Tales of a Video Game Developer
Recently did a couple of book unboxing videos that might be interesting
The first one is from the Pokemon Zoology Book Kickstarter I backed some months ago, some really cool material there
And then, I made another one for REPLAY, the visual novel made by Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia.
CastlevaniaRL is a fan-made traditional roguelike inspired by the Castlevania series. Six different classes armed with an array of skills challenge the castle of Count Dracula and their many monsters. You can play online for free at https://slash.itch.io/serenade-of-chaos or check the source code at https://github.com/slashman/castlevaniarl (yes, it’s open source!)
This new version was prompted mostly by a crash bug detected when using Orbs of Recall during a boss fight (cowardice!). However, I also managed to pack some improvements based on feedback from the community.
Additional flexibility for UI configuration allows changing the camera scale and position now, thus allowing 1x UIs with lower resolution sprites. They can now be accessed via .bat files (a launcher might be made later, maybe). A new UI mode, 1024×768 with 1x sprites (32×32), allows a bigger viewport at the expense of pixel art detail.
A 800×600 mode, very similar to old CvRL from 2010, might be useful if you want to play in laptops in windowed mode.
(Just a reminder that the ASCII UI is still completely functional)
Additionally, support for female voices has been added back, and an improved set of female voices has been bundled.
CvRL2 is a traditional, top-down, turn-based roguelike, with fixed overworld and procedurally generated dungeons. It’s a retelling of the classic Castlevania 2 for the NES, in a format heavily inspired by ADoM. You can play online at https://slash.itch.io/cvrl2
Roam the countryside traveling between the towns, finding clues to destroy Dracula, and the mansions, where the relics of Dracula are found.
Here’s the changelog for this version
“Yuhalak” (temporary project codename) is a project I’ve been working on along old friends Jucarave and now QuietGecko. It’s going to be a first person dungeon crawler taking place on an original setting that is being designed by SlashwareKnight Stoltverd, and conceptualized visually by Alicia Mendez.
Progress in the game, now at internal v0.0.2
We continue with the goal of completing the “port” of the JS codebase and data into Unity; You can now pick up items and navigate between levels. There are also flying enemies.
Jucarave also added some HUD elements, including the inventory hotbar. Ranged attacks are also now added, and there’s a “camera bob” effect to simulate walking.
I finished migrating the procgen specs we had designed for the new levels. We also have the foundations for a character creation flow (placeholder art).
Stoltverd continues researching and designing the contents for the locations in the game
Friend QuietGecko jumped into the project as well to add some cool audio into it; first steps included WWise integration, a test music track and dungeon ambience, as well as sound effects for steps and combat, it has already given this build a lot of life and uniqueness.
Alicia has been working in conceptualizing some of the enemies while at the same time we continue refining the process of ideation to art assets.
Yuhalak is the latest of a noble line of dungeon crawlers made by both myself and jucarave. Stoltverd has come up with something very interesting for its universe. Stay tuned for more info.
In “Farewell San Vicente”, our entry for Global Game Jam 2023, a family flees their home in the countryside displaced by “La Violencia”, the civil war in 1950’s Colombia.
You can play it online, or download it for Windows, for free, from its itch.io page.
Many thanks to old time slashi-follower Kay Tila for the translation to German, and to Ignasi Sanfeliu Rosell and Ricard Soler Roger, from Projecte ‘Ce Trencada’, for the translation to Catalan.
Here are some words from Ignasi, from the Catalan translation team:
Des del Projecte ‘Ce Trencada’ estem més que contents d’haver pogut participar en la introducció de la llengua Catalana en aquest videojoc tan rellevant.
Per nosaltres aquest treball ens va ser molt difícil de digerir des de la perspectiva de la narrativa, algunes entrades ens van fer quedar una estona en silenci davant del teclat.
Malauradament, aquesta és una història que es repeteix al llarg de la història quan el país està dominat per la por i la deshumanització i et veus obligat a prendre decisions molt dures, com ara passa a diferents parts del món com Ucraïna i Palestina per desgràcia.
Això és una cosa que no volem que ningú pateixi i esperem que aquesta traducció ajudi a propagar aquest missatge a més gent.
Donem gràcies a l’equip per la confiança que ens han ofert i la voluntat de voler fer el joc al més accessible tot afegint el català al seu videojoc.
Ignasi Sanfeliu Rosell, Projecte Ce Trencada
The game is now available in 5 languages (Spanish, English, Turkish, German and Catalan). If you want to contribute a translation to the project, you are welcome to!
You can read more about the story behind this game here!
CvRL2 is a traditional, top-down, turn-based roguelike, with fixed overworld and procedurally generated dungeons. It’s a retelling of the classic Castlevania 2 for the NES, in a format heavily inspired by ADoM. You can play online at https://slash.itch.io/cvrl2
Roam the countryside traveling between the towns, finding clues to destroy Dracula, and the mansions, where the relics of Dracula are found.
This version adds Graphics.
One random thought of the day was that I need to create stuff that is more visually appealing. I think my baseline, pure ASCII graphics, is just too limiting… I am aware of say, Cogmind and Brogue, which are masterpieces of design that manage to tangle people deep into them in spite of their “limited” visuals (although both have gone past “pure” 80×25 ascii exclusive modes, with rich 1bit tilesets and beautiful special effects). I believe it’s just that: 80×25 pure ASCII-only just won’t cut it. There is people that will love it, myself included, but we are not many.
Anyways, last week I decided to push things a bit and improve the entire Rainy Day roguelike branch with some of the latest JSRL developments; this meant their build stack changed from browserify to webpack, support to make native Electron packages, and the possibility of using the PIXI.js based tile-based display.
This is just a first graphical version of the game; there’s a LOT of room for improvement visually which I am aware of. I just wanted to put it out there so that more people could experience the game, as I’m aware the ASCII might be too much. If more people is interested I will continue improving the visuals.
I still have not decided if I will continue using this tileset (which was made for the original CastlevaniaRL, years ago). I already had to add several tiles to it. I’m also using the Ultimate Fantasy tileset, from Oryx as well, for the overworld.
However, in order to use the CvRL tileset, I already had to improve quite a bit over the simple GFX display provided by JSRL; I added support for multiple overlaid tilesets of different sizes, based on the developments done on Emerald Woods, and also allowed different tile sizes based on the level (so that, in the overworld, I can use smaller tiles)
Downloadable packages are already a possibility, but I decided to wait a version for that just so I can include the update checker, and fix any critical glitches since it’s the first graphics version, before shipping a downloadable and have people stuck on it.
I must also note there was a version prior to 0.0.6; fellow roguelike developer Kyzrati was kind to play the game and provide very valuable feedback; this resulted on version 0.0.5 which fixed a critical issue with audio track loading, and included some other small but important usability improvements (including a low HP alert)
I just updated the roguelikes in the Rainy Day development branch (that is Rainy Day, SpelunkyRL and CvRL2) to use webpack + electron instead of the old web-only browserify build stack.
This means downloadable versions for all of them will be available soon, just need to add support to check for latest versions (a must for downloadable games IMO).
Additionally, this opens the door to add graphics to them; I’m initially thinking on adding them to CvRL2, since it’s probably the one that would benefit the most.
“Yuhalak” (temporary project codename) is a project I’ve been working on along old friend Jucarave. It’s going to be a first person dungeon crawler taking place on an original setting that is being designed by SlashwareKnight Stoltverd, and will feature art by an upcoming artist from a faraway land.
The plan for Yuhalak is to take the core gameplay of Stygian Abyss, implement a new theme over it (so it is no longer an Ultima fangame), and add many more gameplay elements to make it a worthwhile dungeon crawler. We hope to retain a retro style, in the vein of Ultima Underworld.
We have done a lot of narrative and design work, and even did some improvements in the Stygian Abyss engine (which were what actually prompted the release of the latest versions of it on February), and its procedural generator; however, after some weeks of work, we decided to instead port the current codebase of Stygian Abyss to Unity, in order to be able to extend it to what we want it to be and being able to reach multiple platforms more easily.
There has been great progress in this port up to today; the procedural generator is completely ported, and you can roam the dungeon and attack enemies; we are already improving over the original, by supporting directional sprites for the enemies so they aren’t always looking at the player (we did this because they are going to have more complex behavior than they did in Stygian Abyss including fleeing, and maneuvering around the battlefield).
Yuhalak is the latest of a noble line of dungeon crawlers made by both myself and jucarave. Stoltverd has come up with something very interesting for its universe. Stay tuned for more info.
CastlevaniaRL 2: Part 1: The Lady of Berkeley, is a traditional, top-down, turn-based roguelike, with fixed overworld and procedurally generated dungeons. It’s a retelling of the classic Castlevania 2 for the NES, in a format heavily inspired by ADoM. You can play online at https://slash.itch.io/cvrl2-the-lady-of-berkeley
Roam the countryside traveling between the towns, finding clues to destroy Dracula, and the mansions, where the relics of Dracula are found.
Dev goes on as I attempt to polish while still keeping under the original scope of the 7DRL; this version tightens the gameplay even more but also fixes an issue that was preventing the good ending from being achievable.
CastlevaniaRL 2: Part 1: The Lady of Berkeley, is a traditional, top-down, turn-based roguelike, with fixed overworld and procedurally generated dungeons. It’s a retelling of the classic Castlevania 2 for the NES, in a format heavily inspired by ADoM. You can play online at https://slash.itch.io/cvrl2-the-lady-of-berkeley
Roam the countryside traveling between the towns, finding clues to destroy Dracula, and the mansions, where the relics of Dracula are found.
Yet another patch, addressing some issues found by Ryan Szrama. It’s expedited due to the game not being winnable under normal circumstances, but also adds some tweaks to make the game more challenging besides that.
The most important change was reducing the attack power of the final boss, for some reason its values were not updated properly in the back and forth.
Some other fixes included:
Gameplay/ balancing fixes included:
Finally, a small UX improvement was made, with travelers now being spawned always in the middle of towns, to avoid having to roam the entire town looking for them every time.
Slashie's Journal 