The day is here that I can finally reveal what I’m working on, and that’s Wizardier! Here’s a link to a devlog I’ve started on TigSource.com, or if you prefer IndieDB.
Here’s a brief description from TigSource of what the games about
I’m a big fan of the old game Defender, where you job was to protect those little people, I want to create something similar with Wizardier but with also elements of Terraria so that you can actually dig down and create caverns and places for the villagers to hide.
Each of the villagers will have their own fear value, which determines how they act. The higher their fear the more agitated they become making them run around and generally be difficult to manage! so part of your job (while fighting off hordes of monsters) is to try to keep them calm. In the above screen shot the wizard has created a fire which causes the villagers to gather round.
Their will be different types of monsters that behave differently and offer a varied challenge to the player. So for example rats are easy to kill but they can create tunnels into where you have the villagers hidden, Ogres are slow moving but can smash apart large parts of the scenery and goblins just jump around and make a nuisance of themselves!
The gameplay takes place over 24 hours in the game world (20 mins in real time) and the level is complete if you manage to make it to dawn with at least 1 villager left alive!
Or to put even more succinctly it’s a 2D pixel art action adventure platformer digging/building game! (ok that wasn’t very succinct). Kind of a cross between Defender and Terraria, with some A.I thrown in for good measure and lots of particle effects. The pace will start off slow giving the player time to get organised, building to all out chaos in the later hours.
It’s great to finally to be able to talk about what I’m working on. First I’ll talk about the gameplay.
A key gameplay element is the constant time pressure you have. Monsters will be spawning at different intervals, keeping the pressure on you to keep the villagers safe, but it’s good to plan ahead and make caves and safe areas for them early on before things really start heating up.
I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to have a number of different stages of lighting conditions (the tiles being tinted) or just jump from day to night half way through (10 mins in), I’ll have to experiment a bit to see how that goes.
Another element is being able to change the environment, the wizard can dig and build (places a stone block) in 4 directions, and this gives the player a lot of freedom with how they want their barricades and safe areas to be.
Then we have the actual battling with the monsters! The wizard will have various spells at this disposal such as fireballs, plasma bombs etc, some of these will be double edged though, the plasma bombs for example will destroy monsters in an area but will also blow out a section of ground.
Couple of coding things I’m happy with so far are…the edge tiles creator. Basically I realised that most similar games have specific edge tiles or at least they seem to, I say “seem” to because if you want more than 1 main tile for your ground, creating edge tiles for all the variations quickly spirals into 100s of different tiles, so I knew I needed to come up with a different solution. What I do is just have some basic edge tiles (and then another lot of inner edge tiles) which sit on a layer on top of the ground blocks, all I have to do is scan through the map checking where edges should be, and then plonk those edge tiles on top, meaning no variations are needed. I’m also playing around in my mind with the idea of tinting/darkening the ground tiles according to how far away from the edge they are. The other thing I’m happy with is the physics particle effects I’ve created. Who doesn’t like particle effects! but even better particle effects with physics! so they bounce off things! I put this code together really quickly and I’m already using it in a few different situations (always a sign of some good code).
It feels great to be working on a game that I really do want to be working on, if that makes sense. To me that’s what being an indie developer is all about, you are making something which you think is “cool” and I don’t mean that in a superficial way, I mean it in the sense of working on a project which you can be proud of. Of course I hope Wizardier will be financially successful but it’s a hell of a lot of fun working on it as well!
Check back here or the Devlog, IndieDB page for updates over the coming weeks to see how things are progressing! I’ll also be tweeting at my @biggerplay account.
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