Reynard Devlog #16 β New Crafting Recipes, Bugfixes and More (0.8.7)
Previous week I’ve had a lot of stuff going on… Grandpa passed away π and we’ve attended the SGC. On SGC we’ve received tons of valuable feedback for Reynard. This week I’ve decided to implement and fix some of the suggested stuff. Thus this update revolves around bugfixes, crafting recipes and other minor stuff.
New Crafting Recipes
We’ve added crafting to Reynard pretty early. It’s available from the beginning of the early access. But one thing is adding the system to the game and other thing is utilizing it. That’s why I’ve decided to start adding more interesting recipes and usable items to the game.
Until now you could only create a better version of the item if you placed 2 of the same items on the forge. But we want to add more stuff for the forge. We really want the player to be able to create something more powerful if he finds the material for it.
That’s why I’ve added more “Usable” items which are spawned as a loot drop from certain monsters and pots. For now I’ve added 3 new recipes and 5 new items:
I’m planning on adding special challenge rooms that will challenge the player’s skill, but will hold way better items and crafting components. But that’s in the future.
Other Changes
Added Simon’s staff and a recipe to create it on Forge.
Added Necro staff recipe… On 15th kill spawns a skeleton.
Fairy has 5 HP. She heals player for 1 point, but also damages herself for 1 point.
Added Blacksmith’s ring. Once dropped on the forge, it repairs player’s equipment.
Rats now have 50% chance of fleeing when hurt.
Serpentino’s spit now has SFX and when you pass the bridge there is now an explosion sound.
Dexter roars before he enters the charging state, added sound effects for roar and charge.
Doctor plague now spawns skeletons more frequently and starts roaming sooner and has added sound effects for cast and attack.
Wilson Shoots laser beam in random direction.
Wizco now has more SFXes.
Modified all 100% resist armors that aren’t breakable. They don’t have 100% resist anymore.
Buffed the Xeno turret. Faster shooting rate and more damage.
Fixed the bug that didn’t spawn projectiles.
Fixed the layers of Forge and Pawn… The enemies can now walk on them.
Fixed the relic forging bug.
Confirm button is now the “dash” button.
Fixed the bug that didn’t save “usable” items.
Selected buttons now have a brighter color.
Shrines, libraries (mini shops) now show the cost of the item instantly.
Fixed the bug when Item preview didn’t open up if companions came close to the interactable object.
Fixed the bug when the stairs to secret room are spawned behind indestructible objects.
Expect more cool recipes and updates in the future. We’re also planning Reynardβs release on the steam in November! If you’d like to recommend something, please let me know!
Reynard Devlog #14 β Daily Runs and a House (0.8.5)
We’re turning up the heat! Daily runs have been added to Reynard!
Daily Runs
Previous week’s Wilson is doing awesome! Players like him! More boss patches will come in the future, but first we’ve decided to spice things up with daily runs!
Daily runs use a different dungeon seed on a daily basis, so in scope of 24 hours, you’ll always have an access to the same dungeon!
Once you die or finish the game, your score will be submitted online under name you’ve chosen in the profile selection menu! You’ll also see the leaderboard with the score of top 5 players!
In order to play the daily run, you have to enter Reynard’s house (more about the house down below), where you’ll find stairs to basement. If you interact with stairs, you’ll get to play the daily run!
Daily runs are fairly new in Reynard and will probably change! For example, I’m thinking of adding a cap of how many times you can play a daily run… And I kind of have a feeling that I’ll add that soon.
Reynard’s House
As mentioned above, I’ve added a house! Not only that it’s “cool” to walk around the house… It’s even more awesome to enter it!
In house you can find “The book of credits”, where you’ll find all the info about who created and helped creating Reynard’s universe, you can enter a daily run and in the future you’ll be able to read the bestiary, check profile stats, daily run stats and see your unlocked achievements.
Other Changes
Here are the other things that I’ve added, tweaked or fixed:
Added some particles when you destroy an object or kill an enemy.
Increased the chances of getting stamina or energy potions when breaking pots.
Reduced HP of pots. They are now broken with one hit.
Increased the small health potions HP heal to 1.
Increased the big health potions HP heal to 15.
Triple Bubble turrets CD reduced for 50%.
Fixed the ground decorations outside of rooms in the dungeons.
New boss Wilson has arrived to Reynard’s dungeons!
Wilson
Previous week we’ve released an “easier” boss Doctor Plague and now I’m presenting you Wilson! He’s a weird entity (big eyeball) accompanied by small “Willies” (little eyeballs).
Wilson deals chaotic damage and has a powerful energy beam attack! So you better be careful when you’re poking him in the eye!
https://gfycat.com/ObedientFoolishBuffalo
Doctor Plague Buff
As mentioned previous week, I knew that I’ll have to buff the doctor… and so I did! He’s now roaming around cemetery raising skeletons!
Other Changes
I’ve added some decorations to the Dexter’s level and changed the whole progression through the dungeons. If you’ll want to save Prascilla you’ll have to go through:
Basement dungeon
Basement dungeon
Boss
Basement invasion
Desert dungeon
Desert dungeon
Boss
Desert invasion
Winter dungeon
Winter dungeon
Boss
Winter Invasion
Final Boss
I think that the progression is more interesting this way… You have to face one more boss in the end, but you’ll progress through the dungeons faster! Other thing that I’ve changed is that special rooms like: Forge, Library, Shrine… are now populated also with different pots, traps and so on!
Reynard Devlog #12 β Doctor Plague and More! (0.8.3)
Our fox is on a streak! We’re releasing another Reynard update! This week we’re bringing Doctor Plague to the party!
Doctor Plague
Some of our players complained that they can’t defeat our first boss Dexter because he’s too “difficulty”… Well… We don’t like nerfing stuff… But we can surely spice things up a little bit can’t we?
I kind of started designing Doctor Plague with a word “easy” in my mind, so that the players that have to get “git gut” could have a higher chance of reaching the second biome. But I don’t want to make the challenge too easy for the players. That’s why I’ve added some spicy moves to the Doctor Plague and I’m sure that we’ll have to balance him a little bit in the future updates.
Boss Orders
We’ve noticed that our players had a very happy reaction when we suggested that maybe each run the bosses should be picked randomly. That’s exactly what we did! Now when you fight your way through the dungeons, you’ll never know which boss you’re gonna face!
Other Changes
Fixed the Boom Joe! Effect zone didn’t clear its targets when disabled.
Added potion UI icons.
Acid Mick HP reduced from 5 to 3.
Boom Joe’s and Freezer Face’s charge range reduced from 4 to 3.
Removed the credits scene, will implement it rather in-game world.
Fixed the infinity punching with spamming special attack button when special weapon was equipped.
Reynard Devlog #9 β Inventory, HUD Update, Areas
In previous post, we’ve showcased the weapons and the runes… And now, after couple of weeks I’m able to show you the inventory which brings the ability
to swap those runes!
Slimes and Health bars
You can also see that we’ve replaced the Slime’s sprites… When these slimes get attacked and if they get hurt, they’ll display a health bar. The health bar’s color is dependent on the health type of the monster. The purple slime has “water” type health, which gives it a “blue” color. Because it’s health is water based it can’t get hurt by fire attacks… which also means that it can’t catch fire and spread it all over the place.
Additionally if we kill these slimes… they can drop loot… Ok… In the game you’ll probably never see a slime dropping 5 swords like in the video, but we wanted to show you the point π
HUD improvements
I’ve also replaced the HUD’s graphics. I think that it looks way better now than a classical black and white window. HUD now has the ability to show you if the weapon is on cooldown. You can see the cooldown in action in the video below.
The “stamina” bar’s color is now also changed to more greenish color – because we all know that blue usually stands for mana.
Inventory
The biggest thing in this devlog is inventory which is split on 3 parts:
Left part is for consumables, runes, usables etc…
Middle part is strictly reserved for the equipment and it’s rune slots
Right part is dedicated for the item’s descriptions, stats etc.
I can say that inventory is already functional but I’m sure that I will update it as soon as I’ll add more different items, such as consumables etc. Besides the inventory I’m planning on adding “Stats” tab, where player will be able to see all of the Reynard’s “important” stats… Such as on weapon swing damage etc.. I tried to add all this info in the item’s description but I wasn’t able to fit everything in such a small window… That’s the reason why I’m thinking of implementing “Stats” tab.
This time in video I’ve decided that I’ll rather talk… I don’t feel comfortable talking π but it’s really easier to say things while playing the game than editing text pieces with video fragments. I think that I’ve also improved the video’s quality… The pixels look better now!
This was one of the first inventory concepts in the game.
Some more inventory experiments…
PS:
If you have any recommendations or opinions please express the in the comments down below!
In previous Reynard devlog, BoΕ‘tjan revealed that we’re planning to add a world map and in this post I want to write about the dungeons.
Challenges
Before the development of the game, we’ve set some ground rules. One of those rules was that we want to increase the replayability of the game. That’s the reason we included randomly generated dungeons.
Writing a dungeon generator is fun, but it can be time consuming.
For an example. When I was designing a basic prototype of a dungeon generator questions kept popping up.
Couple of examples are:
What roles can a room have (locked, treasure room, starting room…).
Which dimensions of a room can appear.
How many types of specific rooms can appear.
When a room can appear? At the beginning, middle or the edge of the dungeon?
How the monsters will spawn in the room.
How will transition between rooms work.
And many many many more…
The problem was that we had an idea where we want to go with the whole dungeon generation, but not the most “detailed” idea. That is probably the main reason I’ve spent so much time on creating a generator. Figuring out what we want the player to experience and how to keep him challenged was one of those details. Another thing that kept me busy was designing a generator which is designer friendly.
Check out the video to have a glimpse of early dungeon prototypes and other added features.
PS:
When I was making a dungeon generator more “user / designer friendly” I used Odin Inspector and Serializer plugin. It saved me many hours of work on inspector customization and serialization. So if you’re developing in Unity3D check it out, I think that you will find it very useful.
If you’re interested in dungeon generation and procedural level design, I’d recommend you to listen this cool GDC talk from the creator of Eldritch.
In previous blog post I was writing about our Pariah progress and why we decided to work on another game instead. From now on there will only be progress reports for Reynard project.
I’m gonna try to keep these progress reports short and simple π
Reynard’s Story
Reynard is a human-like fox who works as a ranger. One day all the children from the “animal” town went missing and because of his personal reasons he decides to travel the world to find them. And that’s all I’ll ever probably write about the story before the release π
Art update
For now we’re using some sprites that we could find / buy on opengameart or itch.io. Even though we already had a dummy art for the main character I decided to replace him with a “bigger” one. The reason lies behind the fact, that we’ll have to draw our own main character which will be larger than our previous “blonde dude”, and I needed something to visualize how his size will fit in with an art.
Feature update
Our character can now:
Attack with a sword,
Cast a “spell” or throw something,
Dash
Besides that I was working on different systems which still aren’t visible in video below, but are working as intended. Some of those systems are:
Health system,
Stamina system,
Weapon system,
Perception system
Enough with the words… It’s video time π
Next week I’ll probably work on a simple AI system or maybe on interactable items like treasure chests, locked doors or something similar.
Another thing that always surprises me is pixel perfection in Unity3D. Setting up a camera that satisfies my “pixly” eyes is not so easy in an engine that was originally made for 3d games. So I have no doubt that eventually I’ll tackle this problem sooner or later.
If you have any questions or opinions please feel free to express them in the comments down below.
