Reynard Devlog #12 – 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.
Another week, another Reynard update! Last week we released the “Merchants” update and this week we’re introducing you to the pawn shrine, buffed enemies and potion hotkeys!
Pawn Shrines
On your quest through dungeons, you will hoard a lot of items. Some of them will be useful, others not so much and because of Reynard’s limited item carrying capabilities you’ll want to drop the “not so good” items to free up some space in your inventory. It would be a shame if those items would just be left on the dungeon floor. Here lies the reason we’ve created the pawn shrine!
The Pawn shrine is a shrine similar to the Forge shrine. You step on the Pawn shrine and drop the item on it. Mysterious powers will grant you some gold in return for your item.
Buffed Enemies
To spice things up in the dungeons, we’ve decided to add buffs to enemies! For now enemies can be buffed in 4 stats!
Max health buff.
Health regen buff.
Damage buff.
Movement speed buff.
Damage buff on green slime.
Health regen buff on red slime.
Max health buff on rat.
Movement speed buff on a bat.
Potion Hotkeys
We know that in the middle of battle, opening up the inventory and drinking potions was really annoying. That’s why we’ve added hotkeys! A visual indicator is still not available, but we’re planning to add it ASAP. The hotkeys will select the most powerful potion in your inventory and leave the weakest potions for last. The default keys are:
“1” or “Dpad-UP” – Use health potion.
“2” or “Dpad-RIGHT” – Use stamina potion.
“3” or “Dpad-LEFT” – Use energy potion.
Other Changes
Modified leprechaun perk, you now earn 20% less score.
Modified blind monk perk, you deal 20% more damage.
Silver key shrine now takes only gold.
Thin blade now deals slashing damage instead of blunt.
200 additional experience gained if the whole dungeon with secret room included is cleared.
Added buffed enemies. The more dungeons you clear in the run the more buffed enemies will spawn.
Modified the health bar. Now it also displays the type of buff the enemy has.
PS: 3 days till giveaway ends! We’re giving away 3 keys for Reynard! You can enter the giveaway here. Till the next time! Have fun exploring the dungeons 😀
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a devlog in this form… Reynard has hit an early access stage and it’s available on itch.io and this is first content update which brings Merchants to the game!
Merchants
Until now, if you discovered hidden stairs, you could only reach library which offered different relics in exchange for different payment types. For an example: You could get relic which boosts your health regeneration in an exchange for consumables or score reset… The Merchants update brings 4 merchants which offer various goods! These merchants are:
Izak (Weapons)
Pepe (Armors)
Abdul (Runes)
Bubba (Potions)
Merchants unlike statues, libraries and other “mini shops” take only gold! So gold is getting another use case in the game and it’s not used only for building turrets anymore. Each of the merchants offer more items and set the price semi-randomly based on its quality.
Other Changes
If the description of the item is long, the description window slowly starts scrolling down so you can read more.
Fixed the “Throwing Acid Spear”.
Added experience bar at the “End of run” screen instead of using only numbers.
Fixed multiple typos in item descriptions
Removed “+” signs in item descriptions. Now only “-” is displayed.
Bats now collide with buildings and can hurt them.
Giveaway
We have also decided to create a giveaway! We’re giving away 3 keys for Reynard! You can enter the giveaway here.
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 😀
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 😀 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!
For couple of weeks I’ve been working on how different systems interact with each other. The reason I’ve spent so much time on this task is because I really wanted to make it as modular as possible. Modularity of the systems will significantly increase the speed of how fast we can create weapons, enemies, items and other stuff (even in other upcoming games).
One of the game’s core design is that Reynard can carry only 3 weapons at the same time. And these weapons have to be different by type such as:
Melee (swords, axes, hammers…).
Ranged (shurikens, arrows, boomerangs…).
Special (bombs, magic cloaks, summon rings…).
To keep things interesting and to increase the game’s replayability we’ve decided to add a rune system. For example: Weapons can have “Weapon runes”, armors can have “Armor runes” and so on. Primarily these past weeks I’ve focused on Weapon runes which can:
Deal different or random amount of damage.
Deal different types of damage (normal, blunt, electric, fire, holy, ice, pierce, poison…).
Add stamina penalty (if you have runes that are powerful, you’ll be draining Reynard’s stamina faster with each attack).
Have a chance of missing or knocking an enemy.
Have different effects (Damage over time, slow over time)… These effects can:
Be stackable (same effect applied multiple times to same enemy).
Be spreadable (fire, ice) etc.
Have different power and duration.
To make everything work as intended I also had to implemented weakness tables and so on. Did I mention that we’ve added BOOOOOMBS? Enough with the words here comes the video:
PS: I can’t wait to show you our next creations next week! Stay tuned!
Reynard Devlog #7 – Dialogue System Reynard Can Talk!
Hello again. As I mentioned in last week devlog my next mission was dialogue system.
Dialogue system
I tinkered a bit with Nodecanvas and their system, which has a lot of possibilities, but in the end I made my own. It’s really basic for now but Reynard can talk to you without problems. I will extend it in next days to do more things. For now our system reads text files in which it searches for new line (when you press return/enter). Then in the next step loads them into box. You will also have possibility to skip dialogue lines by simply pressing right button or you can just wait and text will automatically write on screen.
Box is made with help of unity’s UI canvas and TextMesh Pro. We use TextMesh Pro because is simply better than default Text from unity. With TextMesh Pro you have much more customization and much clearer fonts if you zoom camera really close. You can get it for free from unity asset store.
How we start Conversation
We can trigger system in two ways. One is by proximity. If Reynard comes close enough to Phoenix as you can see in video, dialogue will start automatically. There is also possibility to run dialogue only once. You will have to pay close attention in the game as you never know when is the last time when some NPC will speak to you.
The second way is that you need to press a button to start dialogue. You can see that in this week video when Reynard comes close to the house and you can see exclamation mark above it. If you press right button dialogue will start or you can turn away and never know what secrets you just missed. Also we can select if player is allowed to move once the dialogue has stared or hid movement is frozen
There are also some basic sound effects when text scrolls and don’t worry they will be improved as we decided to put them in few hours before this devlog was released.
This is all for this week devlog. Come back next week for new info about Reynard.
This week we are changing colors of sprites in Reynard. Benefit is that we can change colors of whole sprite or change only selected colors which we want to change, so we can have even more diverse dungeons as mentioned in previous Devlog.
Shaders?
This is achieved in two ways. First is with shaders and second with custom tool. When I started looking intro shaders this week I was confused and I still am, but I managed to write one really simple shader that changes color of whole sprite. Thank you youtube videos! Maybe you remember this effect from Binding Of Isaac as they use them on elite enemies to distinct them from regular one.
Chaning Colors With Shaders
Palette Swap
But that wasn’t everything I was doing this week. I also tried to find way to recolor sprites and here is result.
Palette Swap
With this tool you create palette from sprite and then you can change every color that is in you sprite. So we can easily recolor something without opening pixel edit or aseprite as we are using both for art. And you believe me I made some spooky looking reynards with it.
Hit Effect
Also we added the hit effect to Reynard. Now when he is hit by the enemy or he takes damage he flashes and some particles fly around. Flashing is again made with the help of shaders and particles as name says is made with particles effects in unity. Shader just changes color to what we select and then with few lines of code we just set how many time he flashes in a given time frame.
Hit Effect
Right now I’m working on some shaders for desert map and I have to finish dialogue system. Update on that will come in future blog posts so stay tuned for updates.
In previous devlog I showed you some progress on dungeons and today I can show you the basic minimap and some other cool stuff!
Feature update
Because we’re not that hardcore that we would leave our Reynard to wander around the dungeons without a minimap, we have decided to add it. Current version of the minimap is basic and it shows the locations of various rooms (locked, treasure and boss rooms). It also colors the room where the player is located with an orange color. We’re still discussing if the minimap should be an obtainable item, a perk or included by default. My personal opinion is that it would be cool if player had to put some effort to unlock it. What is your opinion?
I’ve updated the HUD which now displays melee and ranged weapons. If you check out the video, you can see that there is a third slot, which is reserved for special items. In the future we’ll be adding bombs and other items. Health and stamina bars have also been updated. They were improved with “normal” colors and numbers. Numbers will help the player to accurately plan his next moves.
We were thinking about how we could inform the player if he can interact with something. In the end we decided to go with a classic bulb bubble.
While play testing the game I really got tired of shurikens… that’s what drove me to create a boomerang. I still can’t believe how such a simple item can boost developers motivation to keep on developing the game. It is quite basic, but fun.
Next thing we added were flammable objects! Flammable objects loose health over time and the fire can spread easily between them.
Under the hood, I was working on resolution and canvas scalers and some other “black box” systems.
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In previous Reynard devlog, Boštjan 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.
Hello, my name is Boštjan and i think it’s my first time writing here about Reynard.
Unity and 2D tiles
So lets talk a little bit about Unity and 2D tiles. When we started developing reynard we decided to use Super Tilemap Editor, because we figured out that it is simply better than tools that came with Unity. After deciding what tools to use and searching for tilesets there was annoying problem with Unity. Anybody that uses unity for making 2D games with tiles has faced that – random rendering vertical or horizontal lines when playing the game between tiles. I admit it we made few mistakes while figuring out how to fix it. If you use same tile editor as us is really simple to fix this. You must just extrude 1px with tile atlas editor. Other solution is that you add 1px to you tile. I was doing that with program called Pyxel. You just resize tile to desired size and center it. In our case new tile size was 18×18 because we use 16×16 tiles and then you just copy the edge pixel in all directions around tile. After that you just set size of your boxes in unity sprite editor to 16×6 and your problem should be fixed.
Pyxel Edit
Reynard World map
Now to our world map. I wont tell you how much islands or areas there will be, but you can see in video that for now we have prototyped 4 islands in 3 different biomes. Using Super Tilemap Editor for doing that is really easy and it’s just like painting in Microsoft Paint. I have a quicklapse of doing that so if anybody is interested in that video let me know in comments bellow. When Reynard comes into the vicinity of selected buildings you will see big exclamation mark. This indicated that there you can do something. For now I only log to Unity console some strings if you press attack button but in next week there should be dialogue system instead of me just logging stuff. For Reynard i use sprites that Filip drawed and showed to you in previous Devlog.
So what is next for world map. Working dialogue system, maybe some random spawning enemies, more diverse tilesets, some shaders for the water part and particle effects for islands, because as for now there is only snowing particle system and you can see clouds on grass island. We want to make game looking more interesting and not just bland few colors on ground. Shaders and Particle system will help with that.
So this is all from me for now. Stay tunned for new update next friday.
