Reliquary - a procedural rpg shooter - New Demo!

WestZephyr

Thanks! I sort of broke it recently, but as soon as I have a stable playable build I'll put it up along with a devlog update.

<img src="http://imageshack.com/a/img835/6498/7rpb.jpg" border="0" />

Man, I hope nobody was super attached to the old art style. It was sort of a tremendous pain in the butt to work with, so I had to make a decision between seriously cutting back on scope or switching to something easier to work with.

Last month I started over from scratch with all new pixel art assets. The simpler workflow combined with my current level of experience with C2 allowed me to implement everything I'd done before the change(about three months of work) and more in just two weeks.

<img src="http://imageshack.com/a/img802/7/3uda.jpg" border="0" />

To give you an idea of the difference it's made, the old player character had to have between 8 and 16 animations for each individual action like running or shooting, depending on how smooth I needed rotation to be. Now the player character has 8 animations total, because pixel art just lets you get away with so much more before it looks weird.

This simplicity has also added a lot of flexibility to how I can design monsters and their behaviors. I'll be adding new species to their ranks much faster now. I've got three fully implemented and three more in the oven. After that I'll turn my attention to boss monsters and dungeons.

<img src="http://imageshack.com/a/img268/9584/0bar.jpg" border="0" />

I'll throw a playable build of my testing arena up here in the next few days in case anyone is interested trying out the combat.

Alright, playable build time.

This is the first area of procedurally generated asteroid field you enter whenever you leave your base. For now it'll just loop when you find the exit, but I'll be adding more areas once I've got the base itself working.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1dfxqab9t4mj9td/UYJDpzP8J-/Reliquarywin32?dl=1

WASD to move

Spacebar to use your jetpack when floating between islands (short bursts recommended)

Mouse to aim and LMB to attack

RMB to Blink (only recharges when jetpack energy is full)

Scrollwheel to swap weapons

E to pick up weapons (only slot 1 [light guns] and 3 [melee] are currently available. 2 will be for heavy weapons)

` (tilde) to restart if you die or get stuck. (running out of fuel in empty space just leaves you stranded right now unless you have enough ammo to push yourself back to land with your gun)

Esc to cancel fullscreen, Esc again to close.

Work your way across the asteroid field shooting or whacking anything with green on it until you find the orange Phase Crystal. Run into that to warp to a new area. Most enemies have a chance to drop healthpacks or ammo.

I'd love to hear how it performs.

Tried it, really cool. 60fps for me (2011 Macbook Pro with Win7 through Boot Camp).

I dig the new art style, but the core gameplay seems to draw a bit too much from Nuclear Throne, in my opinion. Maybe you could spice up the combat somehow? The idea itself is pretty solid.

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Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, you're totally right about it being too similar to Nuclear Throne at this point, and I'm a little uncomfortable about that. The way it actually plays has been like that from the start, but the way I handle weapons themselves now is pretty much lifted straight out of NT, which I did just to get it working so I can focus on the hard parts like level generation. Going forward I will definitely be changing things up and really making it mine. Once the base building mechanics are implemented I think the game will really be it's own thing.

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, you're totally right about it being too similar to Nuclear Throne at this point, and I'm a little uncomfortable about that. The way it actually plays has been like that from the start, but the way I handle weapons themselves now is pretty much lifted straight out of NT, which I did just to get it working so I can focus on the hard parts like level generation. Going forward I will definitely be changing things up and really making it mine. Once the base building mechanics are implemented I think the game will really be it's own thing.

No prob and there's nothing wrong with inspirational influences.

I enjoyed the game already and kinda forgot I was playing an early build, so there's definitely a lot potential in this.

Small update.

This past week I got a basic gameplay loop going to support testing the upgrade system, which works like leveling in Dark Souls. Starting from your ship's crash site, which functions as a home base, you'll traverse four stages of the first zone before reaching the zone's boss. Upon defeating the boss, it's lair will function as a waypoint that will allow you to travel home without losing the resources you've collected. These resources can then be used to upgrade components of your space suit.

Once I get the boss fight (pictured above) stabilized I'll update the build so anyone interested can try it out.

Oh yes, I dig the boss!

Alright, playable build time.

This is the first area of procedurally generated asteroid field you enter whenever you leave your base. For now it'll just loop when you find the exit, but I'll be adding more areas once I've got the base itself working.WASD to move

Spacebar to use your jetpack when floating between islands (short bursts recommended)

Mouse to aim and LMB to attack

RMB to Blink (only recharges when jetpack energy is full)

Scrollwheel to swap weapons

E to pick up weapons (only slot 1 [light guns] and 3 [melee] are currently available. 2 will be for heavy weapons)

` (tilde) to restart if you die or get stuck. (running out of fuel in empty space just leaves you stranded right now unless you have enough ammo to push yourself back to land with your gun)

Esc to cancel fullscreen, Esc again to close.

Work your way across the asteroid field shooting or whacking anything with green on it until you find the orange Phase Crystal. Run into that to warp to a new area. Most enemies have a chance to drop healthpacks or ammo.

I'd love to hear how it performs.

This looks really cool, I will check it out later.

Looks really nice! I can't wait till we can try it!

Man, I've really been neglecting this thread. I was in a mini-crunch getting the game as polished as possible before the June 2nd deadline for Intel's Level Up 2014 contest . I got it submitted at pretty much the last second, and now that I've had a few days to decompress I'm remembering to update people on how it's doing.

You can download it here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/reliquary/ ... alpha-demo

The first area of the game and it's boss are included. You can review the controls from the main menu, or bring them up in-game at any time by holding "?". Let me know what you think!

Very nice game.

If you can make the player use the arrow keys to move this will be great.

I'm interested in your way to make the save and load system, did use a plugin for it or just the save and load events ?

Very nice game.

If you can make the player use the arrow keys to move this will be great.

I'm interested in your way to make the save and load system, did use a plugin for it or just the save and load events ?

Thanks! Custom keybinds and controller support are on my to-do list for sure. For saves, yes I just used the save and load events. I'll be adding multiple save slots eventually too.

Played a bit of this last night, it's looking fantastic. Look forward to seeing what you do with it!

lolpaca Glad you liked it, thanks!

Based on feedback and a few playthroughs that have popped up on youtube I'll have a small update to the demo rolling out soon to fix a few bugs, tweak a few enemies and make the controls and abilities more obvious. One guy never figured out the jetpack and had to use his gun for propulsion as a last resort, and another guy didn't know about the blink ability. It's really easy to think something is intuitive if you're the one making it, while to anyone else it's just obtuse.