We Can Actually Play It Now!

Cube Dev: We Can Actually Play It Now!

Well, we’ve finally reached the point where I can actually play the game.

Woohoo!

Now, I may have cheated a little for testing purposes.

I may have inflated the numbers so I could level faster.

I may also have filled basically every available space on the floor with monsters just so I had something to fight constantly.

But it worked.

I can now walk around the dungeon, pick fights, win fights, forget to pay attention to my HP and lose fights, collect loot, gain experience and level up.

I made it all the way to level 7 on my extremely legitimate and absolutely-not-inflated test character.

Skills Are Working Too

The skill system is in now as well.

The level-up screens themselves still need a complete redesign, but mechanically the system is working. As you level, you can select your core abilities all the way up through level 50.

After that, Mastery takes over.

We’re not there yet.

For now, the important part is that you can choose a skill, it gets added to your character, it appears during combat, and when you use it...

It fires.

So that’s a pretty big chunk of the game loop finally connected.

Explore. Fight. Gain experience. Level up. Pick abilities. Use those abilities in the next fight.

All good.

And Now... Equipment

Next up is getting equipment to actually drop.

Which, of course, opens an entirely new can of worms.

Generating equipment isn’t really the hard part.

The hard part is figuring out what happens after you pick it up.

How do you manage an inventory on a device like this?

How do you compare two items?

How do you choose an equipment slot?

How do you equip something without turning the whole process into a miniature puzzle of its own?

On a normal PC or phone, you’d just open an inventory screen, click an item and drag it where you want it.

On the cube...

Yeah.

That’s going to take some thought.

But for the moment, I’m going to enjoy the fact that Just One Floor Deeper is finally playable.

Now I just need to figure out how to put some pants on the adventurer.