This last week I banged my head against a wall trying to find a good way to build cutscenes in unity. There are a lot of moving parts I wanted to have happen at once. Then I found unity timelines. Which was exactly what I was trying to build, but better. Unfortunately it has crap documentation, and the internet as a whole hasn't really put out any good comprehensive tutorials.

Now that I've muddled my way through it got it to do what I want I think I need to make a tutorial video to share with everyone else who might be confused. It's really a great system. I'd been avoiding any large cut scenes in the game since it was a big undertaking. I just got to building the final stage of the game and needed to have a scripted scene. I'm really happy with how its turning out. Stay tuned (hopefully) for a youtube video on how to use timelines!

I've worked on this game in a kind of unconventional way. I do it, almost exclusively, on my commute to and from work. Because of this I tend to try and work on stuff in small chunks I can do easily and build off it. It's worked pretty well so far, but one area that really could use more planning is in level design.

To start I was making a few levels just to have something to play with. As I started building more I realized I needed them to flow better from one to another. On top of that, each one really needed a theme, puzzles, and better flow. That's really hard to do in small sittings. For me at least. Its brainstorm that requires a lot of rough drawing and planning that has hurt me in the long run having to go back and redo chunks of levels.

I have one level I actually planned out at home, drew stuff up on, and then built on my train ride. It's probably the most solid level I have. It made me realize that just building on the fly wasn't going to work. So now to really make levels I'm proud of I'm going to have to invest more time up front in planning.

Level design is about more than just the actual layout of the stage. It's also about why you go certain places, the story behind items, and making things designed in a way that makes sense practically as well as for game play.

Ever play that old game Centipede? Well, I  wanted to make a monster that acts kind of like that. Basically a monster with multiple body segments that you can destroy and make him get smaller. Its simple when drawing it out, but there are a lot of little parts to think of with how something like that moves. Its been a good programming challenge  for me and I'm pretty happy with how its coming along. Initially its for a boss but also will be a common enemy later on too. When making a game solo its important to reuse everything you can to get mileage out of it. As much fun as it is to make new enemies though what I should focus on is finishing all the level design so I can get an alpha build out on the app store.

I got the shop up and running too! Now I just need to fill it up with enough items and do some  math to figure out the economy a little. When you first get there you shouldn't be able to get the most expensive items. Maybe, just MAYBE one. You also need a reason to come back.

Also, centipedes are gross.

Just going around and barking at baddies can get boring. For a game to be engaging you need a reward to your actions. Sure, you get experience, but even that isn't enough. So I added in some coins that explode from them when they die to collect. This helps, it gives a sub goal of collection which is nice. The problem then is what are they good for? Well in some games this is just your "score" and you don't  really do much with them. I'm not a fan of that. Also for some people this isn't enough of an incentive.

I had an idea that a place to buy things with your hard earned coin would make sense. Well, some sense. You are playing as a dog after all and having money doesn't really work. BUT I DIGRESS. The point being, it's nice to have an aspirational long term goal as well. You reach the store, you see an item that you just got to have and now you've set your own goal. No need for a quest structure because the player has set a goal for themselves.

Building a store is tough though. Originally my idea for the game didn't really have items. So having things that make sense for a dog to collect and use is hard to come up with. In addition just coding it has taken me a while. I realized I made my inventory system not very generic, so I couldn't really reuse parts of it. So I have to refactor some things so I don't end up with duplicate code for essentially the same thing.

I don't know that many people are reading this yet, but if you see it, let me know your ideas for items a dog might use!

When I was a kid I wasn't allowed to play Dungeons & Dragons. This didn't stop me, however. I knew enough of the rules that I made up my own version of the game. I thought it was the coolest thing ever that I made my own game. I called it Legend Quest (catchy right?).

One thing I had a very hard time with as a kid, and no internet to use as reference, was xp, damage, and health curves. How do you make sure the player doesn't get over powered too quickly? Or enemies don't one shot you if you after a few levels? Luckily with the internet now you can easily just look up great formulas for these. Today I made a table showing roughly what these values will be over a set of levels. After testing this out a bit I'm pretty happy with the values. I thought I'd share my super easy formula here:

xpNeededToLevel= (int)(Mathf.Round(baseXP*Mathf.Pow(currentLevel*1.5f)));

Basically this gives me a gentle curve up of xp needed to hit each level. I did the same with different exponents for damage, enemy damage, enemy hp, player hp, armor, etc. All the things. The player stats change based on their level, the enemies change based on the stage. Which is important because it gives the player room to get stronger than enemies if they roam to kill them all. If you skip a lot you'll also end up feeling a bit under powered. Which is ideal. Enemies leveling with you is never fun because numbers go up but difficulty remains flat. Boring!

In art news I started making some mine cart rail tiles because who doesn't like mines?

Just getting things started here! Phew. What a day. I bought the domain, started tossing together a bunch of junk for the website, and made an app icon. Used to just be a placeholder image of my dog.

Doggo Dungeon is a F2P dog dungeon crawler. I've been making this game solo in my free timing, teaching myself to program and using my background in art. It's been in development for over a year now and has come a long way since then. A lot of time, love, and learning has gone into this project and I can't wait to share it with everyone!