Tag «7DRLC»

Mondar at the A MAZE 2019

We visited the A MAZE this year, and it was relaxing and fun. After missing it in 2018 (we went to the Reboot in Croatia instead), we were eager to meet fellow German and international developers in Berlin again. For those who don't know the A MAZE, it's a games festival with exhibition, talks, live music and workshops (and probably more). The focus is on art/games, and not on the business side or even the development of games. It's all about personal stories, crazy, mesmerizing and/or glitchy visuals, VR/AR/MR/XR/PR and generally digital weirdness. So, we had a good time.

The A MAZE happened at a new location this year, at the SEZ, a big building reminding Friedrich of his former school which was built in the 70s. While the Urban Spree was always very fitting for the AMAZE in our opinion, the SEZ brought the event together well and was also better suited for this year's cold weather. The venue change was good!

In order to justify our visit a bit, we also brought Mondar's Dungeon with us and showcased it for a few hours at the Open Screens (right next to Sos' Open Sound System). Some people eagerly played the game and gave feedback, and overall we are stoked by the positive reception. Mondar's Dungeon was originally meant as our entry for the 7-Day-Roguelike-Challenge (yes, the same event Pitman Krumb was part of, back in 2011!), but we didn't finish in time and instead worked a bit more on it until it felt complete. The elevator pitch: "Mondar's Dungeon is a roguelike, but with cards." While future updates might still come, it is mostly finished and can be played on itch.io for free!

Our friend Björn was also at the A MAZE. He released his game Murder Machine Mini on Steam two days before, and Friedrich lent his laptop so he could present the game at the Open Screens too. He did, and quite a few people had a good look at this retro shooter.

As mentioned before, the A MAZE also offers talks and workshops, and we attended some of these. For example, while Jana took part in a workshop by Anita Sarkeesian about diversity and representation in games, Friedrich was more interested in the technical side of game creation and attended workshops about ray marching shaders and about stage design in Unity. But our personal highlight were the Hyper Talks, where nine creators each had five minutes for talking about everything, from playing with dogs to creativity burn-out.

It goes without saying - we also talked to friends and friendly people at the venue all the time, discussing games, game design and the weather. Jana took part in a podcast (about game difficulty), over at the Saftladen.

Now what does the future hold for Rat King? Sadly, Behind Stars and Under Hills is on hiatus with an unknown fate. But to keep going, we accept commissioned work - the second half of 2018 was dedicated to the game for an app about the sky disk of Nebra, commissioned by MotionWorks GmbH. This sky disk is probably the oldest still existing depiction of the cosmos - we will write a bit more detailed blog post about the game soon.

Of course Rat King is still indie, thus we create concepts and prototypes for different game ideas floating in our collective rat hive mind. This blog will hopefully be more active again soon!

7-Day-Roguelike 2017

Yet again I participated in the annual 7-Day-Roguelike Challenge, and created a first-person roguelike. I call it They Look Strange And Have To Die, and while it has all the roguelike elements you know and love (random generation, turn-based gameplay, permadeath) it also is a first-person shooter. So it was a bit of an experiment. It was done within the seven days, but only the last two saw most of the development, as our current game project Behind Stars and under Hills was calling, too.

Originally the music in the game were tracks by other composers (royaltyfree), but since version 0.9.1 it was replaced by more fitting songs by Johannes-Paul Hanisch! The after-compo version also adds sound effects, which do a lot to the atmosphere.

Overall the game is pretty short, as I only had time to create three levels, but the amount of alien queens and the lack of ammo might compensate for that. ;-)

You can download Look Strange And Have To Die on itch.io! I also created a video where I talk for a bit about the game:

7DRL-Challenge 2017: They Look Strange And Have To Die - Developer Commentary

(YouTube videos try to set cookies and contact Third Party servers!)

Me Against The Mutants: post-mortem

Before we began to create "Me Against The Mutants" we had other ideas for our 7-Day-Roguelike Challenge entry. All a roguelike needs is a turnbased gameplay with a walking player and some enemies – and then you add things. Things like different zones, the ability to break walls, end-bosses, etc.

So our first real idea was about a prince who has to be protected by several amazons. You would play the whole group, and while amazons are good at fighting, collecting items and other stuff, the prince would be a whiny weakling with no skills at all. But as soon as he dies your mission fails, so you'd have to use the amazons as his wardens.

We liked this idea very much, but unfortunately it transformed into a full 7-day-roguelike and even beyond, and we had to plan for something with a much smaller scope.

We knew we wouldn't have much time during that week, so after some rethinking we scratched the concept and went for a simpler approach: the player is in a world full of radioactively contamined mutants and has to use "infinity fields" in order to reach places and get rid of enemies. Why was that easier? Because it means focusing on a single gameplay mechanic (the infinity), which we invented a year or two ago but never used it for anything. This way, we could concentrate on the basic mechanic of roguelikes not just by making a simple clone, but rather by adding something new to the genre which hopefully doesn't need so much work.

Of course, it was much work and there still were problems. No matter how small the focus of a game is, the whole thing at least needs some time to become an actual game. However, the technical hurdles of "Me Against The Mutants" were bigger than anticipated. Even though I already tried the infinity mechanics via smaller prototypes, I never implemented it with entities other than the player. When all the tile-based movement of the player finally functioned inside an infinity zone, it became clear that the current implementation would not work with the enemies. A big modification of the code was necessary, and for some hours I even lost all hope to get it to work again as error followed error every time I tried to compile the project.

In the end the whole thing was worth it, although it cost me a whole day – not only the player could create infinities and enter them now, but also the world and its inhabitants were able to do so. Thus the idea of the radioactive zones was born, and now the player had to be careful not to walk into a "natural" infinity field unprepared.

One decision we reached very early was to make the game realtime instead of turnbased, i.e. NPCs and monsters can move and act all the time. We are still not entirely sure if this was a good decision (as it is a downer for many fans of roguelikes), but somehow it makes the game more dangerous and it complements the infinity fields.

As "Me Against The Mutants" is very small in focus, there is not much variety; in my opinion realtime helps to tighten the gameplay in this case. Would it have been turnbased, people would get bored of the pretty obvious AI very fast.

Learning from our first 7DRL "Pitman", balancing issues were less crass this year. I will never make a game again were a fight could go on for hours because both parties are too weak and too agile so one combatant would never hit the other (which happens in "Pitman" quite often). Hence the mutants all have their basic damage and the player has his basic damage, and both cannot be zero (only very low). There are also much less stats – and in hindsight even with six important values only (Attack, Defense, Speed, Health, Mana, Stamina) not all of them make sense ...

For instance, a varying speed of the player isn't much of an issue for the gameplay – even though having different speed for every character was one of the reasons we wanted to have realtime gameplay!

It's also essential that the self-created infinity fields don't exist forever, so a tactical course of action is desirable; but I was never quite content with the approach of using mana. If it drains too fast, the infinity isn't much fun; but when it drains too slow, it doesn't make much sense in the first place. Either way, automatic mana regaining was needed – which made the mana refill containers I placed in the world useless in the end.

The differently coloured slimes are another part of the balancing act. As the game has no concept of the player's progression level (it is far too short for that), we invented another way of changing the player's various skills: slimes. In the beginning, when we thought we could add much more things to the game, the slimes would be large radioactive pools and change everybody around them. They would have been the real reason for normal creatures suddenly being mutants. As we never really had a plan how exactly that would happen and also not the time for elaborate mutations, the slimes became the simple, but double-edged swords they are now. They can boost the player or make him weaker or both – the effects are random, but don't change per colour, so every red slime in the world does the same. Of course, sometimes the God Of Randomness decides that every slime colour has to have mostly negative effects, so this gameplay mechanic really could benefit from a little bit more thinking.

The slimes are also one of the reasons why there are bunnies outside the contamined building. The little rabbits were planned as creatures not yet mutated but with the possibility to do so. As the game progressed only slowly over the week, it was clear that they would regress to decoration.

But they also serve as a tutorial – the player can approach the bunnies, hit them and even backstab them without having to fear them to counteract. In fact, the whole outer region, the grassland with the forests, was planned to be a dangerous zone but instead it is now an interesting contrast to the mutant-infested building. Somehow, it promises some kind of peace and happiness this way.

On the other hand, our roguelike is missing handholding at the beginning, and some people were really not sure what the game was about and how to control it. Sure, they could have read the instructions at the start of the game or below the embedded SWF, but never one never should expect something like this. Nonetheless we like that the game is even more about exploration this way, and the first "Aha!" moment when you get into the building is really fulfilling.

 

About the graphics: pixel art was an unconquered field for us. We mostly dabble in the third dimension, so concentrating on single dots instead of polygons was a small challenge for Jana's skills as an artist. Nonetheless we were eager to try it, and it also convinced us to make a full game with pixel graphics some day, as they are neat and have an abstract style which can make forget the lack of detail. And even though retro pixel graphics already are widely used in the indie gamedev scene, the pure form of the pixel still can produce novel looks and an interesting atmosphere.

Conclusion

What went right?

  • learned a lot about 2D pixel graphics
  • game was finished within time
  • interesting gameplay mechanic, even worked as intented
  • small scope, lots of fun
  • used Flash, which works on all desktop computers
  • sound and music!
  • featured on freeindiegam.es and rockpapershotgun.com, woah

And what went wrong?

  • stupid coding problems
  • not much time
  • balancing still an issue
  • very sparse in content and variation
  • some people are confused about what to do and how to do it in the game