I Think I Can See the Finish Line
Cube Dev: I Think I Can See the Finish Line
Sanctuary is built.
Not just the clearing anymore. The actual systems that make it useful are starting to come together, and it's finally becoming the place I wanted the adventurer to return to between delves.
Which also means we're getting dangerously close to having the entire game loop in place.
The Shrine of Fortune
One of the newest additions to Sanctuary is the Shrine of Fortune.
Relics are now pure treasure, and when you find one you've got a choice to make.
You can sell it in Sanctuary and take the guaranteed gold, which can go toward repairs, upgrades and everything else that wants to empty your purse.
Or...
You can offer it to the Shrine of Fortune.
Give up the guaranteed payday and fate will hand you a piece of equipment in return. The more valuable the relic you sacrifice, the more the odds bend toward something better.
Higher value in, potentially higher value out.
Potentially.
It is the Shrine of Fortune, after all.
The Smith Is Open for Business
The smith and vendor have both moved into Sanctuary now.
The vendor handles the usual buying and selling, while the smith gives all that scrap you've been collecting another reason to exist.
He can dismantle unwanted equipment, repair damaged gear, and now upgrade equipment all the way to +10.
For a price, of course.
And upgrading isn't meant to replace finding better equipment.
Taking a low-tier weapon all the way to +10 gets expensive very quickly. Each upgrade improves the item's stats, but the costs climb with it. Finding a genuinely better weapon in the dungeon should still be a much better plan than endlessly polishing the rusty thing you started with.
Dual wielding is properly working now too. Your offhand weapon contributes part of its damage, critical chance and other effects to your attack.
Which is particularly nice considering it used to happily lose durability every time you attacked while contributing absolutely nothing.
Oops.
Repairs in the Dungeon
The repair system has made its way out into the dungeon as well.
If you reach a campfire, you can now use Mend to patch up your worn equipment using scrap you're carrying.
Field repairs aren't as efficient as visiting the smith, and a campfire only gives you one favor.
You can rest.
Or you can mend.
Pick one.
And that choice might be a little harder than it sounds.
Once a piece of equipment reaches 0 durability, it's broken beyond repair and is lost.
So maybe your weapon is sitting at 10% durability...
...but you're sitting at 15% health.
Do you rest and make sure you survive whatever is waiting around the corner?
Or do you mend the weapon you've spent all that gold and scrap upgrading before it breaks permanently?
Choose wisely.
Of course, the gods may smile upon you and you might stumble across another campsite farther into your travels.
Might.
It's another little bit of risk versus reward that should make pushing deeper into the dungeon considerably more interesting.
Death Actually Means Something
Death and retreat are properly wired into the game now, and both return you to Sanctuary.
Just a little lighter than you were when you left.
Your committed progress is safe — your banked purse, experience, equipped gear and stash survive.
The things you're carrying during the current run are another story.
Die and they're gone.
Retreating is a little more forgiving and lets you escape with a portion of the gold you're carrying, but you're still leaving things behind.
A summary screen shows exactly what you lost and what survived before dropping you safely back into Sanctuary.
So camps remain very important. Get somewhere safe and commit your progress, or keep pushing deeper and accept the risk.
Consumables Are Part of Your Kit Now
Consumables have changed a little too.
Potions, bandages, antidotes and the rest of your supplies aren't temporary floor loot anymore. They're part of your adventurer's kit, survive between runs, and are saved.
Supplies stored back at Sanctuary can be pulled into your pack before heading out again.
Hopefully you remember to do that before something poisons you.
The Menus Got an Overhaul
A lot of work also went into simplifying the interface.
Everything is now twist and tap.
Twist moves the selection. Tap commits it.
Tilt is completely gone from menu navigation.
The title screen now follows the same four-panel design used throughout the rest of the game, with New Game, Continue, Credits and Settings.
Settings has its own page for music and sound, and changes save immediately.
I also removed the old profile menu. Since we're down to a single adventurer per cube, starting a new character simply asks whether you want to replace the existing one. Cancel is selected by default because accidentally vaporizing your adventurer would probably be considered poor UI design.
Character creation is simpler too.
You choose your starting loadout:
- Sword and Board
- Dual Wield
- Wand and Focus
Then start the game.
The selected equipment is actually worn from your very first step. No classes, no permanent restriction. It's just your starting point, and you build the adventurer however you want from there.
And We Have Credits!
There's a proper credits screen now too.
I even built an editor for it, because apparently I can't just put three strings into a file and call it good.
Each credit can have a role and name spread across several lines, and they'll fade in one at a time before looping.
More importantly, all of the menus now respect the cube's orientation properly. Hold the cube differently and the interface adopts the new orientation as a whole rather than individual pieces trying to figure out which way is up.
That sounds simple.
It wasn't.
And Then I Crashed the Entire Cube
I also managed to track down a fun family of crashes.
Mixing certain types of drawing operations on the same facelet turned out to be a very bad idea.
Trying to upscale a font glyph killed New Game outright.
Drawing a line alongside several rows of text managed to crash all eight modules while scrolling past Continue.
So those are banned now.
Fonts stay at their intended size. Menu rules are rectangles instead of lines.
And, most importantly, I wrote that one down so Future Me doesn't decide to rediscover it.
Now Comes a Whole Lot of Dungeon
At this point I'm putting finishing touches on systems, verifying that every quest type can actually be completed, and starting the rather large job of generating the dungeon maps.
One clarification I've made along the way: the dungeons themselves are not procedurally generated while you play.
Each floor is generated ahead of time, either programmatically or with AI helping create the initial layout, and then I hand-edit it.
That lets me control room placement, encounters, features, secrets and everything else while still dramatically speeding up the process of creating hundreds of floors.
And there are a lot of floors to make.
Almost There...
Audio is still one of the remaining question marks.
I'm working with a composer, but I still need to get the direction nailed down and get the final files if we're going to use his work.
If that doesn't come together, the game may ship with the audio that's already in place.
Either way, the list of things standing between me and being able to call this thing done is getting surprisingly short.
I definitely want to get it into the hands of a few people before that happens. Let them play it, break it, find the things I somehow missed, and tell me what they actually think of it.
But it's almost at that point.
This was my first game for the cube.
It was absolutely an overambitious choice for a first project on a device like this.
I've kicked myself more than once for deciding that an RPG with inventory, equipment, durability, quests, vendors, NPCs, status effects, skills, sub-dungeons, upgrades, saves and hundreds of maps was somehow a sensible way to learn the hardware.
But I'm getting very close to being able to say something I've been working toward since I started:
I did it.
So... What's Next?
You'd think after all of this I'd choose something simple for the next cube game.
Apparently I haven't learned anything.
I'm already thinking big again.
One idea that's starting to creep back into my head is a variation of Secret Life of Aliens built specifically for the cube.
The basic idea behind SLOA is pretty simple:
You're here to prepare for the invasion.
Abduct humans. Study them. Gather as much information about Earth as possible, and try very hard not to let the humans figure out what you're doing.
Because getting detected is bad.
Getting captured is probably worse.
The more information you collect, the better prepared your species will be when the real invasion finally begins.
I think there's something interesting there that could work really well with the cube itself.
Maybe different faces become different systems or locations. Maybe twisting the cube changes where you're operating, what you're monitoring, or how you perform an abduction. There are a lot of possibilities for making the physical cube part of the gameplay instead of simply putting SLOA onto six screens.
I don't know exactly what it looks like yet.
And Just One Floor Deeper isn't even completely out the door, so I'm definitely not starting another giant project.
Yet.
But the idea is there.
And considering how JOFD started...
That's probably dangerous.