Herald Update 1

Hi, hope you’re all having a good weekend.

Getting the demo of Herald ready and has caused some big changes to be made in the game.

Random Items

The random items have been redesigned as a secondary tool to compliment and add variety to the combat system, instead of being the core to the game.

picking up a bunch of random items

Encounters

Encounters are now balanced by a system called that spawns pre-designed sets of enemies together instead of completely randomly. Working on the system that improves the spawn locations too.

HUD

The HUD has been quite tricky because of the low resolution and variety of information so right now its just a green bar at the bottom of the screen. Not sure how to make this better when all the info is added so I’m just going to play around with it till it feels right.

Level Flow

The player will complete floors and work on their way to the goal of collecting the ‘Occult Gauntlet’, but I am now considering a high-score system similar to Spelunky, to make each run have more meaning. I also think this could allow for having a shorter, better experience (maybe 20 minute-ish runs?) instead of long hour long dives into the game. If anyone has thoughts on this I would be interested in people’s preferences?

Thanks for reading! Demo and more info coming soon!

-Jacy

Herald of the Depths

Hi!

For anyone interested in the game, I’ve written up some of my core goals and design choices.

Main goals

  • Engaging encounters with tactical game play
  • Engaging runs that feel different and unique from each other

What’s different from other roguelikes?

  • Primarily the enemy encounters being the main focus of the game. There are still items, levels to explore, skills to learn etc but that all surrounds the combat core.
  • A limit to the simulation depth type of design. I prototyped a dozen times before settling on Herald of the Depths and during that process I decided I am better off avoiding any complex entity system or other foundations to the engine. I have also played the most of games that use systems like this, so think it will be fun designing something that is further out of my comfort zone.

Development

I have the ambitious goal of releasing this in April so there will be weekly updates of what I am up to.

Thanks for reading!

-Jacy