Hey Guild Leaders! This month I worked a lot on the new areas.
Without further ado, here's some of what I've been working on during August.
Procedural Tile Heights

The first step to making tile-height matter in gameplay: Having significant tile height difference! Here's another example:
But... that caused some issues with the mouse-aiming.

So I had to re-do the system for it (it uses proper colliders now!):

Should be much better now!
Procedural Stairs
Continuing the trend of procedural additions, I added stairs that get generated in the new floor this week!

These should serve as natural chokepoints and should help make navigating the new floors more interesting.
Pushing with tiles of different Heights
While messing around in the new areas, I noticed something uncanny...

I don't have to be an expert to tell you that this is
NOT how pushing should look!
So I fixed it - walls are now proper obstacles for pushed units:

I also thought a bit about pushing enemies from higher platform to lower ones -

I figured it'd be pretty fun if they receive damage when dropping from a certain height - the rule here is similar to damage when pushing off a unit, the damage they receive is equal to a quarter of their max health.
But... what if they drop onto an obstacle? or another unit? I obviously can't have two units in the same tile...
So how about they just
bounce?
Visuals & Fog
In addition to all the procedural generation stuff, I also worked on the visuals of the new areas this month (you can see other versions of the visuals in the #wip channel in the
Netherguild Discord).
Here's a mockup of how it'll look with enemies:

You may have noticed the fog (the red squares around the tiles!) a gray, impenetrable fog will have an effect on gameplay in the Mist City where the fog is denser, but for the Bandit Stronghold the red fog is purely visual.
Planning Out The Entire Game
Every Sunday I reflect on my work that week and plan out the future of Netherguild -
This month I finished planning out the outline of the ENTIRE GAME.
This is an outline of more or less all the floors (actual levels or 'camp' floors) that I plan for Netherguild 1.0 to have on full release.
(Of course, subject to changes, removals and additions, but this is the general outline)
Release Date?

Originally, I wanted to release Netherguild earlier - but with the amount of content I still want to add (like finishing the two new floors, adding a bossfight) before Early Access release, I ended up changing my plans to release it sometime during November this year.
- Until Next Time -
And that's all for this update! Thank you for checking it out, hope it made for a fun read :D
Cheers and see you next time!!
-David
This is a summery of weekly updates over on the Netherguild Discord
[ 2022-09-02 15:00:31 CET ] [ Original post ]