LILITH Devlog #2

Hi, welcome to the second DevLog on Lilith. And if this is your first time here, I'm Kevin, solo developer of the game. This game is a 2.5D arena hack and slash developed for a course assignment. The brief on this project was to develop a game from the Beat-Em-Up genre and as every following week a new iteration of the build will be updated, playtested by players, and with the feedback it received, a new version will be made for the following week.

For this Devlog I'll be sharing on my current progress and struggles while developing Lilith. Let's begin.

Recap :

During the last update, I shared mainly about my ideations and expectations for the game. And I can say I pretty much got the foundations finished. And along this months, the class got an update on the assignment mentioned to add "Roguelike" elements into our game. So this week is me trying to build a Roguelike game on my previous Beat Em Up game. Ps I also received many comments mentioning that the game was "too easy", dw I gotchu! 

What makes my game Roguelike?

The real question is "What counts as Roguelike?". What first came my mind is endless playability, with every run giving the player a different experience. So to sum it up, more content with lots of them being procedural generated. And this led to the initial thought of making more enemies, and XP system which leads into a player leveling system with every level the game randomly pulls random upgrades from a list of upgrades.

Bringing variety into the game :

Currently, the game is boring. As much I want to argue saying that the combo system is cool, with the same attacks going L R L R or L L R R doesnt make a difference when you just spam anything and the enemy dies. There needs to be more stuff, especially when I needa add roguelike elements into a game. Or at least enough things to allow them to be procedurally generated. And so came to mind with the player upgrade system. With each run you can alter your player stats, you can go into different builds across every new playthrough. Pretty straightforward but it gets fun when you realised you can perma stun the enemy per heavy attack. 

But the issue comes with what happens when the player is insanely strong? If death is the end of the game, what happens when they "don't die", so I added a FNAF clock system and called it lore💀💀 but hey, similar to how I view roguelike games, I want players to constantly try out something new every run while making each run not boring. 

Same goes for enemies, like just having a walking skeleton is def not it. So I thought about ideas on how to bring variety into the enemy pool. While that I bought this sprite pack on the itch io asset page and started making work out of it. Based on the animations, I could make a simple archer enemy, and a agility based wolf enemy. While designing both of them, all I had in mind is to make them annoying but not too frustrating, hopefully those apply to every player's run.

New Enemy 1 : Undead Archer

New Enemy 2 : Undead Wolf/Cat/Dog/Furry idk u name it

And to put a final touch, I started added an energy bar and skills (skill for now) for the character after realising that I can just put a bunch of quick attacks sprite together and increase its play rate.

Yay skills (Ps they chain with your attacks)

Idea yes 👍 | Execution 🤔

Imaginations can go wild, but making your dreams come true can be tasking, and for a kid with 0 programming knowledge... Spoiler alert, I died (well partially at least). Making this possible was at the very least not fun. But it was a super rewarding experience especially for me whos is more of a hands-on learner.

Programming can be fun if there is a solid guide or tutorial video to replicate online. But unfortunately in my case, I barely followed any tutorials since there's almost none that I found online being suitable. I mainly went thru hour longs of videos explains the basics of Arrays, Maps, Data Tables, Structures, Enums, Behavior Trees you name it, I really know how did I manage to process everything in just a months time, but they, I guess it worked out well in the end.

Tho when asked if I ever had the thought of giving up, I would say 100% say yes but thankfully every time at the verge of giving up, I ended up finding the solution to my problems??? But the game itself was initially inspired by CobraCode when going down the rabbit hole, I found out that he had the same issues with me regarding the enemy's AI.

So let me explain, this game is considered a 3D game, so every AI/system reads its numbers in terms of radius. So to get the archers and wolf to walk to the same player axis, is technically impossible. Well not impossible but yea getting to that point basically requires me to create an new AI following system, so its a month long worth of studying, trail and error. But thankfully, I managed to reach out to Cobra and got myself a few pointers on where to begin. Really wholesome guy 10/10.

Linking everything together.

And with the complicated stuff settled, I could finally take a chill pill, HAHA NOT. Turns out I needa learn Data tables and structures to make the RNG system cause shuffling the upgrades into an array was easy to understand, but the struggle comes in where I need to link the RNG's skill into the widget for the player to select. Explaining the thought process is fairly complicated but I can share the logic that worked for me.

Array --> Shuffle --> Take top 3 and load it into the UI buttons

Based on String in array, trace it back into a Data table with all the required information (Description and stats), then link everything into an Enum (Enums can change the linked property of a Widget's button)

This was made easy thanks to this forum post I found

Polishing + Self Reflect : 

And that sums up this week's post. So far I've achieved everything that I planned and it is a super rewarding journey. Most of the final touchups are just to add a scaling system for the enemies and tweaking the upgrades and stats for the player. There is still a few more updates coming out where I do some fine tuning but going forward, there is not much to add aside from more enemies, some mini bosses/elite teir enemies so I hope you look forward to them. As of now, thank you for reading my second DevLog for Lilith.