itch.io

Hello! 

This new version of Gunwire comes with 2 crucial changes: a levelling perk system, and a big UI overhaul introducing a HUD. 

The perk system took a while get up and running, especially once I started diving into more creative perks, like Bullet Time (slowing game time during dashes) or Scorched Earth (creating patches of fire after grenade explosions). On the whole, the game should be a bit more interesting now, as you can combine different weapons and perk strategies into (still relatively simple) builds.

 I noticed that Unity is capped at 82% of fullscreen, which caused the actual size of everything to be much bigger than I originally planned. I reduced all font sizes and backed up the camera by 30%. This results in increased stage area, giving the player a bit more space to move around while kiting the enemies.

A more comprehensive list of changes:

• Perk system - Defeated enemies grant experience, allowing player to level up and get stronger. 
• Spawn system - Instead of enemies just increasing in density, I went with a bit more catered approach where tougher enemies are introduced in dedicated phases
• Game over stats - The game will now display player's stats after losing - number of kills, total damage etc.
• Stage and UI got resized
• Visuals - Full UI overhaul (windows, buttons, bars), together with a new HUD
• Visuals - Added particle effects, bloom effects and afterimages
• Visuals - Added AOE indicator to exploding Boombot and grenade skill
• 4 New weapons - Jackhammer, dual revolvers, dual SMGs and dragunov sniper rifle
• 3 New enemies - Charging Mechadog (periodically charges at the player), Armored Spider (tanky), Chasing Mechadog (fast)
• Audio - Changed up some of the sounds where I was able to find better matching ones, especially for weapons. 
• ... And more bugfixes than I could count!

Hi there! 

If you're having a look in here, then you probably are a bit curious as to where this game is going exactly in terms of development.

Features which I'm planning or contemplating to add in near future are below. This will be an evolving post, where I may add/remove things as my ideas change. Especially if some of you come up with something that really convinces me! This is quite a brain-dump, so proceed with "caution".

1. Powerups (100% doing this)

I want there to be some incentive to move around the stage into specific areas. Currently, the only thing keeping the player mobile is the need to evade the enemies. What I want to have is a system of temporary powerups spawning in certain areas of the screen to let player get a boost - healing, extra grenade throws, weapon fire rate boost - all this good stuff.

Now, I've been playing these sorts of games for some years now and in some I felt that powerups become make-or-break in endgame phases, and if they spawn totally randomly, it becomes an RNG lottery. To prevent this, I have an idea in mind whereby the powerups would be spawning simultaneously as highlighted areas in different parts of the stage, and player gets to choose which of the powerups they want to spawn. And then maybe the player needs to stand in that area of the screen (sort of a point-defense) for the powerup to become delivered "from above", at which point the other powerups vanish. 

Such a system would allow tactical choices (you choose the powerup from a pool) and offer some more variety in gameplay (you need to defend a point instead of just running around). 

2. Leaderboards (100% doing this)

I plan on looking into some sort of a high-score system which would allow players to compete against each other. I would probably need to reset the board between the versions of the game. I might experiment with LootLocker soon to see how easy it is to get something like this up and running.

3. Additional Perks and Weapons (100% doing this)

I really want to go ham on the offering of weapons and perks. I like traditional roguelikes in which you start off with an insane amount of choice, as much as I like games such as Crimsonland and Gungeon, where you had a whole arsenal of weapons to choose from, although more RNG-based. I don't want RNG, but I do want a wall of weapons to choose, and then a whole ton of perks to allow for interesting builds. Open to suggestions in both areas here. I definitely want to cover all standard ballistic weapons, but also have rocket/grenade launchers, laser guns, railguns, maybe some funny ones as well.

4. Additional Characters and Skills (maybe?)

I am also considering having more characters to choose from - although that would likely require having per-character skills (to replace dash/grenade) and as a result entirely separate pools of perks... I feel like this could introduce quite high levels of complexity, so I'd need some very tempting skill ideas (or other forms of uniqueness) to commit to this. This would however allow for a much higher variety in builds, so it's quite high on my list of options.

5. Stage Variety (still considering my options here)

With the most basic approach, the game could remain as-is in terms of stage itself, and just progress between enemy types. But I could also have progression of stages, especially if I was to implement boss fights -  a boss fight could open a portal/passage to another stage.

I might also go down the path of having multiple stages to choose from from the get-go and the game could then have a dedicated leaderboard per stage type. 

There could also be additional game modes, like a defense mission, or a timed mission, or missions with just one enemy type... Lots of options here.

6. Mini-quests (maybe?)

Another idea I was toying with was small quests/tasks that would pop up for the player within a playthrough. For example "blow up 5 enemies with one grenade". Player would have 1 minute to complete this, and as a reward there would be some powerup or load of experience... or a dedicated "quest perk"? Those quests could offer additional goals during a given playthrough. Like powerups, there could also be a selection of quests, so this could be used strategically.

If you find any issues with the game, don't hesitate to let me know here. I do my best to test the game thoroughly before releases, but things always sneak by...

Hi drazool!

In a way, I'm "done". I don't consider the game complete by any means, but I don't see myself working on it anytime soon.

I've stopped working on this project and gave gamedev in general a big break. I lost quite a bit of code back in March, which taught me quite a heavy lesson on backups, which were sporadic, to say the least (I still got all the code, just without the progress since last release). But more importantly, the project just grew very big (aka "messy") and difficult to maintain and balance, wasn't really enjoyable to work on anymore. I found myself postponing the next release date repeatedly, because I couldn't just sit down and get the work done the way I could back in 2016/17.

Glad to see people are still enjoying this game though!

Enjoy your retirement! :)

I have to agree that the amount of time roguelikes take with respect to development is often quite insane... And in a way it never ends, because the project can grow indefinitely.

Sounds like a decent chunk of changes! Good stuff.

The exact same reason why I'm sticking with my 32x32 tiles as well, it's so much easier when you can just add that specific item/monster yourself. The blessing of roguelike genre is that we can get away with this, without being pixel art masters :D.

Does that mean you need to go over autotiling all over again? Or you got that thing covered?

Also, why does it say "One Man Army: Unius Exercitus" at the top? Is the name going to change soon?

Nice!

Nice one!

Just a thought I got from looking at the list in top right corner,  have you thought about changing player/ally/enemy backdrop on that list to use different colors? Would make it very easy to distinguish between the sides of conflict.

I can play ASCII roguelikes and have a lot in the past (mostly pre-dcss versions of Crawl and Dwarf Fortress till this day), but I am generally a fan of well done tiles. It's also why I stuck with tiles in my own roguelike.

If width is reduced, you can always get away with making the font a bit smaller. UI is kinda massive at the moment. I am speaking from a PC player perspective though, not sure how the game looks on mobile devices. I suppose these massive fonts are there because of these platforms?

I would vote for keeping enemy names next to their sprites (same way items kept their names). Torches look cool!

Hell yea! Nothing like some proper tainting.

The "After" variant is far clearer but walls have lost quite a bit of detail. It's a tradeoff and I'd go with the new one anyway, but if you were able to add some variety (eg. occasional cracks) or pattern to these walls, so that they're not absolutely uniform slabs, that would give you best of both worlds.

Good stuff!

Hi! Glad to hear you like the game.

From left to right, these symbols are: Tissue Health, Structure Health (bones), and then the 3 shields represent armor rating against Slash, Blunt and Fire damage.

If you hit and hold Ctrl, that should display enemy preview window, same one as the L mode shows and it will usually try to show you the last enemy you hit, or closest enemy. If you keep pressing V while holding Ctrl, it wil cycle through all visible enemies. 

You weren't the only one to have trouble with that font. I felt it was ok, but then after swapping to another one (had to do some clenaup and refactoring in the code to allow such swaps) I realised just how unreadable the old one was in comparison.

Glad you like the new ones!

In that case you will probably be happy to hear that new version (coming in a couple of days) uses a different font, which comes in both serif and sans serif flavour.

Thanks!

I actually have an artist in my sights who has a lot of decent quality music available with a fantasy twist (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG46uU4jlxak8DvmcVqN2oQ) and is willing to share her music for free. I like a good number of these tracks and can already see some of them in particular areas of the game.

I just need to sort out the engine (sounds work well, but the entire "music player" part seems very wonky and doesn't like any music files I throw at it, might end up writing my own player) and some of my internet issues (forced to work with low-transfer-limit LTE connection instead of broadband, can't stream much with that :/).

But music definitely is coming soon-ish. 

Yea, itch.io has issues today with uploading pictures. Could you send me screenshots and/or the save file on sheriour@gmail.com? This is really intriguing as I cannot reproduce it on my own at all.

Are you 100% sure you made the Fire Aura spell type "User", and didn't just cast it on the kobold by mistake? I can't count how many times I've given my enemies some beneficial effects by forgetting to switch that. It would explain both behaviours at once. You can see who has the spell applied when looking at the kobold (either hold ctrl or press L and move over kim). The creature having fira aura will have an icon showing that they are affected by the spell.

I've done some research and it seems this is a false positive for Panda that comes up from time to time on their forums, and it's affecting some of the .exe files. As I keep uploading Dungeonlike in a SFX archive, it's always a different .exe file each time, so maybe I should just do a simple .zip instead, as many people on Itch.io seem to be doing. 

Not sure how up to date your Panda is (it being out of date seems like the only explanation as to why my freshly installed version does not flag any issues while your does), but I see they keep getting posts on their forums about this (bunch of forum posts), then developers submit apps to be whitelisted and that gets updated in next versions.

Anyway, thanks for raising this and for the follow up with details! Got me quite scared there for a second when I realised that I don't perform any scans on these archives before uploading them, so there always was a chance for a virus to tag along. Added a routine antivirus scan to my list of "deployment procedures" I perform before any version is released, just to keep it safer.

If anybody is waiting for the file to be back up for download, I will install and run Panda Anti-Virus on the archive at home later tonight (seeing as this is the antivir which found the issue) and if it doesn't pick anything up in there, I will re-enable the download. I'm pretty confident there is nothing wrong with the archive, but I'd rather check it out myself.

I ran Sophos on it, in both archived and extracted formats, didn't bring anything up. Would you be so kind to show me some report from Panda Anti-Virus which identifies the virus it found in the archive?

Will investigate why that is. Removed the archive from the downloads section for now.

Oh wow, bloody Itch.io did not bother to notice me about your answer. With the corner of my eye I noticed "hey, there shouldn't be 5 posts under that topic!". How unreliable, I assumed it just gives me notice of everything... So there goes a month-delayed response:

With respect to how complex the health system is/will be I definitely want to hit that sweet balance spot between super-simple "one hp bar" approach and DF's "your thumb's fingernail was broken" approach.  It has to be simple enough to allow good UI readability without going into menus (at the moment you can see your entire health state on the bottom panel, and that needs to remain possible). Yet it has to be complex enough to allow multiple approaches to combat and different handling of various enemies.

Oh and many weapons already have their own specific attacks like stabs, flatside attacks, arced swings etc.

Now, I like the mechanics of the first solution and I think some of it could make it into the game even without additional health types. The game already features two, which is Tissue (which could be understood as tissue+muscle, pretty much all the "meaty" stuff) and Structure (which can be understood as bones, but for future enemies like stone golems, it's... wel it's structure :D). So I like the idea of influencing combat performance through missing HP - at the moment you need to cut tissue to 0% or damage structure dramatically to break the bone, but otherwise, an enemy with 5% tissue health on his arm still hits the same as he did with 100%, which is rather silly. That could definitely get some upgrades. Also, instead of having a dedicated hp pool for tendons, having them damaged could be a Condition which arises in certain situations (eg. critical strikes with slashing weapons) and it would block the body part from use altogether (much like having your bone broken works at the moment).

Didn't really thing about it tbh. I fear that currently it would be a very quiet server though!

I consider Elona one of my main inspirations, along with ToME, Dwarf Fortress and some others. I liked the customisability of your character, all the wacky mutations, many ways of influencing the items (changing materials/making stuff +4 etc) and on top of that an open world with your own house/museum etc... On the other hand I played a fair bit of Dwarf Fortress, and I loved the damage system with all the limbs and armor pieces. Dungeonlike is meant to be (at some point in the future) a merge of my favourite features from these games, together with all the brilliant UI solutions that exist in ToME. 

Did not play Tyranny though, might need to take a look. My idea for spell customisation was based fully on my experience with Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, but your description of what Tyranny achieves  sounds very interesting. With respect to race customisation. I recall your comment from several months back with these suggestions, got this listed somewhere in "things to consider" list (which is a huge list...).

Hit chance for spells relies on spell power,  so while your spells start hitting harder, they also pierce through enemy  hex resist easier (that is defined by Intelligence stat + Concentration skill). I suppose you reached a level of power which left enemy stats far behind in the dust, which might mean I need to adjust some of this, especially for enemies later in the game. I might also introduce "partial resist" mechanic, as currently such "200 dmg crush" spell like yours either hits and kills the enemy instantly, or just misses entirely. There should be something in between I feel, or some additional layers of defense against magical attacks. Otherwise all bossess will be always wiped with ease by any mage character.

I absolutely love that tanky armored mage build :D.

But killing the main boss with one hit? Poor orc. He just wanted to pillage and plunder in peace. But I guess thats what happens when you betray the horde, get a bounty on your head and attract attention of some elona-hardened wizards carrying multiple shields. He should have known better.

These are all great ideas! I think the fog of fire "kinda" exsists in the form of Wildfire spell at the moment?

And yea, there needs to be more variety and choice with respect to how melee combat is handled. Still need to figure out exactly what I want in there, but currently the open world aspect of the game is what I am mostly focusing on, and it proves to be quite a challenge.

Current Roadmap

As the old "Future  of Dungeonlike" post was vastly outdated, I've decided to get this list written again, to actually reflect what are the features I plan on working next. I cannot guarantee that all of the items listed below will make it into the game, but I will attempt to get them all in, as I feel that they can enchance the game tremendously, if done right. The list mentions mostly bigger pieces of work, but there are many smaller systems which will be added/changed along the way, but I can't list absolutely everything in here.

This post is under constant maintenance and I will try to add new things as I go on and update progress on listed items once I get to them. Probably on a release-to-release basis.

Story and Setting

Dungeonlike is currently very weak with respect to story and I'm planning to rework that part quite a bit. I have an idea for a world, and it's a rather dark idea, with demons and undead all over the place. I want the world to be significantly more grim and gritty, and will attempt to make it clear by the story, by existing factions and general way in which people behave in the world. I will probably tweak the tiles a bit as well to be less cartoony-colorful, as I don't think it fits right now.

Races

So far I was going primarily with standard Tolkien approach with human, orc, elf races etc., but I might spice it up a bit and get slightly more creative than that. Humans and orcs are probably here to stay, but I can't promise anything with respect to other playable races. As the world becomes more menacing and dark, the races will probably also be a reflection of that.

On top of these narrative-related changes, I will also attempt to get races far more diverse in terms of playstyle. There are many ways to achieve that, and I will probably allow some race-specific powers and traits to allow for some nice combinations. So far races have been just "stat adjustments" and I can't help but feel that just adding more races won't change that, but sticking to a couple and making them different enough between each other should work wonders in the long run.

Quests

One of the features that seems basic, but in the end might need quite a bit of preparation is quest. In their final form these would be of at least 2 types, with Story quests and randomised Mercenary conracts. Story quests are actually quite a straightforward type and those will probably come quite soon, as the story becomes more granular. Randomised quests however, are quite a different beast and will probably require far more work.

Item System

The item system has been growing over time, with both new items, new item types and an enchantment system currently implemented. I am planning to expand this further, with players having an option to enchant the items themselves by following a crafting system. I actually have quite a detailed idea in my head about how this will look like.  There will be more tiers to items than just Normal -> Magic -> Rare and not all items will be equally enchantable.

Skills

I also have a bunch of plans for skills, with two big areas of change: defensive skills and magic.

Defensive skills are currently as boring as they can, there is really very little reason to not take armor skill, with shield also being a no-brainer most of the time. I will try to make the three defense skills (Armor, Shield, Acrobatics) a bit more mutually exclusive, and also a bit more pro-active with some abilities to provide additional protection. 

Magic is another obvious candidate for changes and I currently have plans for a couple of magic schools. I will also have to change Sangumancy to actually be more of a "bloody rituals" type of magic, instead of something that spawns poison clouds.

I was also thinking about creating some diversity in how melee classes can be approached, with some division into berserkers, shielders etc. with their respective  tactics, but I couldn't come up with a not-horribly-complex system so far.

Endgame

Currently the game is a dungeon grind for the sake of dungeon grinding, but it gets really stale. I have two ideas for some endgame content and ideally would really like to have both.

One would be Faction Warfare, inspired mostly by how such thing was handled in Mount & Blade games. Not sure how much of that I could translate into this roguelike-ish type of a game, but I want to give it a shot. Being in the middle of a 100 man battle is an amazing feeling, and tens of fireballs exploding on a battle field would only make it better. Having the option to side with a faction in order to take over the world also sounds like something cool for endgame.

For a more traditional type of content, I was thinking about extreme endgame locations, wouldn't probably call them "dungeons", but they would play a similar role. These would be inhabited by demons, who would have randomised bodies with mysterious body part names. 

This also means I need to have some kind of reward system and additional progression systems, and I'm currently exploring various possibilities here.

Open World Features

First will be additional structures/locations, which will include more friendly areas, quest-related locations and possibly overland structures like old fortresses and the like.

Second will be a sort of Dynamic Encounter System where temporary encounters will spawn all across the world, such as skirmishes between factions, demonic invasions, maybe some bandits robbing people on the road, a recent battlefield being discovered, and whatever other type of encounter I can come up with. These will be slightly different from current "you have been ambushed!" events, as player will be able to actually see them on the map and have the decision to simply ignore them.

Third, the world needs finishing, as the map is currently horrible, with invisible walls surrounding a square of grassland. There will be a bit more biomes to explore in the future, and the entire world will slightly grow in size, although I've decided that distances between places should probably be way smaller. Having a massive empty map is pointless, so at some point I will push everything a bit closer together.

Music

Yes, I know, it's way too silent within the game at the moment. I've been thinking about music for a while, but find myself unable to choose an artist. Need to finally make a decision here as from code perspective, music isn't difficult to add.

Thanks!

I was hoping that my replies would be reachable by the notification system, but apparently it just blocks all access to the "comment world" if community section is enabled, how harsh.

And no, the game is just an evening/weekend thing for me.  I got a full time job as a software tester. But who knows, maybe one day... :D

Hi all!

I figured that I'd much rather have an actual community/forum section under the game than a simple comment zone, especially that some of the reply chains have already become quite long and therefore difficult to read and follow with the way comments are handled on itch.io. On top of that, I really want to have a much more useful tool for stuff like development roadmaps, bug reporting, community-driven ideas and all the goodies that such a forum section can allow.

 This shift unfortunately means that all comments which have been posted up till now will be hidden by the system. Not much I can do about it, I don't think I can convert them into community threads.

Thanks!

Nah, I got a full time job in an unrelated field (automation testing in telephony, a bit less exciting). This is just a project I fiddle around with on evenings and weekends mostly. 

But you know, one day maybe :D.

This does sound serious. I could get that confirmation popup implemented quite easily now that I think about it - after any player attack/spell the game can just check if the attack is harmful and if the player is among the affected targets, then ask for confirmation. Could be optional as well, if somebody likes using AOE and does not mind hitting himself.

Elona is one of the three main inspirations for my game, ad this will get more and more visible as time goes on. Although I won't go as far as introducing etherwind and playing blackjack with a luck buff received from a loaf of bread to get potions of cure corruption, the entire idea of "fantasy sim" is on the horizon.

The particular thing you are talking about though... I didn't think about such approach. I had in mind the idea of player undergoing mutations as game progresses, but having such "custom race maker" does sound VERY interesting.

Yea, I know it's quite a bother to get all loot into the shops at the moment, but let's say - for now - that it is the price that us greedy hoarders need to pay in order to just sell everything we find :D. It's  amazing (psychologically speaking) how the game suddenly feels that it "forces" you to gather and sell loot, even though it does not give you that huge of an advantage and is a totally an optional path. And yet I do find myself creating loot-chests in the middle of a level, to later take everything out of them, use Town Portal and sell all the stuff. 

I do agree that for the games you've mentioned, the solutions were spot-on, but somehow I would not feel content with either (even though I love both games - Crawl was the first RL I played, while ToME was probably the one I sunk most hours into). I might go with something like "there is a special cheap scroll that lets you instantly sell all items on the ground and get 50% their worth". So if I implement some quick-selling system, it will need to have a trade-off against manual haul like that.

Yea, townsfolk are generally very crude when it comes to their AI in the first place, and I still don't have dynamic faction/attitude switching, so currently NPC's can't move their attitude towards player between allied-neutral-hostile, it's all kind of written in stone. But I didn't want to have an unpopulated ghost town just because this feature is not there yet, so there you have it, the town of defensless sheep. Enjoy your murderous tendencies while you can, Joseph the Ripper.

Sheesh, I need to start writing shorter posts. Btw, I might at some point change this comment section into a full-blown community forum (Itch.io has that option), but that will wipe all existing conversations, which I am not really happy about... :/