Project “Yuah-lak” seeks to create a first person dungeon crawler set in a region inspired by the Indian subcontinent, Ultima Underworld and the Agartha myth.
There haven’t been recent development on this, but I thought it would make sense to give an update of what we did on it after last update, with developments that went from end of April to early June 2024.
The initial goal is to create a vertical slice of the dungeon, literally. A playable level which we could use to support a pitch for funding. I stopped pushing for it when it was time to decide priorities, and closing the loop with NovaMundi (which ultimately led to its full release on Steam) won the battle.
We still haven’t reached the point where we have something interesting to show visually, hence I’m still keeping this private. We discovered we are going to need to invest a lot in the art, and a fun combat system, in order to add some differentiators to it that might make it appealing for publishers, so it’s on hold now until we can pour some love on it.
Still, I believe there’s potential on our idea of a quick dungeon crawler, with many choices at the character generator phase providing more unique runs, set on an interesting universe.
Before finishing her internship at Slashware, Alicia managed to progress quite a bit on the conceptual arts and animation for the game; here’s a bit of the process done for the Yaksha enemy
She also worked on concepts for the attack animation of the Yaksha (as well as the “Preta”).
An interesting bit of work with the Yaksha was coming up with the design of its weapon, which involved a back and forth between art and narrative design. It went from being a club-sized weapon with different applications of Jade, Gold and Iron, to a larger, heaver staff with a huge Jade core adorned with gold.
Of course, I even started working a little bit on taking these cool concepts and putting them into the game; just to test how they’d look I did one frame of the Yaksha enemy, attacking 🙂
Her final contribution to the project was some concept work for “the hero”, based on the definitions on the game bible made by Stoltverd, here’s an excerpt from it:
The player plays a follower of Deva, the divine being. The player may choose to be an apprentice of siddhi (magic user) seeking enlightenment through the constant challenging of perceived reality, a Thag, a deceiver who seeks enlightenment through crime, or a Kapala, who seeks enlightenment through violence.
The warrior has long black hair and golden armor with almost no chest protection. Makeup and war paint is essential for his looks. Colorful silk pieces complete his look, with pieces of clothing originating from the back, attached to the shoulder pieces to give him movement. His legs must be the ones with most adornments. Baggy pants and armored sandals complete his looks. On his belt, inside a sheath, he has a talwar, on his other hand, as spell ready to be cast.
Stoltverd also worked on descriptions for the female hero, but we didn’t manage to create the art for that one. Furthermore, he worked on defining the behavior, spawning criteria, and overall the “uniqueness” for each one of the enemy types. We also put a lot of work to define the stats of the weapons, spells, and traits. That’s all on the GDD, waiting to be implemented.
He also finished doing the sketches of possible maps for the levels of the game, which will eventually be used as input to further polish the procedural level generators and make every level type have a further defined “spirit” of its own.
But enough cool art, let’s go to the code! We worked on populating the level with a bigger variety of enemies, at least in their behavior since visually we still don’t have the art to represent them. Their movement is now restricted based on their ability to swim or fly. This also led us to work on adding better support for aquatic enemies, which required some iterations to get their billboard rendering correct.
Talking about aquatic enemies, movement is now much quicker when “swimming” on water so it’s no longer “realistic”, a departure from the slower paced Ultima Underworld exploration (I guess even there, as atmospheric at it was, it was a bit tedious), but better from a gameplay perspective for what we want to do (quick runs!). Now it feels like our superhero is skipping on the water, which I like 😛
Another departure from immersive sim in the direction of more arcade-ish dungeon crawling was allowing an easier interaction with items; you can now pick them up quickly with E when nearby, instead of having to look at them.
Tweaks by Gecko on the audio system included allow turning sound on/off, as well as adding new sound effects for all the new spells and interactions with items, and adjusting the balance of background ambience volume. We also implemented “step” sounds including walking surface detection.
Finally, Camilo put a lot of effort to program the effects for the spells: Light, Magic Missile, Blink, Time Stop, Sleep. They also now require MP to use.
As I mentioned, the project is currently on hold. Camilo went on to work on his own on a similar project afterwards, called “Quest for Immortality“, this time in Godot, but sadly it seems to be inactive as well right now.
Slashie's Gamedev Adventures 