Reliquary - a procedural rpg shooter - New Demo!

The updated alpha demo is now available. http://www.indiedb.com/games/reliquary/ ... alpha-demo

The changelog is visible if you expand the description, for those interested.

The first major area and it's monsters are largely complete now and shouldn't change too much from what's in the demo. Now I'm turning my full attention to the next two areas along the main path and a few smaller optional side paths.

Area 2 is already up and running with it's own unique assets, but it's going to need a lot of tweaking to get it consistently playable. Thematically I guess it's a sort of volcanic space jungle.

It'll introduce the first environmental hazard with lava pits. Player interaction with them is straight forward, dealing damage over time if you stand in them. What makes them interesting is how monsters interact with them. Swarmlings that wander into lava don't take any damage, but swell as they are superheated. Shooting or touching them in this state will cause them to explode, which can chain to other superheated Swarmlings and potentially destroy an entire swarm and it's hive.

There's a fair amount of overlap between areas in terms of the variety of monster the player will face, so hopefully new interactions like this will keep it from getting stale. Each area will still introduce one or two new enemy types though, the first of which being the Stalker.

Stalkers will follow from a distance and retreat if you get too close, releasing a cloud of bat-like creatures I've been calling Inkwings to cover their escape. Inkwings will circle their host Stalker, sacrificing themselves to deflect ranged attacks. If you get too close, however, they will flock in your direction and burst in your face. Individually this doesn't do much damage, but a single flock can kill you if you fail to repel them.

Anyway, time to get back to work! Gotta make some more monsters while I pretend I'm the demon from the Night on Bald Mountain scene in Fantasia.

ahr Ech

this is incredible. I'm missing words for it. so freaking nice!

besides the fact that it showed me that my beginnings on something similiar are just silly attempts, it's really great!

Definitely something i would even consider buying.

btw. which size is your main char's sprite? 128x128? are you planing to release the source as well? I think i could learn so much from it (specially when it comes down to enemy movement (yours seems not to be that typical buggy pathfinding sort of thing )

Cheers!

edit: I'd love to leave the game easier tho. atm I have to go back to the title screen to close it permanently.

edit2: i guess i found a bug in stage 1: at the end crystall i get 2x the option to go back to the base (screen)

Gougth

Thanks for the feedback, glad you like it! Keep going on your own stuff for sure, this started as a silly attempt too!

All the human sized sprites are 20x20.

All my enemy movement is done with the bullet behavior. On collision with obstacles they just bounce off. To keep them on islands I store the UID of the last one they touched in an instance variable and when they are no longer overlapping I set their movement angle back towards that island. The rest of the time I just anglelerp their movement angle towards the player if they are within a certain range. (Or away from the player if they are cowardly, like the ones with guns.)

I'm not sure if I'll ever release the complete .capx yet, but I'd be happy to answer any other questions you might have.

For exiting the game quicker, you're totally right, that's been bugging me too. I'll be adding a Quit to Desktop option from the ESC Menu. For now just use Alt F4, I guess.

That bug is real weird, thanks for letting me know! I can't reproduce it so far, but I can probably add a few redundancies to make sure it doesn't happen until I figure out what causes it. Has it happened more than once? Was it the first time there from a new game, or after killing the boss?

ahr Ech

only 20x20? They seem to be soo big! At least my 64x64 char seems to be so small in fullscreen (compared to your humans)

Which programm do you use to paint them? PS?

Bullet behaviour you say? Intresting... I guess that would work for my enemies as well. Atm they work with the pathfinding behaviour and get often stuck etc, never thought about the "easy way" with bullets. I'll defenitly try this out asap.

That'd be great! I'll contact you for sure if I got any other questions, thanks for the offer! I can't tell you how much I appreciate it!

The bug has not happened more than once (havn't played through so many stages tho'). I am not quite sure when it occured but I'm positive that I didn't kill a boss before since I havn't seen one yet (haha). Nevertheless I think it occured on a saved game. I finished only one stage, saved and was loading it several hours later.

btw: how do i refer to your name since it has a space character in it?

edit: The bug occured again. I was loading a saved game, died and joined the "starshatter" thing through the skullteleporter. At the end it gives me again 2 options to return to the base. Hope it helps!

edit2: when it occured once, it occures the whole team when finishing a level! Also both options are working as intended and teleport you back into the base.

edit3: there was an enemy ("small one") floating through the space instead of staying at his island

This looks damned cool!! Need to check out the demo later at home!

Really cool graphic-ideas!

Freaking ace, man!!! Excellent work, love the atmosphere, art, and music! I personally feel comfortable with the controls, makes me feel i can actually get good at the game rather than being too difficult or too easy.

What aspect of the game is procedural and how are you going on about it in C2?

Gougth

Thanks so much for following up on the bug. I can reproduce it consistently now. It seems like there are other errors that go hand in hand with it too, like prop shadows spawning with props that don't use them. That floating enemy may be related too. It must be some weird interaction between the save system and the level generation, but I don't know what it could be yet.

And yeah, I use photoshop. People keep telling me to switch to Graphics Gale because that's actually made specifically for pixel animation, but I can't get used to the interface.

Beaverlicious

Thanks!

kraed

I'll be adding controller support and custom keybinds eventually, but it's really good to hear my defaults work well for others!

To answer your question, pretty much any stage that isn't the home base or a boss arena is generated when you arrive there. Because my assets are all fairly low resolution I can get away with having lots of sprites that are very large relative to the player without costing much memory, so each island is a single sprite. (I like to avoid tiling as much as possible for a more natural look.)

Generation starts with a loose template, which is just a sprite with a path roughed out in image points (the red squares), scaled up to the size of the level. Large islands are then placed at each image point. Then I do a second pass with smaller islands. Now the smaller islands are just sitting on top of the larger ones and it looks awful, so I have them set up to move away from each other if they're overlapping. Once they've sorted themselves out I do a third pass, this time without the template, instead spawning at the locations of random existing islands, and they push themselves around to fit again.

Then it's time for props. Rocks, large plantlife and other stuff get distributed across the islands, with preference going to large islands so they don't look too empty. Then small plants are distributed , with every third one being placed near an existing one, so they appear to propagate in patches.

Finally monsters are spawned, and each type has it's own conditions for that. Things like hives needing to be on a large island, and nobody can spawn too close to the player's starting island.

I hope that made sense and wasn't too long-winded!