Broken Broom Adventure!

iak 2019-10-10 16:14

Wooh I made it to the untextured end-room-thing! XD Y'know. Though with the missing enemies and end and potentially other stuff a lot is unfinished, I really like your style. The background and blocks all have very nice colors that go well together. I could see the broken broom mechanic be extended too in the future. The procedural generation is cool, too. I'll have to take a look at spelunky myself now that you mentioned learning from it. So yeah. Though a lot is unfinished right now, I would like to see more of this in the future. If you continue, contact me somewhere.

justcamh 2019-10-11 02:56

Neat start dude, I really like the procedural generation. I was super impressed that every room was accessible, with no four block high jumps required. I think this has actually inspired me to do something procedural with my next game, cos that but with critters would be awesome. :heart:

minibobbo 2019-10-11 02:58

This is sort of a reverse Spelunky :smile: I like the idea and procedural generation is always cool. You mentioned some things you wanted to add but couldn't for time. I would have liked if the broom let me start to hover not just at the top of my jump, but also while I was falling.

Shrinking the hitbox on the character slightly would help avoid that "I'm not really standing on this corner" feeling you get. airstand.png

How were you planning on implementing enemies? Would you get an attack also?

lamossus 2019-10-11 06:22

The movement is rather basic but feels pretty nice. I like how broom doesn't give you much height but allows you to hover long distances horizontally, that's more interesting than something like a regular double jump. Maybe change your generation a bit so it creates more horizontal obstacles, I think that would make it a bit more challenging and fun. Also you should probably allow players to use hover after falling off the platform, not just when they jump

rubixnoob13 2019-10-11 18:03

Okay, time for a mass comment reply! :smiley: - @iak I am definitely planning on expanding this in the future, so I'll try to keep you posted somehow - @justcamh I've been wanting to do procedural gen in something for a long time and keep putting it off as "too hard", but now that I've dabbled in it just a little bit, it's actually pretty easy. You should definitely check out the website I linked on the post, because it kinda steps through how the code works and breaks it down. I tried looking at the actual Spelunky source code, but "what even are comments?" Meanwhile, bobbo down there knows what's up. Currently the gen is very similar to Spelunky, except that instead of going down into some mines, you're trying to go UP and escape a dungeon! (and the map is 10x10, where Spelunky is like a 4x4 room grid) :stuck_out_tongue: - @minibobbo I've definitely re-thought the broom mechanics. Currently there is a lot of "spaghetti-code" in the jumping mechanic, step 1 is look at Finite-State machines so we can have a "We're falling, but we haven't flown yet, so we can start to fly now". I didn't even notice that you can stand off the ledge, but I know exactly what you mean. Thanks for the tip, that'll be added to the list (you SHOULD be able to have your toe on the platform, but not float off of it lol). As far as enemies, I have a few ideas for them in mind, probably some simple chase-pathfinding AI with another FSM so they'll go from "idle" to "attack" when they see the player. I know it's a little hard to tell from the art, but player is technically supposed to be a "witch" (hence the broom?) and I was going for sort of a Halloween theme, so enemies might be things like bats, evil pumpkins, ghosts, etc. Also the guards who put you in the dungeon in the first place. You were actually intended to have a VERY short (think melee range) attack, probably some type of magic sparkle thing, and there is a cell door for the area where you initially start which would require you to use this attack to escape.-> CellDoorBig.png I'm sure eventually there will be powerups and items to give different attacks with more range. - @lamossus I like the way the hovering feels as well. It's kind of designed to help give a boost if you need to to get up just a LITTLE higher, but you can WHOOSH over things like you mentioned (maybe pits of lava or spikes at some point?). I definitely wanted to allow flight after falling off the platform, but when I tried to implement it, as I was telling minibobbo above, I had some bugs and couldn't get it to work properly, so I just took it out to make sure the other things worked as intended before releasing it. The generation is kinda a proof of concept, I am planning to expand it to be able to look less like it's done on a big grid, as well as to combine some textures for optimization, since right now the entire map is literally a 10x10 box of 8x10 rooms, plus the outside impenetrable border tiles (the reddish ones on the edge). I think those are 3 high and 4 wide, so maybe 106 x 84, which is like 8904 total map tiles. Right now, those are all individual sprites in Godot, which thankfully works on most of the things I tested on. However, I've since done some optimization checks, and with a little optimization, I got another render test to go from "way too many single tiles" running at like 51 fps with vsync disabled to like "a few textures that have a lot of tiles drawn on them" running at around 2100 fps with vsync disabled (yeah, that's like 40x faster!) Essentially a lot of the background tiles don't do anything really, other than make the background "not just gray", so they can be static, which allows more processing for stuff that matters (like collisions on terrain and enemies and stuff).

Whew! I think this is the closest to the 4096 character limit I've ever made it on a post, so I'm gonna wrap this one up. Thanks for all the feedback so far, and thanks for playing to everyone who's done so!

tohubohu 2019-10-12 02:47

I ran the game once but despite what I thought was a methodical search from room to room I never found the "exit" or an obvious end. So I thought maybe there was a small chance that the procgen failed and decided to reload the game. Now, however, the player shows a blank screen when I attempt to run it (it shows a loading bar that never fills, and doesn't show the purple "Generating Map..." screen from before. Looking in my web browser's (Firefox) console, I see an "uncaught exception: abort(101)" error.

Edit: Now it's decided to work again. Will give it another shot.

Okay, I think I've found the 2x2 gray box that marks the potential end or exit. I like the graphics and the controls are pretty smooth, though waiting for that extra bit of hover to get to the third tile up takes a little too long IMO. Implementing procedural generation was definitely a plus! The map is pretty large, but maybe with additional features it wouldn't seem so. Congrats on the submission!

rubixnoob13 2019-10-12 02:51

@tohubohu If you look at the screenshots on the page, the last one shows the "exit" area (it's really not super obvious and it's only that color because there's just no textures there at all and that's the background of the room lol)

plazmaz 2019-10-12 03:01

It's an interesting mechanic, but I didn't really notice much gameplay, and the goal was unclear. Additionally, I wasn't sure how it fits into the theme of the jam. I liked the mechanic of the broken broom, not-quite-double jump, but I think there needs to be more gameplay and objectives to keep players engaged. It's possible I'm missing something, but it didn't hold my interest long enough to get to that thing.

julianbeutel 2019-10-12 04:04

hey, downloaded the Mac build - seemed to work fine for me. player movement feels good, and ya like others were saying, I like that the broom gives jussssstt enough of a boost. would really want to check in with this game if you have time to implement for features. but what you have so far is feeling good. congrats!

rubixnoob13 2019-10-12 04:36

@plazmaz Yeah, there's not a lot of gameplay (yet), because due to RL things I was only able to devote about 12 hours of actual time to working on this during the jam.

@julianbeutel Thanks so much! As far as I know, you're the first Mac user to download and test it, and this project is the first thing I've released using Godot engine, so basically I just had to assume it would work correctly since I don't have a mac to test on. But I know the Mac community often feels left out at release time, so I thought I'd try to be inclusive lol

nikita-demidov 2019-10-12 12:02

The Mac version works(as @julianbeutel said)! The world generator is great. Are you planning to make a post mortem version with enemies, story...? btw: What is about the theme?

lunardust 2019-10-12 12:55

nice artwork! feeling good to fly with a broom. hope to see more gameplay.

miltonnh25 2019-10-13 04:43

Good job with the game. Even though there is not too much to do it was still fun to play around with. I hope to see you develop this game further. :slight_smile:

lovetocode999 2019-10-13 23:03

Great start for a game! Fun to play around with, I really liked the procedural level generation. The graphics also look really nice. A few suggestions: - Add some background music - Add enemies to fight - Add an attack to fight the enemies with - Add an end goal

I would really like to see this made into a full game, it looks great thus far!

P.S. I love your profile picture, as I am a bit of a rubik's cube geek myself :smile:

zachary-shah 2019-10-19 14:45

Time restrictions can be a pain. However, I think you should have focused on enemies before sound effects and etc. Even something as simple as spikes could mix up the platforming elements. Other than that, everything felt extremely polished, well done!

jonathan-lorenz 2019-10-28 11:22

Moving the character around was fun, so you got that part right. It is not really a "game" since you can't win or loose but I recognize the effort on the level generation part. Cheers!

kantieno 2019-10-28 14:05

I appreciate what you have so far! It is definitely a cute game and I appreciate having secondary movement abilities like the broom. The procedural generation worked nicely and I'll be excited to see what else you fill the world with if you continue working on this!

rubixnoob13 2019-10-28 15:03

Thanks everyone for the comments and feedback! I do fully intend to do more work on the post-jam variant, which I've actually already started work on, but between full time job and learning Godot it's taken a bit longer than I expected to refactor what I got done during the jam and get back up to speed. But it's coming, and I'll continue to post updates either here or just on the Ludum Dare page in general when I hit a major milestone. Like *gasp* maybe, enemies? :smile:

catusfelony 2019-10-29 00:00

(Godot Gang, Godot Gang, Godot Gang, Godot Gang)

I like the tiles, they give off both whimsical and a ruined tower feel. I found the end room but having barely read the description before playing I thought it was a bug in level generation and ignored it, thinking I got caught in a dead end.

This game needs more Stuff. You know, enemies, items, hazards this kinda Stuff.

It's still enjoyable but really feels like something's amiss. I'll be looking forward for the post-jam version.

ristoretto 2019-10-29 00:46

Very playable!

One thing that is different from spelunkey in the map generation is that the main path is always in a zigzag pattern, I think that its more interesting to explore the level if its a little random like in spelunkey with a main and some branching with goodies.

I also think that spikes would have added a lot to the gameplay.

One idea I just got was that spelunkey use bombs to make the player progress impossible parts that's generated. Maybe the broom could do something like that. And you could have coins in the level which add broom mana or something. Anyway, what is there is surprisingly playable!

brokenmirrormedia 2019-10-29 06:56

Visuals are cool, and I can appreciate the difficulty of implementing procedural generation. The game did feel pretty empty without much to do, and the controls felt a bit floaty or inconsistent (especially when trying to get the broom to trigger). Overall it's a neat proof of concept, I just with there was more to it.