Shardpunk News

December has arrived! It means that after one month of full-time (well, kind of, due to all the crazy stuff that hit in November) game development I am back in my day job.

Does it mean that my development speed will decrease again? Yes.

However, the work I did in November included creating a development plan and a more detailed game description. I also have the whole backlog for graphical assets ready. All of this will help me out with my search for a publisher. Man, I would love to get back to full-time game development.

Anyway, I want to write more about one gameplay feature that I had a problem with: using Fusion Cores.

Basically, a Fusion Core is an item that you can find during your journeys. Its main purpose was to unlock entrances to shelters which were present at the end of every level.

You spend a Fusion Core, and the shelter becomes active.

So Fusion Cores were somewhat similar to fuel in FTL or in Pathway.

The main unanswered question was: what should happen if the player does not have a Fusion Core to unlock the shelter?

There were several ways to approach this. First, the most interesting one: getting rid of Fusion Cores.
I mean, that would surely solve the issue! The player would be able to enter every shelter as they will.

Another approach - and one that would not be about ripping a feature out - would be to introduce some kind of a penalty for the player. In Pathway, if the player runs out of fuel, they can decide to continue their travel on foot. It does damages the health of your characters though.

Now, this wouldn't work in Shardpunk, as the characters already travel on foot. And the whole thing is different, as I need these Fusion Cores to unlock the exit, not to move around the map.

I decided to make shelters optional, so I've added an alternate way to end a level. Each combat level will have a "regular" escape route that does not require unlocking any doors; the characters simply leave the zone and the player proceeds to select the next travel destination. You don't enter a shelter, so the punishment is that you don't get to heal up or recover stress.

Now, this introduced new problems (or should I say "challenges"). After each combat - even if you don't reach a shelter - the characters are getting more hungry. However, what stops them from eating food rations even if they are not inside a shelter? Surely they are able to find a moment - even when they're running away from rats - to grab a bite of something, right? So I've made sure that a feeding phase is present after every combat, even if no shelter has been reached.

What is more, a character can eat more than one food ration at a time, to better replenish their hunger.



Also, the hunger meter is being displayed as a bar now. You lose one hunger point after each combat. Previously it had three states (not hungry - hungry - starving).

What is more, some characters might acquire a quirk that requires them to consume more food.



Lastly, to make this stuff more real, I made sure that each day is divided into parts. So instead of a whole day passing, only a part of it does.



That's it for this entry. Take care, and thanks for reading!

Two weeks have passed; the show must go on. Here's the latest update on how things are going.

I took unpaid monthly leave in my day job for the whole of November. The goal was to see how fast I'll be able to progress with the game when working full-time hours; I needed this data to create reasonable estimates for creating Shardpunk.

You can imagine that I was pretty excited for November! And then, on November the 1st, my Mom died of COVID. This sucks, a lot.

Most of my full-time November enthusiasm was quickly gone. Still, I managed to work on Shardpunk - I had no day job anyway - and I have to say that I've seen a gigantic development speed bust when compared to my previous, "hobby" working hours. I mean it's a no-brainer - I literally am treating gamedev as a day job until the end of November.

Man, it might be difficult to go back to my old day job afterward - although I do love it as well.

Anyway, I managed to develop some new in-game systems, although most of them are not ready to be presented due to missing graphics. I decided to focus on this particular screenshot instead, as it is carrying lots of information about the progress:



Here's what we got here:

Map travel

This one is pretty obvious, as you can see the map. The player can select the next travel target which starts up a new mission. Map locations may come in different environment types (sewers, open/closed industrial locations). I am planning on adding map modifiers as well, which will increase the variety of levels.

What is more, you can see that only a limited number of locations has a shelter (the ones with a door icon) - it means that shelters will become more scarce. I am still playtesting how this change affects the general experience (as some actions - like curing Stress - were only available in Shelters, so more tweaks might be necessary).

Reduced inventory management

Initially (well, it is still present in v0.3) each character had an “inventory” with a max capacity. They could fit all different kinds of items there. There were two major issues with this approach:

1. The overburdened mechanics. If a character was carrying too much, they would be unable to move. The player had to shuffle the inventory - by dropping some unused items on the floor, and them passing them to another character. That was cumbersome and unnecessary.



2. Combat preparation screen was huge and it was another unnecessary thing. The player had to distribute the inventory between characters (as you cannot leave stuff in the shelter) before leaving the shelter, which simply resulted in distributing the stuff evenly anyway. It was an unnecessary chore:

Note that this screenshot only has 4 characters displayed. Imagine how cluttered the UI might get with 5 characters.

I decided to sacrifice some realism to make the gameplay more fluent: right now, only stuff usable during combat is a part of the character's inventory (so stimpaks and grenades). Other things became a part of a common inventory.

What is more, I removed the overburden mechanism. There is no limit of how many combat-related items can a character have. If you want to overuse grenades, you will be facing more enemies. If you abuse stimpaks, your stress will go up.

I've also merged the mission loadout screen with the map screen - which can be seen on the first screenshot.

New UI

The content of the UI was constantly changing, due to new features being added or old ones being altered/removed. This was resulting in the in-progress UI not looking very good - I was just putting stuff randomly, knowing that it is not possible to set up the final layout until all the features are there.

However, ugly temporary UI was reducing my morale, so I decided to create more simplistic one. Something inspired by the office applications I am working on in my spare time, but also by games like Star Renegades, Crying Suns or the upcoming Death Trash. They all are combining pixel art in-game graphics with higher-res (or simplistic) UI:



I ended up with the current simple UI and I am starting to like it. Here's how it looks in combat:


Weapons and add-ons

OK, this one cannot be seen on that initial map travel screenshot. However, I spent a lot of time developing this, so here's a glimpse of this new feature:

It will be possible to find weapons during your missions. Weapons will vary in stats, and will have upgrade slots that will allow you to adjust them even further. Still, character "classes" will be only limited to a certain weapon type.



Now, this feature will be a challenge as I want to visualize every different weapon model during combat. I already see a lot of fun in mechanic though - I believe it will be worth the effort!

That's it for this entry. The next one will appear in December, so after I'm back to my day job.

Hello - due to a major loss in my family due to COVID, I'm not feeling good about writing about new things and ideas for the game.

I did some development and playtesting lately though, and I'm attaching few nice screenshots - enjoy!

Glitchy death animations (character falling on water):



Character being surrounded pretty badly:



Ranger, shooting:



Another glitch: missing shelter door:



Rogue, shooting:

I finally spent some time adding completely new content to the game. The next tech demo will be featuring two missions, each having different looks.

First, we have the sewer levels:



The biggest change in the implementation was that map tiles now can be animated (water and water edges). Also, the water tiles are the first tile types that are both transparent (so the players can see and shoot through them) and non-walkable. It does sound obvious but required some code changes.

Sewer levels have much more closed locations than the "industrial district streets" level had. This introduced some challenges when composing level fragments. Each level is being randomly generated from predefined fragments, and I needed to make sure that fragments stick together correctly. It was easier with open spaces as they were, well, open. Here, with corridors and narrow passages present, I had to be more clever.

I ended up adding metadata to each level fragment, holding information about valid connection points with neighboring fragments. For instance, the level below can handle both low and high connection from the right, and a high one from the left:



This allowed for maintaining the same semi-randomized nature of levels and making sure that there is always a valid movement path for the player.





I've also decided to create some interior levels for the industrial level types as well, now that I had this fragments' connection thing figured out. These look pretty cool as well:



That's it for this entry - see you in two weeks!

OK, so I had a little less time working on Shardpunk for the last two weeks as I managed to get myself sick. Luckily, I already recovered.



Here's some update on the progress. Let's start with the stuff I did not describe completely the last time: the disappearing Hit Points feature.

When a character is injured during combat, they lose HP. These HPs can be "restored" by using an adrenaline injection. However, you're not really restoring them - they will be lost when you reach the shelter; you can then recover them during the shelter phase.

Now, this feature was already present in the existing demo. The problem was there was no indication that some of the HPs healed in combat will be lost after it ends, which few playtesters reported as confusing. Therefore, I added some visual cues: hit points that are "healed" during combat appear orange:



Also, the HP tooltip has been expanded to show all of this:








Speaking of visual cues, I tried removing the big magnifying glass icons from the loot points, leaving only the green tile highlight:





I believe this will make the screen less cluttered.

I am also trying to find a better style for some of the UI of the shelter phase. This is the latest iteration of the combat summary screen:



Now, I know that I need to stop spending time on tweaking the visuals and focus on the bigger picture: so adding map travel and different level types. Worry not - these things are in the works and I might be showing something more soon.

Thanks for reading!