Last post I wrote that I expected it to take 6 weeks to complete the core gameplay loop. After the first 72 hours and several hyper-focused coding sessions I managed to complete it. Rather than publishing a new dev blog 3 days after the last, I took the next 5 weeks to improve the UI with the goal of finally showing some of the gameplay. I’m happy to have finally reached that point, and I also spent some time improving combat which you’ll see below.

Dungeons

My initial goal as I outlined in the last post was to create the concept of Dungeons. This is where the core gameplay takes place, each dungeon consists of 3+ floors, each floor has several rooms that the player progresses through. Rooms primarily lead to enemies to defeat, with the occasional trap, treasure, restoration point, and possibly other things later on.

Currently I’ve implemented two types of rooms:

• Standard mob rooms
  • The player will need to defeat 1-3 mobs to continue on
• Floor Boss rooms
  • Floor Boss mobs are more difficult and allow the player to descend to the next floor

After each room is complete the player will be able to select which path they’d like to take. Visual indicators will give players an idea of what lies ahead – such as a red glow on floor/dungeon boss rooms.

Combat

Previously combat was limited to a single enemy. Once the enemy was defeated, the player was taken to the loot screen where they could see the XP gained and loot from the enemy. That has been changed and now the player will face between 1 and 3 mobs before the loot screen appears. This allows more time for combat, while still breaking it up periodically to view the progress and items gained.

Cooldowns have also been added to abilities for both the player and the mobs. This was a bit more complicated than I expected, mostly due to handling when all abilities are on cooldown. This causes the player or mob who has no available abilities to ‘wait’ until an ability becomes available while the other can continue to attack.

This led me down the path of implementing ability selection for the mobs as well. They now have their own pool of 5 abilities to choose from. Right now their ability selection is random but I will eventually add some intelligence to it to ensure their actions make sense (ie: don’t heal when you have full HP).

Finally for combat, I implemented the Shield effect type. This allows the player or mob to gain a shield equal to a percent of the max HP for a set amount of turns. Shield will not stack to prevent any crazy infinite shielding. You can see an example of a shield ability used in the image.

UI Improvements

After spending so much time on the back end work implementing dungeons and combat systems I wanted to have something to visually show for it. I decided to spend a good amount of time selecting a color palette and creating some decent looking UI/UX for the major screens I’ve been building.

As I began to update the UI I realized that hardcoding frame sizes wouldn’t scale with different screen sizes for iPhone Max, iPad, etc. I spent some time to rework all the UI elements to not only look better, but also scale based on screen width/height instead of a fixed value.

For colors I went with two palettes: the first is lighter, with a focus on brown/tan/white tones, the second is darker with a focus on black and gray (grey?) colors. I want to convey a happier feeling when you’re outside of the dungeons visiting the shops, checking on quest progress, etc. When you enter the dungeon I want players to feel a more serious, almost dangerous tone. I may change how the inventory and ability selection screens appear to have a ‘dark’ version when the player is in the dungeon.

What’s next

I’m going to continue working on the combat systems over the next few weeks. There are several combat effects I want to add including life steal, stun, healing reduction, execute damage/heal, and damage reflection. I want to make the combat as engaging as possible early on so I can build the game around it.

Once the combat effects are completed I’ll move onto adding in additional dungeon rooms. Treasure, traps, and restoration points are the main three I have in mind. I’d also like to implement an end of dungeon treasure chest that has some exclusive loot to really incentivize completing the dungeons. I have ideas for other rooms – things like hidden areas with mysterious enemies, NPC interactions that provide exclusive quests or trade rare items. For now I’ll focus in on combat effects, hopefully in another 4 weeks those will be completed and I’ll be able to start those dungeon rooms.