfway down page 2, latest build available here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/reliquary/ ... alpha-demo

The stuff on this page is no longer representative of the game. There's been a significant art style change and shift in gameplay. Also the new title is Reliquary due to Bungie's recent trademark for Glimmer.

I've reached a point where this project feels like a real thing that exists, so I guess it's about time it had a thread.

The game basically alternates between two modes of play depending on the day/night cycle. I suppose it's more of an eclipse/not eclipse cycle because it all takes place in orbit around a planet, but I'll keep the terms simple.

Anyway, you're stranded in an asteroid field and during the day need to explore and gather resources so you can survive the night, when monsters come out. At night it shifts to sort of a tower defense thing.

If anyone has played the Outbreak mission in Starcraft II, that's the basic idea, but with one person and whatever automated defenses you can rig up.

Death isn't implemented yet, but I'm going for sort of a permadeath thing for individual characters. You start with a new character at base stats and a random name. Over the course of the game you'll find various upgrades for health, attack damage and inventory space. If you die you'll assume control of a another new character at base stats. If you can track down the corpse of your last character you can recover all those upgrades you found and negate your loss.

Apart from character upgrades you'll also be able to find bits and pieces of defensive structures that can be repaired to expand your base.

That's all I've got set in stone so far, but I'll try to update regularly with more screenshots and eventually videos. If you're interested, you can also follow Glimmer on IndieDB.

Cheers everyone.Ahr Ech2014-02-16 02:11:04

Love those lightning effects, seems to be coming together nicely! :)

Wow this looks great. Any chance we can see a video?

Thanks guys. I'll try to get some video up soon. I have a few animation fixes I want to get implemented first.

[TUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWxpre3vtQ8&feature=youtu.be[/TUBE]

Here's a look at some base defense stuff with deployable turrets. Apologies for the poor quality, I'm looking for a better capture solution.

This looks great! I like the core idea a lot.

I've been doing a lot of work under the hood for turret functionality this week. They run out of ammo now and will need to be resupplied using the energy dropped by monsters. The way it works now makes turret placement fairly important because if they're too close to each other you'll waste ammo when they target the same creeps. In my play tests it seems like there's just enough dropped energy to support two turrets indefinitely against normal creeps. I expect this will change when I introduce specialists, but I'm not sure how exactly since they're harder to bring down but will drop more energy. Ultimately I want any real advantage the player has to come from gathering extra resources during the day, though. Mining a couple thousand extra units of energy should make the real difference.

The turrets are getting a cosmetic upgrade too.

original:<img src="http://imageshack.us/a/img821/7812/fqj0.png" border="0" />

new:     <img src="http://imageshack.us/a/img580/1713/hu7q.png" border="0" />

I'll texture them eventually too but that can wait until my final spit and polish pass. Same goes for the monsters, including this new one which I've been calling the Bruiser:

<img src="http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/5361/omkz.png" border="0" />

He'll be the anti-turret unit, I think. I'm not sure if he'll destroy them or just disable them though.

Really like the looks of it, and the idea is quite interesting, the kind of game I'd play.

— , Niko

Thanks a lot!

Very interesting concept. Graphics are nice, I also like a bit dark sci-fi atmosphere.

You could add some variety in background texture, maybe some rock formations, because it looks a bit flat now.

I also like black creatures, but their teeth are looking bit funny now, I'd like them to look more alien.

Speaking of similar alien creature design:

<img src="http://www.fxguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/attacktheblock_featured.jpg" border="0" />

Very interesting concept. Graphics are nice, I also like a bit dark sci-fi atmosphere.

You could add some variety in background texture, maybe some rock formations, because it looks a bit flat now.

I also like black creatures, but their teeth are looking bit funny now, I'd like them to look more alien.

Thanks! And yeah, I'm not happy with that stuff yet either. I will be adding more to the environment and the Bruiser mesh isn't finalized yet.

Niko: Wow, what's that from? Looks really cool.

ahr Ech: British movie called Attack the Block, which I can't recommend enough (creature design being only one of the reasons).

I did a fairly thorough search for the title Glimmer a few months ago and turned up nothing so I figured I'd still be in the clear, but today I found a recent trademark for it by Bungie. Looks like it'll just have to be a working title for my project until I come up with something else. Naming things is so hard!

Niko: Sweet thanks man, added it to the top of my Netflix list!

This looks really cool.

Can we have a play of it ourselves?

:)