Shardpunk News

I have some good news to share - I have started working full-time on Shardpunk! I will be giving more details about this in a near future; long story short is that I've been able to find someone who believes in the project, who allowed me to take a risk and start spending more time (like MUCH more time) on game development.

This is happening guys. After more than two years of part-time, few-hours-per-week development, F*ck yeah!

All that being said, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done until the game is ready. I am still tweaking some systems, making sure that the core gameplay loop is closed.

Anyway - there will be more announcements when the time is right. As for today, I want to share information about some parts of the game I made progress in:

Improved character AI

There were situations in the game where melee enemies could not find their way to the player. This was especially true in the sewer levels which seem to have more tight spaces. This is now resolved and these pesky rats should have no more issues with pursuing your characters.





It does not mean that the AI will be always making the best decisions possible. There are few places in the AI code where I am deliberately telling it to move to a position that makes them more vulnerable. With AI being too smart the game was not fun to play.

Game start screen

The player will be able to choose up to four starting characters for each run of the game. There will be sixteen characters to choose from. Right now I'm still at four; two more are in the making.





Note: I believe it will be adding more detailed mugshots for every character.

The player will be starting the game with four characters, with the ability to find more characters (but never more than five) during the game. There will be special character rescue missions going on.

Weapons!

I am finalizing the UI for this. You will be able to find better weapons for your characters and tweak/upgrade them during the shelter phase.





Final Chapter One mission

As I mentioned, I am working on closing the main gameplay loop and making sure all the features are there. After that, I will be working on the final mission of the first chapter (so-called "bridge mission" as it will be taking place - you guessed it! - on a bridge). I have the general layout of the final map ready, but there's still a lot of work that needs to be put in,

All in all, I am super excited about the future. I am working at full speed to finish the first chapter of the game.

Take care!

I believe I did mention more than once that traveling through the vermin-infested Capitol is a dangerous thing. I mean there are lots of not-so-friendly big ratmen out there.

Which means your companions might die during the game. Like, perma-die.

Yeah, the perma-death feature from Darkest Dungeon and XCOM (including the original XCOM series) always amused me. Once you lose a character, they're lost for the rest of the game. I believe that this feature was also what hooked me to the first roguelike games I played, including Nethack (anyone plays this anymore?).

Anyway, as the development on Shardpunk was progressing, I noticed that maintaining a good game balance with perma-death present is actually difficult - especially that the player is controlling up to five characters.

In games without perma-death, if a squad member is down, they will quite often magically "recover" after a fight, allowing you to continue the game with no real losses. Sure, you had a disadvantage during that combat, as one of your characters was down, but after that, you're again good and well.

Shardpunk does have permadeath present. But - in order to make the stuff more interesting, characters do not insta-die when their HPs reach zero; they transition to a "bleeding out" state:



Characters are still vulnerable during that state. I mean the AI won't shoot them (that would've been too savage), but they can still be caught in an AOE attack - which will instantly kill them:



The player has a number of turns to revive the character, using a stimpak:



Speaking of which, you can see that now every character has a new "reach out/give" animation that is used for both reviving and healing allies:



After a character is revived, they receive the "severely wounded" trait. It prevents the character from performing any actions in the shelter. Such character needs to be healed using medical supplies in the shelter phase to get back to become fully functional again.



Oh, a character can only become severely wounded once per combat. The second time their health goes to zero, they're gone.



Still, even though this approach will make perma-death less worrisome (as the player will have some means of preventing it), the difficulty scaling issue will still be present. Should it still be possible for the player to successfully play through the game having only a single character left? I doubt it - even though I believe there should be special achievements/unlocks if one manages to pull it off (e.g. finishing at least one mission with a single character could unlock some nice weapon add-ons, or an interesting character).

Also, the player will have the possibility to rescue more characters along the way, which will allow them to replace the fallen ones. This feature is still deep in my work backlog though.

Thanks for reading!

The Rat Vermin has launched an unexpected underground assault on the Capitol - a city that was believed to have impregnable defenses. No one was prepared for that - especially as most of the Imperial forces were fighting with Vermin far away. Capitol was swarmed with Vermin relatively fast.

But what's done is done - and now it is time to make the best of this situation. I did describe Shardpunk's gameplay loop in more detail in the previous blog post. Now it's time to talk about Stress.

Every character has a Stress meter that goes up when they take damage. Also, using stimpaks increases your Stress level.





Initially, using stimpaks was not affecting Stress at all. The current approach however feels like a nice risk/reward thing.

When Stress reaches the maximum level, there's a big chance a character will receive a new negative quirk and the Stress level will automatically drop.



Only one quirk can be received per combat. If Stress reaches max value again, the player temporarily loses control over the character - they can panic and run away or start shooting at random enemies.



So how you prevent the Stress from going up? First of all, reaching a shelter does help - it gives you instant stress relief.



Additionally, Stress will auto-reduce after killing a certain number of enemies. What is more, scoring a critical hit has a chance of removing even more Stress.



Some characters will also have actions (in both shelter and during combat) that can be used to reduce their Stress, or the Stress of their companions.



So there you have it! Managing Stress levels seems to be a fun layer on top of the combat/shelter phases. I am looking forward to letting you playtest it, along with all the other features I've added!

Take care!

Let's talk about the shelter phase again, shall we?

First things first - let's introduce the first-time readers to the gameplay loop. Your job is to escape the Capitol that has been overrun by Rat Vermin.

You control a party of four (initially, as it can be upgraded to five) characters. You select the next location you want to move to from a map:



Then you move to the next location. Combat - so the main part of the game, that I am not focusing on in this entry - happens. You kill rats, and you make sure they don't kill you.



When you reach a shelter, you unlock it with a Fusion Core - an item that can be found during combat. Think of it as "fuel" for your travels.



You enter the shelter phase. This immediately gives you a boost, as opening a shelter reduces the overall stress of your characters. Stress is bad, as it can mess up your characters by granting them negative traits:



In the shelter itself, there is a bunch of activities that can be performed. Each of them costs an action point.

Now, previously every character had their own set of shelter action points. That was starting to become cumbersome (especially when I was designing the weapon modification phase that is yet to come), so I changed it to a common pool. Every character adds up to 3 action points to the pool (less if the character is heavily stressed or severely wounded).



Still, the player can select which character will be performing which action. Some characters are better at doing certain tasks. For instance, Rose (the "medic" girl, although she's wielding a shotgun as well) is able to heal more HPs, both in a shelter and during combat - so it's wise to use her for this action.



Some characters have unique actions. Tilly (the sword-wielding girl) can spend one action point to improve her melee skills in the next combat.



Gideon can practice, which will give him a nice accuracy boost.



Also, only in shelters you can really heal your characters ("healing" made by stimpaks during combat is only temporary, and HPs healed that way fade away after combat) and remove the "severely wounded" trait that one can acquire during fights.



All of this makes shelters very useful. From the test playthroughs I did, it seems it is always a good idea to enter a shelter after combat. On the other hand, if you cannot - e.g. if you don't have a Fusion Core to spare - you can still proceed with the game. It will be more difficult, but it can be made.

This will allow me to add a nice risk/reward mechanic into the game: there can be locations with no shelters at the end, but with, let's say, more loot present. So the player can risk going there to find more loot, but the next mission they will face will not be preceded with shelter preparations, thus it will be more difficult.

Man, I could write about game design stuff all the time! Gotta go back to work and actually finishing the game, right?

Take care!

I am not sure whether I mentioned it before, but I had an issue with the "retired soldier" character type. I mean it looks badass and has that great combat suit. The problem was that he was moving too slow compared to other characters:



He obviously had no choice, as that combat armor - even if powered - was surely heavy.

Now, there was another issue present: the weapon. I am planning (well, already started part of it) on having modular weapons in the game - meaning that every weapon will have different parts that can be swapped (scope, barrel, energy core, etc.). Every character type will have a single weapon proficiency, and characters with the same proficiency will be able to swap certain weapon modules.

The problem appeared when I was planning my next "heavy" class character (the "retired soldier" character is a "heavy" class guy). I don't want to go into too many details, but that other character will be physically smaller - so their combat suit would have to be smaller as well. And because combat suits have their weapons embedded (it's basically an arm extension), weapons for different sizes of combat armors would've been incompatible.



Why on earth would the Empire create multi-size, incompatible heavy weapons anyway? That would be a huge inefficiency. Waging war against the Rat Vermin is expensive, one needs to optimize!

So the new soldier is using a lighter version of the combat suit:



And the combat suit allows him to carry a universal, one-size-fits-all heavy weapon:



Heavy weapons still have the slam attack available, to satisfy all the player that like solid AOE attacks:



And you can see that - due to lighter armor - this character is able to move faster, which solves the first issue!

That's it for this entry! I hope that 2021 is going great for all of you!

Take care!