Shardpunk News

Aah, here's some piece of good news: it turned out that two competitions that I wanted to register Shardpunk in are back! They were delayed due to the COVID thing, but luckily they will take place.

The competitions are Digital Dragons Indie Showcase and Pixel Awards Europe. And the deadlines are less than two weeks away (at least for the first one), meaning that I need to have the demo ready before that.

It means that the next devlog entry will surely be created after the next alpha goes live.

Here's brief info on what has changed since v0.2:

The shelter phase

Yeah, that's the biggest addition. If you were following my previous devlog entries, you know that the design of the shelter phase has gone through a major rework. Between each combat mission, player characters stay in a shelter. Here they can craft some stuff, heal themselves, or perform other actions. Also, here the player needs to distribute the food supplies.







Stress

Each character has a stress meter. It goes up when a character is hit, it goes down when you kill enemies, heal yourself or rest in the shelter. Too high stress gives negative modifiers to a character, and increases the possibility of receiving a negative quirk.







Better combat visuals

There are new obstacle types available, some of them being searchable. The combat levels have been re-made to use the new obstacle types. Few character animations have been tweaked.



I am currently working on creating a new trailer and I'm playtesting the demo a lot. Also, I will be in need of a Steam demo for the Digital Dragons Indie Showcase 2020, meaning that the next thing right after I release the next demo will be making sure that it is available directly on Steam.

That's it for now. Expect the demo to be released in the upcoming days!

Note: this is the first time I am posting the devlog on Steam. To browse the old ones, visit my itch.io or IndieDB devlogs, or my TIGSource Forums thread. I will still be updating them along with Steam entries.

Expect a new entry every two weeks!


I am pretty close to releasing the 3rd alpha demo of Shardpunk! The scope for the demo is sealed, I have all the assets I need and I am focusing on the final touches. The demo should be out in August.

That being said, I did make some changes in how the game works, so let's take a look at them.

It all started with these new graphics of shelves, which I've started using as high cover objects.



The shelves were looking great as an obstacle; however, I wanted to allow the players to search them for loot. The problem was that the loot points system was too simple to handle it. Until now, loot points were always 1 tile big, and the element (whether it was a corpse or a locker) that was lootable had to be placed on the same tile.



Such an approach was not enough for the shelves. A character was not able to stand on top of the shelve to loot it. What is more, it would be cool to extend the searchable area so that a character can perform the looting from more than one location.

Therefore, I decided to extend loot point definitions. After my changes, it is allowed to have a separate definition for "pickup points" for loot (which define a place that character can stand on to perform the search action), and a separate location where the loot point indicator is located.

Here's how it works for shelves:



I started to use the same approach for crates as well. So now the game has searchable cover objects!



Besides the shelves, there are other new obstacle types present in the levels that make them look nicer. This includes windows (shattered, to make sure characters can shoot through them) or pieces of furniture. And with some randomness in asset generation it can look slightly different each time:



So what's next?

I'm focusing on polish right now and making sure that the game is not too difficult. After all, I want the players to finish the first mission and see the shelter phase.

Take care!