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Powered by Monsters - a hand painted monster collection game

Augustinas Raginskis · 2025-01-21T14:15:39Z

UPDATE 9/30/2025 a gameplay video of an entire level UPDATE 3/28/2025 a video preview of the new destroybale assets in Abandoned Archives level: ORIGINAL POST BELOW I’m primarily an artist, which might be obvious from the images I included, but I also think I finally progressed far enough in my understanding of coding and other game design elements where I can reasonably try to include some more complex game mechanics. The game would consist of three main parts: 1 Various caves and underground areas where a large variety of monsters can be found and captured. These monsters can then be used in various ways depending on the type: some can be weaponized, others can be used to improve weapons, to be used as crafting materials or simply as fuel, to be sold for currency etc. 2 Bosses throwing waves of monsters at you to battle. Winning these challenges can unlock further monsters, grant skill points, unlock further areas of the game and also unlock a higher tier challenge for the same boss. 3 A hub area that has access to the caves, the bosses, some NPCs and also just look cool and help in introducing lore about the game. I have some work done for all three of these, but right now I would like to mostly talk about the caves and the monster capture part. I have the most done in that area. Setting This takes place in the far future where many things are grown instead of being built resulting in various monster-like creations. Monster ARE the technology. Also all this takes place on a planet divided into 4 quite distinct nations with different paths to creating these monsters. Each different approach has resulted in monsters that adhere to the theme of each faction: robot, horror, fantasy and cartoon. Additionally there is an area on the planet where all 4 factions manage to more or less collaborate in the interest of improving various technologies known as the Testing Fields, which is our hub area and where the game takes place. Capturing monsters, exploring caves Take a look at the short gameplay video I included, I’m basically explaining the game mechanics you can see there. The caves can be explored by controlling a small drone which has the abilities to capture monsters, navigate narrow passages and to destroy smaller obstacles. Monster are captured by deploying Capture Lines from the drone and hitting a marked weak spot on any given monster. Higher tier monsters need more Capture Lines and also each monster has a movement pattern so capturing might be easy or challenging depending on circumstances. The yellow weakspot on the monster has a different number of pointy bits to indicate how many Lines you will need. For example: skeletal monster on the left needs two Capture Lines, while the mouthy one on the right only needs one. Some monsters need more Lines than you start with. Monster Behavior The monsters have fairly simple behavior patterns, but there are many different looks ( right now I have around 40 horror monsters and starting on fantasy ones). Also some monsters are rarer, the locations and specific encounters are somewhat randomized so my hope is that it will be exiting to go and find out what you can find in a new or previously visited part of the caves. Some monsters also have extra behaviors like the bouncing eyeballs you can see in the video, or these slimy territorial creatures. Each has an area marked as a circle around it, circle getting larger depending on monster tier. If you enter the circle the monster will move to the center of it and then pursue you until you leave their territory or until you loose the drone. Failing a Capture You start with 4 Capture Lines and if you use up all 4 without capturing a monster, it will either run away or attack you. It’s all good though, you can try shooting down the monster before it damages the drone too much and try again with another creature. Captured creatures will appear in the pause menu where you can see the monsters name and the tags it has ( I’ve shown this in the vid) and the monster will always be transferred to the Collection Area in the hub/Testing Fields even if the drone is destroyed right after a capture. You can learn more about the monster and how it can be used in there(tags, flavor text, tier, type). Some monsters have evolution lines like the slime creatures above. Laser Explosion The Cave Drone you control is also equipped with a Laser Explosion, which can destroy smaller obstacles and damage monsters. However, each time you use it you risk decreasing the Cave Stability, which is another resource besides Cave Drone’s HP which you have to pay attention to. Drawing a Line Path for the Drone Very importantly, there is also a way for the Drone to squeeze past various gaps and passages that are normally too narrow or to avoid monsters. You can draw a path starting from the drone and the Drone will follow it while being invulnerable and fitting into narrow gaps. If you’re not careful doing this, you might get stuck and once again reduce Cave Stability or run into monsters. Caves and Cave Stability You start in the first cave called the Abandoned Archives. The plan here is to hand craft the entire area, with very few repeating parts. Basically I’m approaching it less as a tileset and more as a painting of the entire level. This means that each cave wont be huge, but it will be dense with various details and encounters and at least to me that seems quite appealing. I tend to get bored of oversized empty levels in games myself and it’s simply fun to design a level like this from my side of things. Also I plan to add some amount of randomly appearing rooms and details, which together with randomized monster encounters should make each run feel different. The cave is fully stable at the start of a run, but there are a few ways to reduce Cave Stability mentioned above. If the cave stability falls bellow 25 percent, the cave will start to collapse and rocks will start falling possibly damaging the drone. However, game is not lost even if Cave Stability falls to 0, it only ends if the drone is damaged beyond repair and cave stability can potentially be brought back up. Right now I have a resource that can be found that increases cave stability, but I might include other methods as well or maybe make the instability temporary, we’ll see. Finished part of the cave: Rocks falling on the drone ( yeah, the falling rocks asset is still a sketch): Where I’m going with this So yeah, this is just one of the things I want to talk about the game and I plan to keep updating this devlog as I complete them. I have a million ideas and for me an uncharacteristic amount of enthusiasm for this, the only limiting factor is time. There are also many smaller aspects like a simple story, the reason for capturing these monsters, drone upgrades, skill system for fighting the bosses and other things I haven’t mentioned but already started on, but one thing at a time. Right now I want to make a fully working demo with two or three caves, a single fancy boss and partially finished hub area and then see how much content I can reasonably add to it before I call it finished. And even a demo is a lot of work, but it continues to be fun making this so hopefully some people like it and give me extra motivation. Some more monsters I designed – the main reason I decided to make a game like this:

A topic by Augustinas Raginskis created Jan 21, 2025 Views: 4,980 Replies: 69

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Augustinas Raginskis67 days ago(+1)

A little art update.

I painted this guy and I'm planning to use him as an NPC in the testing fields. At first I sketched him out as a monster, but I liked the general look of it and decided to turn him into an NPC instead. He will be somewhere on the horror side of the Testing Fields hub area and probably won't have too many lines, but I think it will add to the overall atmosphere of the place.

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Augustinas Raginskis62 days ago

A couple more optional cave areas

I just finished painting and I'm now integrating a couple larger, more open areas in the Abandoned Archives cave. I needed these for a couple larger monster encounters and these have a chance to appear towards the end of the cave.

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SakshamVerencar62 days ago(+1)

nice work!

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Augustinas Raginskis61 days ago

Painting Some Blue Wires ( working on overworld area )

I've been coding a decent bit for the game for a while now so I wanted to take a break from that and do some painting. I showed a sketch of a good chunk of the overworld probably months ago and I just now finally got to painting it. Honestly, it's been fun, especially because for once the painting was going faster than I expected and I felt more energized to do this extra artwork besides the stuff I do as a freelance artist daily.

I was working on this sci-f i themed blue wire area of the overworld and it will need some final touches once I have more work done on the rest of the place, but this bit is 80 or 90% done. That took me around 5 days( not full days, mind you) which is way faster than I expected.

Here it is together with my progress gif and a couple close ups:

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Augustinas Raginskis55 days ago

More hub area art

I've been having fun with this and it continues to go fairly quickly so I painted another part of the hub area. The previous blue wire area was scifi themed and this time it's fantasy.

This area also contains the entrance to the cave a lot of the previous work on the game was focused on:

I think I will continue with this and paint the horror themed area that connects to these two and if I manage to finish that soon, then I will have most of the hub I want to have for the game demo. There are smaller bits I need to add to make the area more alive, like sparks to the exposed wires, but it would be a huge amount of work done. I want to have more and more of the hub unlocked as needed, probably including the last quarter of the hub I haven't touched yet - the cartoon themed area. I also need to figure out how exactly I want to hide the area outside of the hub artwork so it doesn't look like it's sitting in the middle of a grey void, but I have an idea for that that I think will fit in thematically.

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Augustinas Raginskis51 days ago

Even more hub area art

And here is the remaining part of the hub I wanted to paint for now - the horror themed area:

Here's a little GIF of how I painted it:

And a couple bits up close:

Now I need to let all three parts of the hub art sit for a little bit, marinate in the back of my head and add some final touches. I want to make a few adjustments for better visual readability, add a tiny bit more detail in places and I'll probably come up wit a couple more things I need to change to call it complete. But this really has been going surprisingly quickly so far, so hopefully I can finish it up real soon as well.

After that I will need to integrate quite a bit of artwork into the game itself, together with this I have a bunch of assets pilled up and ready for that. I'm sensing another potential work heavy period in the near future so I want to do a lot on this personal project while I have some time.

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Augustinas Raginskis47 days ago(+1)

And the artwork for Testing Fields - the hub area is finished!

Overall I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. I also came up with quite a few little ways to add some animations and movement to this area, so I'll share that as well once I have this integrated into the game.

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Augustinas Raginskis40 days ago

Finalizing Abandoned Archives cave layout

So this bastard is really getting close to it's final form. Here is the layout of the entire cave. The white rectangle marks the size of a single game screen. I did end up zooming the camera out by around 20 % so in game everything looks a bit more detailed and a slightly larger area is visible.

The blue outlines mark all the areas that have variations or optional rooms that have a random chance to appear in a given play through. Some of these have a 70 percent chance to show up, some as low as 25. I can always add more but for now these are all I wanted to add and hopefully they provide a decent bit of variation on top of various paths you can take through the cave. Some of these areas simply block a path and open another, some are shortcuts and some lead to semi secret rooms with upgrades or even small arenas for rarer monsters that can only be found there.

Now I need to finalize the monster placements. I will be adding some randomness to that as well, though I won't leave it entirely to chance or balancing would be impossible. I want to have two or three options for most rooms to ( so for example you might find 5 low tier monsters, or 2 higher tier ones), and there are a couple areas closer to the end of the cave where it pulls from a much larger list of possible monsters. I actually wrote a monster spawner script months ago, so it's mostly placing things around and seeing what I like now.

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Augustinas Raginskis12 days ago

So here's a pretty large update, a gameplay preview of an entire level!

I've been pretty lazy with sharing any progress about the game lately, but I have actually been doing a lot. This still needs polish, some tweaks and I'm sure I'll find all sorts of fun bugs to be annoyed by, but this is a pretty big milestone for the game. We are getting closer and closer to a demo version.

In the video you can see that I added some features I probably haven't even mentioned yet. For example a level end area where a creepy monster spawning blob is located, and it's one of two monster spawners you might encounter there, the other one being fantasy themed.

I also added a simple monster crafting feature. At the end of the level you can find a Damaged Monster Synthesizer which can spawn the type and tier of monster you choose semi-randomly. All you need is to feed it Monster Power from the monsters you captured. Also you can exchange Fantasy Monster Power to Horror, for example, for some currency. The features of this device will expand a bit as you unlock new types of monsters and areas.

Lastly at the end of the video you can see I entered a hidden optional area that has a higher tier monster that can only be found in the that and one other hidden tunnel. There are a couple more rare monsters that can only be found in their own randomly appearing, sometimes hidden areas.

That's not all of course. I might make some more updates going into a few things in more detail, but really this is a game, best experienced for yourself, so hopefully this preview will make some people look forward to that demo a bit more. I know I have been having fun testing the game, even though I know all the mechanics and surprises, so that's has to be a good sign.

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Augustinas Raginskis1 day ago (3 edits)

Adding detail to the hub area

IF THE GIFS DOWN WORK SO GOOD, take a look at this devlog on my deviant art. I keep a copy there and the gifs seem to be messing up this time for some reason here: https://www.deviantart.com/augustinasraginskis/journal/Devlog-32-adding-detail-t...

I had the artwork for this initial area hub finished for a couple months or so now, but now it's time to fully integrate it into the game and give it some life.
I've been adding details like sparks randomly jumping between damaged wire. This is just 3 little png images I drew rapidly switching, but I think the effect looks quite good:

I added spinning teeth to these digger monsters in the background. I simply made two teeth circles spinning in opposite directions and squished them a bit so they appear elliptical in shape:

I still need to add a dialog system, but I started integrating the characters. They have a slowly flickering white outline to make them stand out from the background more and they display a thicker outline when you mouse over to indicate that they can be interacted with. All these effects have sounds added to them that fade out if you move further, so they never just blare at you all at once:

The hub area is not too huge for now, it's about 4 or 5 screens in size and has a clear border, beyond which will be further unlockable areas. I had the idea of showing it as a prohibited area covered by a holographic wall or something like that. So it shows this message if you mouse over beyond the edge:

The yellow hologram also has lines of slowly changing color, which probably isn't obvious in these compressed gifs. It still needs some work, but I think I'm getting there with this area. There are more little animations I'm adding all over the place here and I think it really helps to make the area feel alive.

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