Been working on something to scratch that old-school itch and get myself back in the game designing spirit (also was curious to see what the Newgrounds blog formatting does to gifs). I have had a bad habit lately of embarking on projects that are just a tad too large, so this is a more reasonable step up from the arcade games I typically make while still having a lot of new and interesting game design challenges.
This yet unnamed game is a dungeon crawling adventure where the player is enlisted by a village to enter the neighboring dwarven fortress, then find and slay the balrog (or rather, the non-copyright infringing counterpart to a balrog) that the dwarves awakened. Players will choose between three classic classes and test their might against the goblins, undead, and demons that have taken residence in the fortress in the dwarves' absence.
Have a little assortment of animated imagery, since I suspect this is more appropriate as a news post than a billion art posts lol
EDIT: lol nice newgrounds, didn't know there was a mystery file size limit (Apparently somewhere below 10MB, I suppose?) Edited to include links to gifs under the gifs.
Learned a way to handle equipment separate from the main character, which was fairly straightforward though a bit annoying to set up (there's still a bit of clipping from the equipment skinning being oh so slightly off)
This gif was taken before I just removed the pixelation filter and instead opted to force the game to just run in the intended 800x600 resolution, as just turning off anti-aliasing is sufficient to create the proper old-school look without going overboard on the noise.
Getting elements to properly fade in and out of the camera's way was fairly simple to make, using a blueprint object that swaps materials based on whether it's being overlapped with an invisible non-colliding duplicate 'underneath' it to maintain the shadows. I've still been fooling around with the capsule that the camera uses to determine this, as it tends to get a bit overzealous for my tastes and occasionally occludes the stairs the character is walking on.
This is also the first time I've gotten cloth physics and plumes to behave on a character and I gotta say I'm loving it.
I wanted the game to be controller friendly in spite of still having a cursor, so I've focused on the game resolving things through skill checks and dice rolls which serves a double benefit of slowing things down a bit and making it feel a lot more like a classic ARPG
And of course combat! Like the skill checks it's a mostly automated system to free up the player to focus on using abilities/spells/potions while the character takes care of the fighting.
Anyway that's all the gifs I've got for now, I'll definitely post more later as I work on this, and maybe next time the game will actually have a name.