Crypt of Vidae

[rosareven]

 

Crypt of Vidae

This is not only my first time to use Construct 2, this is my very first time making a game. Please bear with my noobness in any concepts that may seen fundamentally basic such as collision and such.

I made a late decision to join the contest. I've had the story in my head for a long time now but this contest motivated me to put my idea into reality at last.

***Last minute status update: I feel bad but I have to give up my entry for this competition because I won't be able to finish this to the standard of completeness (starting screen, ending, etc). The main reason being poor planning and real life clashes. You can scroll down to my newer reply for more detail, but the game itself is not abandoned. Expect to see it up in Completed Games forum and Scirra Arcade!***

= Demo =
Link to demo, updated whenever I export a new version

Entirely controlled by mouse only. Hold left click to move, right click to cast an area effect that will harm the monsters and absorb their essence when they die. If you have some essence stored, stay still and hold down right click for some mayhem.

= Credits =

None of the graphics are mine. All resource origins are listed below:

The orb and particles: Lexsux for the ready-to-use particle package and Wondertouch for Particle Illusion 3.0

Pillar: Satanic World tileset by DeathLock (original post by him, but picture links are all dead)

Floor tile: Dark Church tileset shared by Zanyzora, possibly created by Enterbrain

And of course Scirra for the fabulous engine and HBGames for hosting this contest that motivated me to get my hands dirty!

Spoiler: Background story of the game

You are an experienced, wicked and mischievous witch, skilled in the art of illusions and enchantment. You live your life causing misery to other people, but today you decided to do something else for a change -

Releasing a trapped soul from his long forgotten torment, deep inside the Crypt of Vidae.

This place used to be your home. You came here for various errands, left due to disgust, then back again to clean up the mess. You really hope this would be your last visit of this cursed place.

Of course as a wicked witch that you are, you wouldn't be stupid enough to risk your life inside the crypt now heavily infested with unrest spirits, which over so many years, have became mindless, violent beings wandering around the confined space trying to maintain their existence. You have a toy, or rather, a decoy, to get the job done for you: the soul orb. This little treasure is going to be your trusty assistant in cleaning up this place once and for all.

Don't ask where you got this from. Just get the job done now, and move on with your life.

Spoiler: Screenshot @ 16th March

Spoiler: Screenshot @ 18th March

Spoiler: Updates @ 23rd March

- Implemented ambient light, using Construct 2's lighting example in the installation

- Your orb can be destroyed now! The brightness of the orb is the equivalent to its "health". Brightness can be regained by killing the enemies, but act fast... I haven't added a replay button yet so you'll have to refresh the page in order to replay for now.

- You can't see your enemies until they are within your light range. I'll have to figure out a better way for the enemies to enter the light instead of just suddenly appear. As a cheap solution I do plan to use pitch-black colour sprites tomorrow as enemies so that they blend into the darkness, but I'll come up with something, or if you guys have suggestion I'm open to any possibilities.

- Venetia's suggestion of a fluid "mana bar" for soul essence is implemented. You can see the bar gaining fluidly and deducted fluidly when you use the right click special attack, but you need to wait very short split second standing still and holding the right click before the special attack starts charging. You can regain brightness if you kill something with the special attack, but not absorbing soul essence with it.

- The HUD you see right now is a rough temporary placement. It'll be redone into something more visually pleasing.

- The "boss" that I mentioned is yet to be there, so right now it's just a simple endless survival game that, if you do it right, you will probably never die. Incentives will be there, I promise!

 

[rosareven]

The demo link has been updated with my latest progress as for today (try right clicking in the game). I can't post a screenshot for it yet because my screenshot program decides to not work and I don't feel like fixing that right now. May be when I hop onto my laptop.

I think I've spent too much time fine-tuning the interactive visuals of the game now because I got hooked up with tweaking it. I found it to be lots of fun. After the contest I think I'll find myself being a better interactive story maker than a game maker XD

The loading screen of the game is gradually increasing in length too, and I haven't even started the actual game mechanics yet, only the visual interactions. I hope I won't blow up someone's browser out there eventually.

 

[Wink]

Hello rosareven

Nice animation effect Your game doesn't take to long at all to load in my browsers I tested it with IE9, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. Try clearing your browsers cache if your game is taking to long to load this can also help your games performance. Also check to make sure your graphic card drivers are up-to-date. I usually clear my browser cache once a day but that's just because I spend way to much time online. lol

But nice job so far with your game :D

 

[onzephyr]

Demo loaded fast for me, I'd not worry much about it. Nice use of particles. And the background story sounds loaded with fun monsters and setting potential.

 

[rosareven]

Thank you guys. Monsters are what I'm going to work on today. I'll need to make my own graphics for some of them because I can't find what I'm looking for on the internet.

 

[rosareven]

Thank you guys. Monsters are what I'm going to work on today. I'll need to make my own graphics for some of them because I can't find what I'm looking for on the internet.

Today's progress: no time for making my own graphics just yet. I want to get started on the mechanics, so I just borrowed the monster sprite from Construct 2's beginner tutorial as a placeholder. You are still god mode at the moment so you can't be destroyed yet. The gameplay instruction has also been updated on the main thread.

The event sheet is starting to become more and more messy, but I only used 12 events in this so far. There are just a lot of actions that happen in each event. I also modified the way the right click effect appears so that it would work on the monsters, but now it's off the alignment that I originally set it for. I'll sort that out later. Figuring out the monster destruction has taught me a lot of lessons in one day.

Speaking of lessons learned, today I had to redo the way the right-click effects appear because my previous implementation will not work properly for attacking monsters and I had to rearrange actions, reassign variables, pretty much rework half the stuff I did yesterday. It was painful but rewarding because now I really know how I should handle that sort of event.

 

[BlueScope]

I'm kind of interested to see some of this beauty in motion... not sure if you're far enough to show something off, but I'd like to invite you to

 

[Venetia]

This seems interesting! Can't wait for sound effects :P.

I'd recommend changing the "souls absorbed: #" thing into more of an MP gimmick ... If you absorb a soul, you fill the "tank", then you can get power-ups or base the length of your right mouse click as a means of draining that MP to unleash types of spells or super attacks. Then have a counter to show how many mobs you have left to clear until the level is done.

Just a suggestion -- the game needs more of an incentive or feeling of progression/reward.

BTW, the loading time was about 10sec, and ran steadily at around 60fps for me.

Look forward to your next update

 

[rosareven]

Updates from me will be back shortly! My intense days of real life work is on pause for now and it's my game's turn to get some attention.

I actually haven't considered what kind of sound I want for this yet. If anyone knows of a good list/library of sounds for fantasy setting games (magic, horror, sparkle sounds etc), I will be eternally grateful of you sharing that with me. Full credits will be provided.

Thank you guys for the support. Venetia: I was just thinking about having a "mana bar" during my pause, and I think I figured out a way to make that work. Also it will actually start off as a "story mode" game where there'll be one big boss in the end to defeat, and ends the story. I'm crossing my fingers to hope that I'll have enough time to integrate an "endless mode" that keeps a score until you are destroyed.

Til then, stay tuned!!

 

[Jason]

An endless/survival mode would be very easy to add, that's currently what my game is, although I'm going the level route eventually, and depending on how many events I have left over, I'll be making an survival mode too, but basically you just have to add onto the event where the enemies die, to respawn them back on the map again (This is currently what I have for the humans on my game, and I have a 1 second wait before respawning them, it's very easy to do), and voila! you have an endless amount of enemies!

 

[BlueScope]

As for sounds, the combination I'm going with is jamendo.com for background music, and freesounds.org for sound effects. Both are licensed under CC, so it should be perfect for what we're handling here.
Might want to have a look into that, even though you might need to create an account for both. I should also add that I haven't actually downloaded anything from either, just checked out the selection... and while jamendo is a bit fiddly to search in, they're both great and very useable webpages.

Good luck with finishing in time!

 

[rosareven]

Thank you so much BlueScope. I don't mind signing up things as long as I can use the sounds for free and for the purpose of this contest. May be for my future hobby games too if their terms of use permit.

Tonight (it's night time right now here) I've gotten less productive than I wanted and I feel bad that I don't have any major update to show. I'm feeling too tired after came back from work to catch up where I left off four days ago, and there are a few things where I find myself hitting against a brick wall. Getting rusted with the engine is a deadly thing to happen! I should have at least fiddle with it half an hour everyday to keep myself fresh during the days I'm busy in RL. Another lesson learned.

I fear that I won't be able to punch out updates as frequently as Jason and Glitch, due to most of my energy being spent on my RL commitments, but now that I've started it, I'll finish it at the best of my ability.

 

[AeroLowe]

I fear that I won't be able to punch out updates as frequently as Jason and Glitch, due to most of my energy being spent on my RL commitments, but now that I've started it, I'll finish it at the best of my ability.

Agh, I know how you feel. They've given me a lot of inspiration, but with everything I have to do in life, I can only get in about an hour of working on the project each day.

That's why time has to be spent productively. The time that you spend lazing around while having Construct 2 open is one of the most deadliest reasons why a game is rushed when the deadline comes. That's pretty hard to do, though.

But good luck, rosareven! Try to get at least a few minutes of playtime in; as long as it's fun, it's worth it!

 

[rosareven]

Yes! I did it! I punched out more updates!

If for any reason you have my game link bookmarked, please use the link in my main post again, because I'm taking Venetia's suggestion of renaming the index page for now to save other people having to clear the cache of my game whenever I upload a new one. (I know I have that problem myself and ctrl+5 didn't work for me)

Game update is going to be on a quick pause for now while I go beautify my post, make my user bar, show off others' user bars and other social stuff. I'll be doing those until I doze off tonight (it's night right now here) and updates will be back on track after I wake up.

Quick list of updates:
- Implemented ambient light, using Construct 2's lighting example in the installation

- Your orb can be destroyed now! The brightness of the orb is the equivalent to its "health". Brightness can be regained by killing the enemies, but act fast... I haven't added a replay button yet so you'll have to refresh the page in order to replay for now.

- You can't see your enemies until they are within your light range. I'll have to figure out a better way for the enemies to enter the light instead of just suddenly appear. As a cheap solution I do plan to use pitch-black colour sprites tomorrow as enemies so that they blend into the darkness, but I'll come up with something, or if you guys have suggestion I'm open to any possibilities.

- Venetia's suggestion of a fluid "mana bar" for soul essence is implemented. You can see the bar gaining fluidly and deducted fluidly when you use the right click special attack, but you need to wait very short split second standing still and holding the right click before the special attack starts charging. You can regain brightness if you kill something with the special attack, but not absorbing soul essence with it.

- The HUD you see right now is a rough temporary placement. It'll be redone into something more visually pleasing.

- The "boss" that I mentioned is yet to be there, so right now it's just a simple endless survival game that, if you do it right, you will probably never die. Incentives will be there, I promise!

 

[rosareven]

Just a quick bump to mention that: 1. I'm not dead yet 2. I'm at that time of the week again when I have to deal with study for 2-3 days before I get back on track with the game, but I've got todos mapped out on a mindmap waiting to be implemented before the due date. Between now and then I'll be nosing around and socialise (as I have been) when I don't have the engine available to get hands dirty with.

This is going to sound like a rush, but my list of todos will be as follow:

• Implement the boss that concludes the story mode
• Music and sounds - I have a few tracks in mind that I'm requesting permission to use for this contest, but I'll soon find alternatives if I don't get a reply from the musician
• Flesh out the swarming enemies and divide them into two different flavours
• Split story mode and survival mode

Meanwhile, I'm all ears for any comments and suggestions that you may have!

 

[afgho]

Nice game and cool effects, to avoid enemies suddenly appearing you could set their opacities following the distance from the player/border, juste create a for each enemies event then a set opacity action with

"Light.Width/2-distance(Enemies.X, Enemies.Y, Light.X, Light.Y)"

 

[rosareven]

Wow afgho, thank you so much for that tip. Now I have an urge to drop my homework just to put that into my event sheet ><

 

[rosareven]

Quick update: I got permission from the musician of my favourite tracks to use his music for my game!

For those of you who happen to be a fan of MS Paint Adventures, you'll recognise this song: Flare by Clark "Plazmataz" Powell. His music style is really soft and mesmerizing. He's got a solo album Medium that I highly recommend.

I'll have to be careful about adding music and sound without prolonging the loading time...

 

[rosareven]

I've been trying to resist, but I'm going to decide to back out from the competition, because I won't be able to finish this in time.

I came to realised that my planning for this is really poor, and now that the due date is near, I am confronted with various real life commitments that have been pushing back the progress of my game day by day. This week, the last week of the competition, for example, has been packed with at least one thing per day that interrupts me from working on the game. By the time I've handled whatever real life it was that I had to and finally got to sit down, I'm too tired to put together anything for the game.

That being said, I'm only abandoning the competition, but not the game! I still want to finish it as my very first game that I attempted to make, and upload it onto Scirra Arcade as a milestone of my learning experience. I just can't finish it in one day at this rate. Very sorry for not being able to keep up my effort in this competition. =(

And with this, I'm also giving up my chance for a standard Construct 2 license, but I have considered purchasing it anyway even if I don't win a copy, because the Scirra brothers deserve to be recognised for their brilliant effort towards this program. I won't buy it immediately because I'm saving up at the moment, but it's definitely on my wish list XD

To the rest of you: best of luck!! All your entries are absolutely awesome and entertained me whenever I sneak-played them at work. I'd be a really bad judge because I won't be able to make up my mind who does a better job.

 

[BlueScope]

Ah... that really sucks. It's definately a good decision to keep working on this, and I hope you can create something awesome in the end! (or, try to resist some more and turn something in )

Enjoy stressless Friday & Saturday