Unity Port: Update 3 - Dungeons

Not going to be a huge or thoughtful update this time, but I've recorded some footage of a Dungeon in Unity, which is elaborated on slightly more-so toward the end of this post.

The earliest, pre-pre alpha Towergirls dungeons were essentially just a rip off of Darkest Dungeon.  Ser was unable to be moved around the various rooms, and instead just automatically traveled in one direction, before being prompted by a few dialogue options on what to do.  This could take the form of an encounter with enemy mobs- one could Attack, try and Sneak past (with a success chance based on attributes), or Flee and return to the prior room.  If this were polished up and given more options, and amusing narration text in response, it could feasibly be enjoyable- but the player was still essentially unable to control themselves.  Naturally this was done away with pretty quickly, and Ser was instead allowed to be moved around.  This ended up in very rough form of the current dungeon system.

The earliest form of the dungeons in Towergirls: the Game, then Subtitle Pending.

Given that players spend most of their time in dungeons, it's important that we make them suitably pretty and not a bore to navigate.  There's been a push as of late to make the towers distinct from one another especially, and Unyin set the bar as far as quality is concerned with Skeleton Princess' Sanctum Tower.

One of the many hand-decorated rooms in Sanctum Tower.

No matter how crazy Unyin went, there were still several limitations with dungeons.  Only a total of five room types were created- long, deep, tall, tiny, and xbox hueg.  These looked wildly different from one another dungeon-to-dungeon (I.e. Glacier Keep's single-image room backgrounds, compared to Sanctum Tower's), but the rooms were still limited to a number of preset sizes and parameters, and further limited by four doors.  We were limited because of the 2.5d nature of the dungeons- nothing was actually 3d, only appearing to be so by clever use of scaling and depth.  Towards the end of development in Game Maker we slightly enhanced the variety of rooms by allowing an arbitrary number of doors in any direction, and one-way passages, but we were still unable to have wholly unique rooms, due to the sidewall shaders and 2.5 nature.

Now, come Unity, that is no longer the case.  Instead of fiddly shaders stretching rectangular sprites into sidewalls, we can simply slap a plane down in three-dimensional space, and have it look just right immediately.  Custom room boundries can be set in like ten seconds.  Given that the levels are proper 3d shapes, this also means we can add stairwells, ramps, and even jumping areas if we like.  One of the most obvious improvements is going to be Glacier Fields- where before it was a maze-like series of interconnected rooms, we are now opting for one (really two) massive rooms like you'd expect from a typical 3d action-rpg.  This will also shine in other exterior areas, like the procedural generated forest tilesets that appeared in overmap encounters.

Old exterior room.

A new exterior room.  Very work-in-progress.

Along with a whole extra navigation direction there's been some tweaks to battles.  Instead of queing up orders for each party member they simply act as their order comes, performing whatever you choose right away.  Also camera tweaks.  This makes combat feel more responsive as a result, especially with the increased pace.  Once abilities/spells/battle animations are more fleshed out we'll be taking a more thorough look at that.

Here's a video of the new (WIP) tutorial tavern, although I'm not showing off all the rooms.  If everything goes well we might be able to release a tavern demo in the next week or two to preview the Unity port.

That wraps up this update, but here's the current status on the various subsystems.

Bottom Bar (dungeon and territory)

 ==== Mostly completed

Character / Enemy Stats

 ==== Mostly completed

Dungeons

 ==== Rooms mostly completed

 ==== Encounters partially completed

 ==== Transition to battle completed

 ==== Return from battle completed

Inventory

 ==== Pretty much done

Items

 ==== Partially completed

 ==== Equipment mostly functional

Abilities

==== Bunch statted up

==== Partially functional

Character Inspect

==== Almost completed

==== Stats appearing mostly completed

==== Party rearranging completed

==== Levelup mostly completed

Talent Trees Screen

==== Talent trees partially completed (Fighting, Magic)

==== Selecting talents completed

Spells/Abilities Screen

 ==== Pretty much done

Main Menu

 ==== Placeholder semi functional

Save/Load

Top Bar (resources and such)

Overmap Navigation

 ==== Camera movement completed

Territories

Dialogue

 ==== Data storage completed

 ==== Parser mostly completed

 ==== Display completed

Siege Stuff

 ==== Partially figured out

Battles

 ==== Partially completed

 ==== Initiative working

 ==== Attacking working

 ==== Camera effects working

 ==== Victory/defeat working

Ser Animation

 ==== Pretty much done

Sneak peak at battle included in the video.  Not sure what the next update will be on, but it's possible that might take the form of an early tutorial demo release, or maybe battles.

As as always, thanks for the continued support.