We have been silent for a little while now, save for a few GIFs, but we felt like showing off some very early images of what we have been working on. We want to keep a record of what we have been up to while hopefully entertaining some people so here goes.
We don’t have a name for this yet, and we can’t really confirm anything about it is here to stay, but for now it is a roguelike coop action game.
Let’s start from the beginning here, which was about 4 months ago.
We experimented with a few prototype games before settling on one with a physics based movement system from a semi top down angle. This movement system involved a rolling character similar to Super Monkey Ball. our original character design was actually a sphere with a cube stuck in it. Everyone loved the way this felt so we decided our next task should be to make a character that had a simple yet appealing design, and was fun to roll around. We quickly changed the default character design to a pure sphere and settled on this orange fox design with a physics controlled tail.
The process of designing the fox…
Happy with the outcome of our first character we decided most of the beings in the game should be animals of some form; likely with geometric or exaggerated bodies. We all agreed we wanted the game to feel playful, and light in tone with lots of color. The first enemy design came out as a cubic cow.
I threw a temporary texture on the cow. While kiril painted it, I took a wack at getting it to use Unity’s nav mesh to path find to the player. It was pretty simple to setup, but had a few kinks since it’s physics driven. As you can see it stumbles a bit on the corners. I added a threshold for how close it needs to be to each way point to fix this later that week. I also made many other adjustments to this system, and continue to do so.
I setup several other ray casts for checking the ground, the direction the player’s stick is aiming, the slope of the object the player is facing, and rays going from each unit to the camera to check if the unit is blocked from the camera’s view.
Slope checking ray in action allowing the player to attack up and down slopes.
Ray checking that turns the environment transparent when the character is blocked by it.
While I was doing this Kiril was hard at work with a sword design, a racoon design, and a new enemy.
At this point we decided we wanted all the characters to be round so we could have them wear helmets, and hats that effected their stats in some way. Kiril created two more designs, and models for said equipment.
We settled on having a dedicated basic attack button, a button for special moves that cost mana, items that you pickup, cycle through, and use, Items that have permanent passive benefits after being picked up, different types of jumps that can be picked up, and different types of blocks/dashes that can be picked up. This is not set in stone but it’s our current design plan.
With all these pickups we needed some containers for them to drop from. Kiril got to work again on those.
Recently we have been working on special moves and new rooms. We also just added this little guy!
This post only covers some of what we have done in the past 4 months , but well save info on the rest of the content for the next post! We hope you enjoyed reading our dev log!
We’ll have more info on this project soon! feel free to come chat with us on the Evil Villain Games discord.