Universal Demon Hunters - Upcoming Turn-based Dungeon Crawler from Wave Light Games

It's cool ... she's used to my crazy hobbies. Truth is, she knows I'll just do it anyway so she doesn't care that much. She just uses it as an excuse to complain. If I stopped, she'd just complain about something else.

Anyway, I think the XP system is working now so I'm going to shift gears on magic items. I coded a basic magic item system earlier in development and I'm going to go back and refine it today and create a whole bunch of items. Here's how the basic system works:

There is a base item such as "Ring of Power" that has a base effect. For example, "+5 mana per turn". Now each item has a condition value that ranges from "Damaged" to "Legendary". There is also a level for each item and different base items will have different level ranges (0-25 for low power items, 75-100 for high power items). The condition and item level is used to determine the final effect the item has.

So in the example above, a Level 100 Legendary Ring of Power might give +25 mana per turn and would be very valuable. Similarly a Level 50 Damaged Ring of Power might only give 1 mana per turn. It probably wouldn't be worth too much to the vendor or to the party.

Each character has, if I recall correctly, 13 equipment slots that they can use to equip items. So items will be a very important part of the game. Items are awarded at the completion of each level and are randomly generated. However, easy levels will give low quality items and harder levels / boss fights will give more valuable items.

There will be around 50 base items for chapter 1 and with all the various levels and conditions, there will thousands of possible combinations. With each chapter, I'll add more items (or maybe just as part of smaller updates). I'll try to include some really powerful, legendary-only items as well just for fun and to give players something to strive for.

Any thoughts? Does that sound good? I think this is the best approach as it would otherwise be incredibly time consuming to create and code a large number of items individually. Hopefully by chapter 3, there will be around 100 base items with obviously many thousands of possible combinations.

 

So at the moment, the items equipped don't affect the character's in-game appearance. I had originally coded it allow for each equipment item to have a corresponding 3d object that could be attached to points on the character model. However, doing so adds a significant performance overhead and I don't believe is really suitable for mobile. Each item would add what's called a draw call and this could result in potentially an extra 10 draw calls per character ... so a total of 60 draw calls. A mobile device, even a modern one, should only have between 60 to 150 draw calls in total. So adding a potential overhead of a further 60 draw calls is just not suitable for mobile platforms. It would look nice but result in lower frame rates and greater battery drain / device heat and just wouldn't be worth it in my view.

When I release the game for a PC build, I'll revisit this and add those 3d items and then write some code to disable it on mobile platforms but as I'm currently releasing on mobile first, I've put that as a later to do item when I get to the PC build.

For the xp, I went with a hybrid approach. All characters get a reward for completing a level (which varies depending on the level's difficulty. If they survive, the get the full amount but if they're knocked out ... they only get half. Then on top of that, each character gets more XP for kills, successful hits, missed hits, ability successes, ability failures and so forth. So if you use some characters more than others, they will level up faster than those that just sit back and do nothing. However, the game difficulty should hopefully be at a point where you really need to use all your characters to survive.

 

Regarding items, one area I'm struggling with is class restrictions. Ideally, I would prefer to have wizard staffs usable by wizards only and big axes usable only by big axe warriors and so forth. However, it's a tricky thing to code and with 20 character classes, writing down which class can use which item is just not possible given the small screen size of a mobile device.

Still trying to figure out which way to go there. Either have restrictions and try to come up with some way to explain it using very little space or make it that enchantments can easily be transferred from item to item. That way, a warrior might use the enchantment from a wizard's staff onto his favourite weapon so would get the benefit but not actually fight with that staff. Does that make any sense?

 

On a side note, creating items is really easy with the tools I set up. I thought it would take me several hours to create 50 items but I managed to do that already. I'll probably add another 50 or so for chapter 1.

 

Thanks, I'll try to post some pictures from different angles and videos showing how the player can pan, rotate and zoom into the view.

 

Quick update ... managed to get 75 base items done. Going to run a few tests now to see how they work. I think I'm going to need to update the code for generating reward items at the end of each level ... I wrote it many months ago and it's probably written pretty poorly.

 

Created 80 base items and ran a test with them. Looking promising ... magic items can get very powerful with the current so I'm going to adjust the formula and the related formula for deriving the sale price of items. A few bug fixes and some work needed but looking good as a first run.

 

Well ... let's see. Here's the rough list of stuff to do:

1 - Finish off character abilities for the 15 first release characters. Approximately 60% complete.

2 - Add some more magic items and tweak. 80% complete.

3 - Add proper voices and sound effects to all player characters and enemies. About 10% complete.

4 - Complete the tutorial screen - 0% complete.

5 - Finish off the credits screen - 70% complete.

6 - Add 5 - 6 more levels to complete chapter 1 - 20% complete.

7 - Finish off the options screen and apply things like variable difficulty settings and finish off variable graphics coding. 80% complete.

8 - Looking for bugs, squashing bugs, quality control ... the amount of time this will take will depend on what kind of bugs I find. I spent the better part of two days fixing bugs that encounter when player characters die and I hadn't expected that.

9 - Minor little fixes / tweaks. I have about 2 pages of little fixes or tweaks I need to make that I noticed during play throughs or testing other features. Probably 3 or 4 hours needed ... though this list keeps growing as I do more testing.

10 - Complete the vendor / shop keeper GUI. 90% complete.

I should have a build ready mid next week for playtesting. I'm travelling for my day job so I'll be working a lot of late nights but it should be ready. I just want to make sure there are no game breaking bugs before I release for playtesting because I don't want to waste anyone's time. I'll also have to remember to pack my MacBook air with me so I can prepare the necessary iOS build. I guess I'll be travelling with my day-job laptop, my development PC laptop and my MacBook for building / compiling Xcode.

 

Yeah, I think you're right ... Apple will stop accepting new entries at some point mid month. It'll probably be tough to reach that goal in that case. I'll try my best and see how it goes. I want to release a quality product though rather than rush it but I suspect it's still possible.

 

Thanks ... glad you're liking it. You're right in that planning the release is important. I have little experience in that side of things so I'm going to try and see what happens. I'm not really that good on the whole social media / PR side. Still there does seem to more interest in this game than my earlier game, Gun Frenzy. Hopefully it'll do a lot better.