Xmas Cheer & Plans for the new year...

So, Xmas is fast approaching, and with that, life and work, development tends to slow down a little on projects.

With that in mind, we are going to take a look at where we are, and try and give a bit more of an over view of what the final game is going to entail, how we are building it, and also talk a little of how we hope development is going to go next year and what we hope to achieve.

We kind of described what the game idea was in our last post, it’s intended to be a 1 to 4 player dungeon bash game, akin to the old arcade Gauntlet, but with a modern twist.

Each dungeon level is generated using procedural generation, so the chance of you playing in the same dungeon more than once, or even in a dungeon that anyone else has played in is quite unlikely. Each dungeon is an N x N maze, that is to say, they are a two dimensional grid. We are using a maze algorithm called Recursive Division, this will generate a maze with both corridors and rooms off it. We will cover maze generation in later posts.

The player will be able to play single player or network mode, in this post we are just going to show some single player screen shots.

At the moment, once you have selected single player, you then need to select your character, this will be pretty much the same in network play too, but there will only be one of each character type (class) in the party, so either agree beforehand, or get and lock in the class you want before anyone else can. From here you can also choose the sex of your character as well as the difficulty level.

In single player mode, you will be able (we are still working on none player controlled party members) to go around and name each of the characters, as they will all be going into the dungeon.

Note: All the UI is placeholder at the moment.

Cleric Wizard Warrior Thief

As indicated above, we are currently working on the A.I. for none player controlled party members. You will be able to switch between them all during the game though. So, these shots are just going to be showing a single character party.

Here are a few in game shots of each class in dungeon.

Thief As you can see, the players class icon is displayed in the top right of the screen, along with their name, how much of this dungeon has been explored, their current life bar (hit points), and how much they are in shadow, we will cover the Thief shadow ability in a later post. The UI in the top corner is mostly place holder, currently the only working elements there is the top row.

Warrior Pretty much the same as above, the under the Warriors health there is a yellow bar, this is an, as yet, to be decided ability for the Warrior class, again, this will be covered in further posts.

If the character carries a map item, they can check their map and see where they have been in the maze.

Wizard The bar under the life bar this time is for Mana, the Wizard has magical abilities and spells that will drain mana. These spells and abilities will be covered in further posts.

Cleric Like the Wizard, the Cleric also has magical abilities and spells, and so, also has a Mana bar.

So, that’s kind of how the game is looking at the moment, still lots to do. We have a few monsters in there at the moment, and a couple of nasty traps too, and again, we hope to cover these and their mechanics in later posts.

At the moment the game is played, as you can see, top down, but we are thinking of either going third person over the shoulder or even give the option to switch during play. We are thinking that the current view does not show enough detail, and we want you, the player, to have as much detail as we can muster. We are currently working on the single player, none player A.I for party members as well as the menu system and networking play. We have lots more monsters to add, traps and a swathe of items and magic, lots to do.

We are hoping to have some sort of game play to show in late January, early February 2025. We are hoping to get the YouTube channel loaded up with some game play in the New Year. We are hoping to be publishing this game initially on Steam, again, hoping to be doing this in the second or third quarter of 2025 if all goes well.

As ever, your comments are more than welcome, please let us know what you think, like, or don’t like about the game, we are always happy to hear what you have to say.

We wish you all a very merry Xmas and a very, happy New Year!

GnatByte Team