Dungeon Colony 0.2.6.12 (+) an Ester Egg!!

Grunt Minions!

I've just uploaded a new version. This one includes all the work I've done on Dungeon Rooms so far! But first, there's an easter egg too. I've added a new creature that is joining the spider family. This one is the Spider Queen!

The Spider Queen is 4 times the size of it's fighter class. And it is much much stronger and faster. So far you can add the spider from the Level Editor. Later, there will be levels with the spider in it:

Check out this gif animation of the same level:

Rooms Part 3:

I've continued to work mostly on Rooms. (Check out the last two posts (One & Two) if you want to read more about the beginnings of rooms.) There are now 3 types of rooms, I will add more types later, but the 3 types that I start with are the most important rooms to keep the economy of your colony going. Every other room type thereafter is an add-on. Those 3 rooms are the Lair, Pantry and Treasury: 

The Lair is the room where your a minions will live. Minions will sleep in their room and use it to store their goods. The pantry is where minions get fed and the treasury is where they get their wage. 

In today's release I've added the logic to place objects inside a room. What that really means is that any objects that are located in a room tile, will be considered inside that room. Having the ability to track what objects are in a room allows me to set room requirements to guide the player into crafting certain furniture items to be placed in the room. For example, the lair will need a bed for the minion to sleep on and a chest to store gold. 

And here is the summary of changes in version 0.2.6.12:

- Adds Spider Queen to the Level Editor.

- Begins with Dungeon Rooms. Work in Progress:

- Creates 3 new rooms: Lair, Pantry, and Treasury.

- Can create, delete, merge and split rooms.

- Renders rooms on map if the Room Tool Button is selected.

- When hovering the mouse over the map, then the color of the room shows (faintly).

- When-ever a minion walks over a Lair room without owner, and if he is owner-less too, then he becomes the new owner automatically.

- Adds logic to remove room owners when a room is deleted or when the owner dies.

- Saving and Loading Rooms is possible.

- Shows room info when hovering.

- Shows room colors on brush when painting rooms.

- Adds inRoom Room property to all objects.

- Adds ability to add objects to rooms.

- Adds ability to assign a room a specific object requirement.

- Sets requirements for the Lair room.

- Removes invoice game activation option since it never worked in first place.

Dungeon Colony Rooms - Ownership

I've introduced some of the new room features in a previous blog post. Since then I've continued on rooms and built the logic to let minions take ownership of the room Lair type. All a minion needs to walk on a tile that is defined as the room type Lair and if that room is still vacant, the minion will automatically become owner of it. I will add a way to remove owners as well. Other room types, such the Pantry or Treasury do not need owners. They have different functions such as managing food and gold reserves for the entire Dungeon.

You can see in the following Gif animation some of the new features in action:

1. I'm first setting up two Lair rooms by selecting the lair room button on the right and then drawing the room in. (Lair rooms have the color blue)
2. Then I'm sending a minion in the left room; as soon as he enters the room tile, he becomes owner.
3. The other new feature is the room info. You can see that I de-selected the room tool button and the blue color showing the room area disappears. However, you can still see the room designation in a lighter blue when hovering the mouse over the room. After a few milliseconds, a popup also gives information about the room. In this case whether the room has an owner or not. 

What's not shown in the gif above is some additional info when hovering over a room. If the lair has an owner, the owner will be highlighted, so that you can find out quickly where the owner is.

... Next: I'll start building the logic that determines what a minion can do in a room. 

Dungeon Colony Rooms - A first look

Minions!

I've started designing Rooms for Dungeon Colony! This is where things get interesting. The main purpose of rooms is determined by their type. For now, I'm introducing and testing three room types: Lair, Pantry, and Treasury. These rooms all play a fundamental role in the up-coming economy update. The Lair will be the room that your creatures sleep in. Your minions can claim a room and become the owner of it. I'm planning to assign ownership by walking into a room. Currently, only the Lair can be owned by your creatures. The other rooms are common or belong to your Dungeon Master by default (the treasury of course).

As a minion takes ownership of a room, it becomes his hub for anything that he needs. That includes sleep, food, potions, weapons and gold of course. To store all of that, your minion will ask you for furniture... That part I am going to work on soon. Right now I'm finishing up the UX features. That is the way that you can create room of different room types. As well as how the UX responds to you when you try to place a room or remove a room again. For example, I've built in features that allows you to merge existing rooms of the same type, or splits rooms into two (or more), while reassigning ownership of any previous room owners. Anyway ... if that makes no sense, I think a small demo is nicer to show some of it in action:

Placing rooms is just like drawing in a paint program: You choose the room type, which will draw the color of the room to show you where the room dimensions are. If you turn the Room-Button off, the room colors will be hidden. For development purposes I show the room ID, so that I can merge or split rooms correctly (see red pantry room in demo). I will reveal more about rooms as features become available.

Dungeon Colony 0.2.6.0

Minions!

I'm making good progress on the final major game engine features: Creature behavior and creature economy. In this version update (v0.2.6.0) I'm extending how abilities are used to control your minion behavior.

There are 9 new abilities which range from mining ore, lumbering wood to transporting and building objects. Now, the player can control what orders a worker will perform and which one he will ignore. The following gif animation shows how you can simply turn on and off certain abilities.

You ask what is the benefit for that and why should I care??? A lot of feedback I've received asked me to allow the player control over what minions do. The engine used to assign orders to your workers on a first come first serve basis. So if you had 10 activities pending to lumber wood, whenever a minion would become free to perform this job, he would take on the job and carry it out.

With the new system, you can designate which minions lumber wood, which mine, dig dirt, collect water, etc. This way, you could limit how many of your workers lumber wood, while others stay back to mine fore ore. By default a minion will carry out all of these abilities, but you can choose to turn them off when you want. In future game updates, workers will be able to learn new abilities. But that's not part of this release yet. :)

Dungeon Colony Version 0.2.5.0

Minions!

It's great to finally write a blog post, I've been waiting for this day for a long time and, for Great reasons, I took time and put the Dungeon Colony machine on hold for a while to welcome new life into this world. Now that I returned I continued development and I want to tell you that there is a new release available today. It adds new features both to the engine as well as the game server:

The Campaign Engine:

The pieces are starting to come together and connect into a full Campaign Engine. It loads levels, integrates into the game editor, connects levels to the campaign map, manages units travelling from one destination to the next and puts your units onto the playing map, when the player selects a game. This means that your units travel with you, including their experience and items they may be holding. Currently I'm working on connecting loose ends to complete the playing experience of a full game from start to finish.

Runes: 

At the same time, I've continued on level design. One of the larger level design elements is about runes. Your Dungeon Master get's it's magic spells from ancient runes which his ancestors have left scattered around the land. He has one of the pieces in his possession, passed down to him from generations, but he must find and collect the rest to unleash its full power. The first rune gives him the spell to summon a minion into the world. The minion's soul is bound to you and the weak power of the rune doesn't allow you to summon more than just that one minion. There are, however, other ways to get more minions in the game.

The Dungeon Master has a special button that opens up the Rune Collection window (screenshot below). Any runes that the Dungeon Master collects will be shown in this window. The following screenshot shows the windows at different stages of assembly. Each time the Dungeon Master finds a new piece the player may try to put them together to craft the next assembly:

Game Server:

The game engine communicates with a server where players can store their game. During alpha development this was (and still is) the only way to save games. Its serves the purpose of debugging and understanding issues players may have. I'm currently looking for a cloud solution for game saves and may use AWS for this, let me know if you recommend another solution and why. One of the biggest upgrades I've made to the server is improving email communication. It was a disaster before and I lost too many emails in the process. This should not happen any longer.

New in version 0.2.5:

- Dungeon Master can now carry certain special items.
- Added new Rune Stone Fragments. Fragments can be combined into one full assembly.
- Further improves campaign map logic for units traveling between locations.
- Enables campaign save/load to server.
- Adds button in settings to allow you to delete & restart a campaign game.
- Adds Gold Reserves to Campaign Game Map.
- Adds Legend to Campaign Map.
- Adds next/previous buttons to scroll through this list.

Dungeon Colony has been greenlit!

Hello Dungeon Masters!

Dungeon Colony has been Greenlit!

I have some great news: Dungeon Colony has been Greenlit! What a good way to start the new #indiedev year. This milestone is fantastic and highlights just what an amazing journey it has been to create the game of my dreams so far. Progress has been good and steady and I'm working towards a beta launch hopefully sometime this year.

Dungeon Colony isn't available in the store just yet. Before it gets there, I need to make some changes to the game and implement some Steam code. There are also a few business related obstacles that I need to complete. So stay tuned for more updates on that.

In case you are curious, I started my Greenlight page in March and I was greenlit mid December 2014. I surely didn't do much marketing (except for game updates) and am happy that the community decided on its own to vote the project into the store.

Dungeon Colony version 0.2.4.0 out now.

I have made great progress on the campaign map which includes a lot of functionality that allows players to navigate the map and move maps from one level to the next.

The following gif shows the first 2 map icons and the road on which your units travel:

As you complete levels, more roads and destinations will be added to the map. You will carry over your units from level to level, keeping any experience they have earned. This feature is still in development.

Here is the complete list of changes in v0.2.4.0:

• Adds notification icon when new comments are available to the player.
• Splits Campaign Map into 4 smaller maps to fix bug with older GPUs.
• Reads path locations and destinations from maps.
• Adds Map Icon for Player Units.
• Adds Ability to move player units from one location to another.
• Adds Spawn Points for various unit types.
• Allows setting count, direction and type of unit to spawn on map.
• Allows placing spawn points from editor using a new Spawn Points Window.
• Adds logic to transfer map units to level.
• Adds Campaign Development Progress Window.

Better precision selecting objects, Comments on suggestions, a new help window and more...

Update: I've uploaded a fix to a bug that crashed the game for many players when you tried to use the new selection feature mentioned below. New Version: v0.2.3.35.



Today's release (v0.2.3.33) brings changes to the game engine and the website:

1. Better precision when selecting items on the map

One frequently mentioned issue had to do with the way you select items that are overlapping each other. The problem was that you wanted to select some loot from the ground, but there was also another object or creature in the way. Before, you wouldn't be able to just select that object. Instead would have to move the creature out of the way first. That would become a big issue, if there were more than 2 or 3 items or creatures over the same spot.

To solve this problem, you can now use the Control key with the Mouse in order to select and cycle through each item overlapping one another. (This works with both Left and Right Control +Left Mouse).

Once you press Control, you will see a little yellow indicator around the mouse, letting you know that you are in select mode. There is a priority built in which determines the type of item that is selected first:

1. Your Units.
2. Enemy Units.
3. Neutral Units. 
4. Objects.

It wasn't so easy to demonstrate,  but the following gif kind of shows how i'm cycling through 2 units and mushrooms that are on the ground, depending if the creature is in the collision rectangle determines if it is going to be selected and cycled. You can also see that I'm pressing Control because of the yellow circle that appears: 

It is also worth mentioning that the selection cycle does remember the items it has selected previously. It does so by storing a reference to each item or creature. This is helpful when an item is at some point in the list but then at another point is not any longer. This can become apparent in the above example when you see a minion walk in and then out of the area where I am trying to select. So what that means is that the order in which the items are selected and cycled through is preserved, even if a minion walks in and out of that selection area. 

2. Comment on suggestions

The built-in feedback system allows players to submit feedback, suggestions, bugs, and more. Today, I am adding the ability to write comments on each post that is submitted. This allows you to discuss with other players each post. Depending on how well this works, I will probably add more functionality in time. Here is a screenshot showing the comments section to the right: 

3. New Help Window

There used to be a help window that explained how to play dungeon colony. This was very old and had outdated information in it. I have updated the help window to use some of the newer features of the engine and included new tips. To access the help window, click on the question mark button in the right menu:

4. Website Updates

The website has also some new updates. The contact page has more information about development and the shopping cart has 4 new ways to buy or support the game. You can now even Give What You Want to send us a contribution to help keep development going. 

Here is a summary of all the changes in version 0.2.3.33:

• Adds ability to comment on any feedback.
• Comments include comment, date, user, and optional response by developer.
• Improves precision of selecting objects and creatures on the map.
• Adds Control +Mouse click to cycle through objects and creatures overlapping each other.
• Improves Input Class.
• Changes Font on most Text Areas to use Currier New.
• Increases the quest description text area size to fit text with the new increased font.
• Reworks the Help windows, showing new tips on how to Play Dungeon Colony.
• Adds new Purchase options to the web-site.
• Updates the Contact web-site. 
• Fixes bug when saving Levels without description.
• Fixes issue with attacking when creatures are already facing each other.
• Fixes issue with Enemies being stuck on map.

20 New Objects Added to Dungeon Colony

Hello Dungeon Masters!

The release from yesterday, November 23 adds an array of new objects to the game. You can find these objects in the editor and create your own levels to place them. Some of these objects can be crafted, and the crafting recipes will be made available soon.

The new objects include:

A wooden bench, wooden chair, small wooden table, large wooden table, round wooden table, buffet, 3 books, a scroll, a plate, a diamond, spider venom, 2 tomb stones, a stone cross, an anvil, a candle stand, and a stone crypt:

The next screenshot puts some of these objects into perspective showing them in a dungeon setting (click to enlarge):

What's next ? ... a bit more art I think. I have some new trees to add to the engine.

New Character Profiles

Please vote for Dungeon Colony on Steam

Dungeon Colony - Beta is coming closer and closer!! Ever since I started working on this game I've always worked on all parts simultaneously: Game Engine, Features, Art, Audio, Web, etc... adding bit by bit, similarly to how I would work on a paining.
Continuing this trend, I've recently added new character profiles for each creature that is currently or will soon be available in the game. For the Beta release, the following characters will be included:

• The spiders live in dungeons. They like darkness to prey on their victims.
• The Dungeon Master and his minion are the creatures you control (center column). 
• The boar is the only friendly NPC which roams the grasslands.
• To the right are the Hero creatures which will raid your dungeon for all your treasures.
• Skeletons are new creatures which will be available in the game soon. 

Dungeon Colony Version 0.2.1.0

Hello!

It has been a few weeks since my last post. Not only have we been really busy, but we have also made great progress. Today's release (v0.2.1.0) moves Dungeon Colony once again closer to Beta stage and reaches two major milestones: new Audio and new Levels.

But first, please check out Dungeon Colony on the indie game store: itch.io.

The addition of audio has significantly improved the feeling of playing the alpha. It finally adds that missing feedback and allows you to immerse yourself more into the world. I am working with an amazing Studio which not only has worked on AAA titles such as Bioshock, Elderscrolls IV: Oblivion or Eve Online but also gives Indies like me a chance for quality audio.

Also new is a full Level which makes use of the latest version of the built-in Level Editor. Here is a a screenshot:

This level is the first level for the new Campaign game mode. It introduces the player to the main game mechanics, such has creature control (move, fight), resource collection, crafting and enemy waves.

Dungeon Colony Version 0.2.0.67

Today's version (v0.2.0.67) continues adding features to the Campaign Map. The first thing we've added is the new art-work for the campaign map, which includes the map itself and a range of icons to represent different levels and quests.

Here is a screenshot of the map and some of the prototype icons:

This map will be used for the campaign game mode, which is one of the 3 modes available (Tutorial, Campaign, and Sandbox). If you have an early access account, you can navigate to the new map, but there isn't much you can do yet. Visit the Road-To-Beta ToDo List to find out more about the progress on the campaign map and other features we are currently working on.

Summary of changes for this release:

• Adds new Campaign Map Prototype.
• Adds new Campaign Map Icons.
• Adds new Campaign Map Level Info Frame.
• Adds backend features to store player completed levels.
• Adds new ground tiles to Level Editor.
• Fixes DropDownList bug.
• Fixes various Bugs in Level Editor.
• Fixes Shader Issues with Mountain Borders.
• Fixes Issues with frame borders.
  
  

Game Editor Progress - Quest Manager

I began work on the Quest Manager not too long ago. This is going to be some beast. Not only does it require a flexible graph structure (see screenshot of sketch below), but it also must be easy to use and have many different options to create a wide variety of quests. To see the entire progress of the editor click here (updated regularly). Also visit DungeonColony.com/Download to try the free alpha.

I created a few new controls to make the Quest Manager more efficient, which are a Dropdown list and TextArea. This is definitively reinventing the wheel. But there's something about doing things from scratch. I like to think about it like LEGOs, when you have a set, you get excited about building something from scratch, it would be super lame if the set came pre-built. I think for many, more than half the fun is in building:

With those I started working on the new Quest Manager Frame:

This will allow the user to create a series of quests for the current map being built. The types are very flexible and over time I will add new types. For now I'll work with those monotone colors. Eventually I will improve the look.

Next I will work on the preview Screen. It just shows you how the quest will look before you create it. Additionally, there is also a Show Graph button. I am very excited to start working on that, since it will be a GUI representation of the Quest Graph. I have no idea how challenging this will be, but I can wait to find out.  It will have to be something that works kind of like this:

Also some doodles:

Game Editor Progress - Entity Editor and Settings

You can track the progress of the game editor right here. You can also download the free alpha here. And please, support Dungeon Colony by pre-purchasing the game and setting your own price. Every coin you contribute is reinvested into game development.

Thank you!

The game editor is coming along very well: I finished the level settings and have completed the basics for editing game entities. The following screenshot (click to enlarge) shows these two additions:

1. Entity Editor
On the left side is the new entity editor frame. This allows the user to select any entity on the map (creatures and objects) and edit their individual attributes. You can basically make a creature extremely strong and create a boss, for example. The attributes that can be edited depend on the entity type. And each available & editable property will be shown to the user when selected.

And a special feature allows the user to edit the attributes of entities that are shown in the toolbox instead of entities that are placed on the map. This allows you to preset attributes and then place a copy of the same object in bulk on the map. This should allow creating complex maps much faster.

2. Level Settings
On the right hand side of the screenshot is the new Level Settings frame view. This allows the user to select level settings such as enemy waves, air requirements, & dungeon entrance.

1. Enemy waves on/off: Allows the user to create a level that does/doesn't include enemy waves.
2. Creatures need air on/off: Removes the need for Air. That is useful when creating maps that don't have the outside world. 
3. Dungeon Entrance on/off: Doesn't require an entrance to the outside world. 

What's next:
Take a look at the current Todo-List to find out more. But at the time of this writing, I started on the Quest Manager. There is one already built into the game, and when you play the sandbox mode, quests are currently being displayed in the upper left corner. I will extend this existing Quest Manager to include a way for the user to create quests and assign them to a quest tree. The tree itself will not be a simple tree structure, but a directed acyclical graph with nodes that represent quests and edges that define quest relationships. This task is already quite big on paper; so I'm expecting this to take a few days of work to complete...

Here's a sketch of the quest tree manager:

Game Editor Progress

Here's a screenshot of the improved ToolBox I just finished. This shot shows some of the tiles that can be drawn onto the canvas


New improvements...

1. Allow moving the frame around making it easier to work with. 
2. Increase the height and add an additional row of content in the table.
3. Add the logic to the light switch button. That turns on/off the shadows so that working in a dark dungeon is easier. 

I updated the ToDoList to reflect those changes.

... on to the next item... 

Prototyping on Paper

Here's a snapshot of my latest doodles which involve one of my many side projects on the game. Can you tell what it is about? Hehe, I don't want to reveal everything I do, but some obvious ideas ? ... My sister convinced me to post more of my notes (I'm no good at drawing) and I'm thinking to release a few periodically, if that's something you'd be interested in?

I use these a lot to visualize things on paper first and to discuss with the others. That one, for example, I sent to my artist. Drawing ideas on paper, rather than prototyping them, often gives me more time to delve deeply into the design elements.

Dungeon Colony Version 0.1.8.176. Boars are back, but Flowers are new.

In my last post I released new grass objects so in today's version (v0.1.8.176) I am adding to that some new flowers (see above screenshot).

These flowers grow only in thick grass areas. There are several rules behind the growing behavior. For example, the flowers use the surrounding plant types to determine if the flower can spread there or not. This allows the game to generate larger areas of the same kind, but also limits these areas to reasonable sizes, meaning, the map should not be able to fill up completely with the same kind (though, impossible it is not). Boars now also like to eat flowers.

There have been a lot of bugs again this week which were reported by my alpha testers. Thank you again. I have seen an increase in the number of people play testing the game, and that seems to also correlate to the increase in bug reporting. But there are also some silly mistakes that I have made to increase complaints. For example, in one of last weeks releases, players mentioned that they couldn't find any boars. Well that was because of my change to test boar eating behavior, where I turned down the number of boars generated by the game to only '1' and I did that in order to see how much grass a single boar would eat over time. Or course I forgot to turn that back on. To sum this up, I now use a notepad to mark down changes that need to be un-done before a release is published.

Here is the summary of of changes in this version 0.1.8.176:

New Features:

• Adds Flowers

Changes:

• Refactors much code
• Reduces new tree rate
• Puts quest hint to quick start help screen

Bugs:

• Boars are back.
• Fixes 4 bugs with loading/saving the game
• Fixes bug that caused game to crash if the recommened screen resolution was not found (thanks alpha testers)
• Fixes a series of Null Pointer exceptions.
• Fixes bug with FBOs

New Screenshots (2)

The first screenshot shows a recent construction of a larger Workshop I built in order to see how resource management balanced out:

Click to enlarge:

the second shows the new vegetation algorithm, which adds more diversity to growing trees:

Click to enlarge:

Download Dungeon Colony Alpha free at www.DungeonColony.com/Download