Introducing Candy Crawl!

http://coldrice.itch.io/candy-crawl

Sadly, I ran out of time to complete the project. The co-manager of the Jam said I had all week, but personally I can’t take away any more time from Interstellaria for this little side project. I was able to try some new things which worked out VERY well – but in the end I didn’t feel 100% successful. Here’s the score at the end of 9(ish) days.

WHAT WENT WELL
-Procedural content (though there is still a 1% chance for an error in tile layout)
-Simple dynamic lighting
-Aesthetic

WHAT WENT WRONG
-Gameplay, I had to redo it 3 times as it wasn’t very fun (and I’m still not happy with the end result)
-Pathfinding. I’d dabbled in it before and though it’d be easy. I really should have taken care of this early on, but instead I tried to do it 24 hours before the end. Whoops
-Content. I didn’t have a chance to make a lot of enemies, or animations. I also couldn’t implement an item store or skill tree. This is mostly due to point one, which is I spent 3 days redoing game play and lost a lot of time
-No planning. I try to plan everything out, but Candy crawl was literally made up day by day. A lot of “hmm, let me try this.” I probably could have got a lot more done in a shorter amount of time if I had a better plan going into it.

The game was based upon a simple game I though could translate well to procedural content, Lego Heroica:

I’m a bit disappointed in the project. I had a lot planned, and if I had planned out the gameplay(most combat) parts a little better it would have been awesome. I ended up spending so much time on one aspect, that it all lost steam by the end. Luckily, I can probably re-use the code for future projects. It’s nice because I got to try out some new ideas and it works as a good tech demo for me. Don’t be surprised to see an isometric mini game sometime in the future from me!

A quick techical “how did I do that” for the different aspects.

RANDOM ROOMS
First – tile placement. The tiles are placed by placing one tile a 0, and then choosing a random “free” side for the next tile. The game has between 5-20 tiles. Each iteration the game picks a random tile and finds a side. The game will skip that tile if it can’t find a free side. In order to detect a free side I just had to calculate the distance between a tile that was diagonal of the tile (for isometric). If there was a tile at that distance, then that side is occupied. Else, take that spot.

The actual layout of the tile graphics is done by a simple string. “dirt,” “grass,” “cave,” etc… when a tile is placed (as mentioned above) it has a 50 percent chance to have the same string as the tile it was positioned off of, or switch to another string. Each level has a list of themes (for example I had only “Grass” and “dirt” for a long time) to choose from. I have 4 tiles of each theme, and the game just picks a random 1-4 number to determine which grass or dirt tile it needs.

Each room is saved to the game, and a new room is generated when you enter it and then saved. The entire dungeon would be generated if I was making a more complex game, but letting it generate room by room worked out fine.

Dynamic Lighting

I really cheated on this one. Not wanting to put a lot of time into it, I devised a fairly simple system.

I created 4 versions of the sprite, one for each direction of shading. I ended up ditching the bottom shade as it wasn’t really needed for a game this simple (I had though about adding torches but never did). For tiles, I made it even more simple – I just made two versions:

From there, I created a fairly simple and messy algorithm which took a light sources “strength” and calculated the distance from the light source to the object. ON tiles, it simply made the black version more opaque (but never 100%) and on objects like coins or the player it made the different shaded version more opaque. The base sprite of the player was the darkest one.

The end result was actually pretty fantastic, and had I been making a different sort of game I would have gone all out with it:

A few people asked about things like using height maps, but it was a little overkill honestly. The effect was there for very minimal effort.

The Builds

By the way, here’s something neat – each build of the game!

Version 1 – Random tile layouts. You can see overlapping tiles because their opacity is 25%

coldricegames.com/candycrawl/Candycrawlv1.html

Version 2 – Better tile algorithm, a jelly bean you can move around!

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv2.html

Version 3 – Bean is slightly animated, and you can travel from room to room

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv3.html

Version 4 – You can now travel back and forth between the maps (saves the maps)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv4.html

Version 5 – First shot at making walls

http://www.coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv5.html

Version 6 – Implemented mini map

http://www.coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv6.html

Version 7 – Added dice rolling for Action Points

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv7.html

Version 8 – Added enemies, roll 3 or over to kill them (combat tiles)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv8.html

Version 9 – Added HP bar (4 health)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv9.html

Version 10 – Added coins, and soda that heals you

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv10.html

Version 11 – Added tile graphics

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv11.html

Version 12 – Added simple dynamic lighting (slight slow though)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv12.html

Version 13 – Text pop ups and a special ability (with mana)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv13.html

Version 14 – Added random events, and the ability to pickup/use items

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv14.html

Version 15 – Action points removed, more events added, more combat prompts added. Spent all day trying to make combat more clear. UI redone to have an HP amount so I can do more than 4 hp

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv15.html

Version 16 – Combat version 2 – added dice with “faces” on them. Turned ability into combat ability. Added chests

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv16.html

Version 17 – Switched to a combat screen, made dice smaller, cleared combat texts

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawl17.html

Version 18 – Added leveling which gives you more dice. Pathfinding v1 (and behind the scenes v2, and v3 which I never uploaded)

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv18.html

Version 19 – Added weapons, new abilities when you level up, new tilesets, random level selection, pathfinding v5. sadly, lighting was broken in this version

http://coldricegames.com/candycrawl/CandyCrawlv19.html

So there you have it, a game in 9ish days from beginning to (sort of) end. Here’s a bonus – the art assets i made for it: