Devlog #1 - I'm making a rogue-lite!

Hey all!

Welcome to my devlog for Craft Realms! (working title / project name)

Craft Realms is a top-down rogue-lite, where you enter and progress through a traditional randomized dungeon, but you can save rooms from that run to build your own dungeon in the hub - allowing you to fast-track progression.

I've been making the prototype in Gamemaker over the last few months. I ultimately decided to make a 2D game to reduce scope (and I love pixel art!). GameMaker is such a powerful engine for 2D. Despite having Unreal/Unity experience, I didn't want to be tempted to make the game in 3D. I entertained learning Godot, but wanted to start making it immediately instead of learning a new engine. 

It's my first time making procedural dungeons, which was super overwhelming at first. Through tons of experimentation and painful trial and error, I've finally gotten a grip of it and decided how I'll be generating content in Craft Realms. It's been so fun and rewarding. I could probably mess around with procedural dungeon generation (PDG) forever and be content. Literal endless possibilities.

I wish I started this devlog sooner so I could have spoken about my very early learnings on PDG, but I still have a long way to go and will be making many more discoveries to share along the way. So keep coming on by! :) If you're interested, I highly recommend reading "Procedural Generation in Game Design" edited by Tanya Short & Tarn Adam.

So what's done so far?? Not much... loool

I'm still technically prototyping. I have a very basic generator built, but it's not populating rooms with stuff yet. I built menus. A save/load system. A minimap. A hub. I have basic player movement and dumb enemies. I have inventory, harvest nodes, a crafting system set up (but I'll be removing the crafting/harvesting - they were overscoped and were excess on a design that works without them). The inventory system will get adjusted to hold room data instead for the dungeon maker.

Most of the time spent was learning how to load many GameMaker rooms into a single room, storing all room information into positions on a grid, and redrawing those rooms on surfaces for dungeon maker side of the game.

Here's a .gif from a few weeks ago of the PDG visualizer representing door connections, the layout, and the minimap drawing correctly :)

I'm still calling it a prototype because I haven't finished the core gameplay loop of saving rooms to know if it's fun and worth making yet.

I need to build the dungeon maker side of it using the rooms you've saved from your runs. The player can currently save/hold the rooms, but can't build with them yet. I'd like to add a few more enemies and a dumb boss or two to finish the loop.

Over the last two weeks, I've taken a step out of GameMaker to revisit my GDD and overhaul/trim anything unneeded. At the top of my GDD, I listed under "vibe": quick to understand and easy to pick up, but the design of the game was neither of those two things. I had to painfully dissect the GDD and remove systems like harvesting, crafting, and a few others and make the game fun without them. The design is much leaner now! I'm relieved...

I do this everytime. I'll come up with an idea and it'll inspire another idea, and another. I'll record all of them so I can run through the ideas later. I'll also anticipate problems with the design and solve for them immediately, which the GDD isn't always the place to do that. It can get bloated... but now I have all those notes/ideas separated and the core loop much more refined / approachable!

I'm saying that with an unfinished prototype... we'll see after I finish the core gameplay loop. :) Will inevitably do another pass of trimming/refining after that's done.

I'm reworking my trello board, tasking and scheduling everything I need to do before jumping back into GameMaker.

I'm going to do my best to keep this updated! If I don't, call me out. Shame me publicly. This is a good habit for me to stick with.

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Until next time, <something catchy>

Thanks for reading!

- Tapsteady