itch.io

Submitted! https://rwhaling.itch.io/aeon-shifters

I'm very happy with how the special moves, animation, and general React UI approach turned out - they all made it possible to implement a more ambitious design than I have in the past.  

I'm a little surprised that the game turned out real-time-ish instead of turn-based, but once I had the special moves running, it just felt "fun" and I wanted to double down on the arcade-y vibe.  Added some music from my last roguelike, Barrow 2, for vibes.

I had to cut a lot of things that I'd originally planned for - gold, perks, stat upgrades, etc. - and the game feels pretty bare-bones.  Most notably, the original plan had been for a randomly-generated map with fortresses, camps, castles, and something much closer to a true musou/dynasty warriors progression - but all of that got cut, so what we have now is a much simpler horde-combat tower-defense thing, but I'm still quite pleased with it.  

I might expand this into a turn-based game with actual maps and more of the cut features sometime, I feel like there is a lot of design space to explore here.

Thank you!  Just published it now.

Update!
Things are going well, new build up:
https://rwhaling.itch.io/aeon-shifters
The big breakthrough was integrating a JS animation library, GSAP, and figuring out how to use it to control parameters on some of my shaders - that turned into the foundation for colorful special move effects and I have found the fun inner loop of the game.  It definitely has turned out sillier, faster, and more arcade-y than I even expected, but I think it's also just more fun than any game I've made before, so I'll take it.  

I cut the list of factions down to 6 - sorry, wyrms and slimes, you are no longer in the running to becoming archons of the new aeon - but really liking how the ones I have turned out, especially the griffons, who are basically just angry geese.

Integrating music and polishing a bit more tomorrow but happy with how things have turned out so far.

very rough build: https://rwhaling.itch.io/aeon-shifters

Building a fast-paced hack-and-slash roguelike with dynasty warriors/vampire survivors vibes.
Re-using a custom WebGL engine I built last year, with React for all the UI.  Learning React for the first time, which is a hoot, but hopefully this means I don't get bottlenecked on UI stuff and can just copypasta my way through simple stuff.

Using Loren Schmidt's lovely Phosphor sprite set: https://lorenschmidt.itch.io/phosphor

Making good progress so far!  Basic gameplay concepts (fortress, grunts, champions, 2 sides) are in place.  But it's not fun to play yet.

Next up - working on building a "special moves" system - acquiring and upgrading big, colorful AOE attacks to deal with the masses of enemies is the entire point, and I'm hoping that once that is up and running the game will start to feel "fun"

The basic gameplay flow is - there are 8 factions, arranged in a "tournament" layout, and each playthrough the order is randomized.  At the start of a level you choose one of two factions, which offer different kinds of moves/perks as rewards.  I'm thinking about a forgiving loss mechanic where you can go into a "repechage" bracket to acquire more perks at lower difficulty, before retrying the main progression.

The sprites are super inspiring, the 8 factions I have are:

• orcs
• undead
• sirens
• lizards
• wyrms
• drakes
• griffons
• slimes

Day 7 - It's done, and with 91 minutes or so to spare!

Implemented all quest chains, skill upgrades, and both melee and ranged combat - seen here, an under-leveled player running away from a peeved moose.

Did quite a bit of polish on the menus and text, which is feeling a lot smoother now. It's not feeling especially strongly themed - my original notes had focused on late neolithic themes, megafauna, conflicts with other humans, etc., whereas this is a lot more minimal - it's really just you and a spear against the world.

Also play tested it on my partner, who does not usually enjoy games with lots of text or menus, and got great notes.

I'll probably reflect more once I have a little distance, but very glad I spent the time to make this, and appreciate this community immensely.

Day 6 - getting close to the finish line, wow.  Progress has accelerated though:

The fog-of-war, scouting, and exploration mechanics went well, and I feel like they are adding a great sense of immersion.  I added food consumption, which made the game too hard, and then bow/arrow combat, which made it too easy.  I already got the game publishing to itch successfully this AM, though, so I can focus on balance and polish pretty much all day.

Day 5 - good progress.  Won't share any screenshots, because the game looks more-or-less the same, but the gameplay has started to fill out, and I play tested it on a friend.  

Added many different creatures, spawn tables for different regions, rudimentary inventory, status, quest, and shop systems - and an ending, if you get to the other side of the map, hunt a moose, and bring it back to town.

Next up, I think, is exploration, to build up a sense of immersion - add basic fog-of-war to the world map, and add a Scout command that can reveal more of the map, tell you what animals spawn in a region, and give vague directions toward your current quest target.  Once I have that, adding food consumption to limit progress, and a new quest chain to create waypoints/hunting camps, probably fills out a lot of detail in the world.

There's a pretty good chance I can get the above done today?  If so, the plan for tomorrow would be to add ranged combat, and some actual enemies - bears, wolves, antagonistic humans, etc.

Day 4 - Progress! Creatures spawn, can detect and flee the player, and the player has two skills - Listen and Hide - to help sneak up on them.

The only trouble is that I'm not sure it's fun yet - so much of detection is probability based, which isn't especially engaging.  I'm hoping that adding more enemies, quests, crafting, and more skills will make this feel more lively. That's my area of focus for today, and likely for the rest of the week.

This looks lovely!  UE has always intimidated me; getting procedural generation and turn-based combat implemented, plus all the animation, is super impressive.  Look forward to seeing where it is at the end of the week.

Good progress, a little slower than I'd like, but getting there - can now track entities position and render them on the local or global map, and interact with them.  Only interaction right now is modal popups, but it's minimally effective for now.  Added a town with the lovely ⌂ Unicode glyph.  

I'm a bit worried that I'm almost 3 full days in, and don't have any enemies or the core gameplay loop yet, so that's priority # 1 for today.  Immediate goal is to spawn birds at random, and have them fly away when the player approaches.  Lots of tricky/fun math around the probability and density of critter spawns, respawn/despawn, etc.

I love the lighting and animation!  What engine/language are you using?

Day 2 update: good progress, map zoom is working, 4 x 3 zoom doesn't feel like quite enough but good for testing.

Next Up:

UI/Modals/Main Menu

Critter Spawning/basic AI

Basic  Combat

NPC/Quests

Skills/Upgrades

More formidable enemies

Dawn of Bronze is an open-world roguelike about hunting, gathering, and stealth, set in the late neolithic - most conflict is between the player and various animals, but an underlying theme is the transition from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agriculture, the establishment of militarized city-states, the early domestication of horses, and the origin of smelting.

Credits/Resources

• Built with rot.js
• Project stubs bootstrapped from Mizar999's rotjs-typescript-basics
• Drawing on procedural map gen techniques from Red Blob Games and Here Dragons Abound
• Did some preliminary work on map gen in d3.js, notebooks viewable here: https://observablehq.com/d/b3ca2e42cae284b6
  

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Good progress for day 1.  Started project setup around 11:15 AM Saturday (US Central Time), got scaffolding in place and ready to start coding at 12:01 PM, so I'll consider my pencils-down time to be noon on Saturday the 11th.

Got about 5 solid hours of coding in yesterday, the biggest obstacle so far, but also the biggest boost, has been TypeScript.  The type checking and tooling in VSCode is amazing compared to plain javascript, and it's a lot easier for me to work in a language with types.  But all my algorithmic prep work was in d3.js via Observable - d3 itself wasn't too bad, but getting my implementations of Perlin noise and Poisson disk sampling ported over and situated right in the project took up most of my time.  I had to give up on getting fast-2d-poisson-disk-sampling working, and used Mike Bostock's implementation here https://observablehq.com/@mbostock/poisson-disk-sampling instead.

Now that we're over that hump, the basic world map is working, roughly matches what I had in my prep notebooks, and looks good, and I can move my @ character around it.

The goal for today is to add a zoomed-in view, and play around with a few different levels of detail to see what feels right.  I'm thinking of a proportion where a full screen of the tactical map corresponds to like 4 x 3 squares on the world map grid, which would mean most biomes are 4/5 screens across, and the whole world is about 30 x 20, 40 x 25, something like that.  Maybe add fog of war/map reveal if I make good progress.