Monday, July 12, 2010

Alpha 4 progress - Subway & other stuff

Subway
Worked on subways to make them more interesting.
You can open/close gates and lit/unlit the subway by switching the power on/off...

...Closing the gates on someone will crush them instantly. Quite dangerous those gates.
(Yes there is a typo about turning "on off")
I might add a wrecked wagon somewhere I have the time.

City Information
Improved the City Information screen.

 
Basements
Some houses have basements. There is not much down there, but it might provide a safe shelter... or not.
The stairs here lead to the basement. Notice the Sewers Maintenance and Subway Station buildings on the bottom left of the minimap.

Surface Map
By now you should have noted that the default map size is smaller (50x50 vs 75x75). I had to resize the maps down, because of the new maps for each district (sewers, subways, basements). I kept the same population per map tile ratio. Small maps have some nice side effects on the gameplay I quite like.
I also specialized districts more to counterbalance the small maps (eg about 80% of shops in a shopping district on average).

Music
Did new musics, including ambient musics for some maps (sewers, subway). One or two themes for each song, a simple structure with repeats, some arrangement between repeats and voilĂ . I could always try to improve them later, but I'm not a good musician.
That's Guitar Pro 6. It's great for guitar based music -hence the name-, but most of the other instruments are horrible or sound badly tuned. It's cheap for what it can do.


Graphics
Trying not to abuse the gradiant tool in Paint.NET, but it makes lighting much easier. Funny I hated doing graphics before and now I'm learning and I like it.


Police Station
What Police Station? You mean the one where that guy is jailed? I still have to do it...

End of post.

7 comments:

  1. Gave your previous alpha a go. Great concept, well executed. Simple and fun.

    If there is anything I would like to see, it is day 1 everything being pretty normal, while stuff slowly gets out of hand. Maybe you work at one of the bad guy bases. Take the subway there or something, and see the accident that makes everything go to shit.

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  2. daniel, i doubt he would add that during alpha. probably when it reaches beta. and if you worked there, i doubt the guards would shoot you like they do now.

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  3. I prefer throwing the player right into the action, like most roguelikes do.
    Seeing the shit hit the fan a la HalfLife I would be fun the first couple of games but pretty repetitive and annoying after that.
    There's a reason the Zombie apocalypse is happening, this will get developped later (the plot).

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  4. It's funny, I'm looking forward to the next version of Rogue Survivor more so than any major video game releases this year.

    It's looking great so far. I can't wait to try it.

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  5. I have another feature for you to add on top of the already growing list!

    Fairly often, when moving to a new district, you will be immediately attacked by zombies which you could not have predicted and had no chance to defend yourself against.

    I suggest that when moving to a new district, if entering would cause you to move next to a zombie, you should be given a message to the effect of: "Area unsafe. Continue?".

    Otherwise, keep up the good work.

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  6. looks great and i am highly excited for its release. don't rush this, and take a LOT of time. make sure to do a lot of testing before release so we don't have to DL too many patches or quickfixes after realease of A4.

    we all remember the buggy shitstorm of 3.1, right guys?

    also for the ToDo for later version.

    NETsurvivor. same as rogue survivor, but with a feature seen in some other roguelikes such as nethack. nethack had network connection but not multiplayer. when someone died or did an important event it would be uploaded to a server and effect games of players on the net.

    imagine walking down the street and seeing an NPC based off of your other character or even that of someone connected to the network. these NPCs would act like normal NPCs, but base their actions off of the character they were based of of (but not being carbon copys of the person who played them). or walking down another and seeing the corpse of your other character and taking what he had on him when he died.

    for MUUUUUCH later versions you might want to experiment with a co-op mode. with co-op mode players would or not (depending on Host's options) be chained to eachother. when one players leaves a district that the two are in one will disapear and begin simulating the district they are entering. once the district simulations is complete the result is uploaded to player 2. when player 2 decides to enter that district that player 1 is in player 1 will upload the district's status and latest turn to player 2. if player 1 goes 2 districts away and player 2 follows later, they will start off simulating the turns that happened after player 1 left.

    copy above paragraphs to something, as i don't expect to see those until mid beta (still ways to go til then amirite?)

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  7. Sorry but MP won't happen, the game engine was designed to be SP only.
    Player ghosts -like in Crawl- won't happen either, since the world "reboot" each time you start a new game and it doesn't make sense story-wise.

    The changing district/map = insta-death gameplay problem is fixed.

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