[prototype] Invader Crush

Tuism

2 weeks ago I started this on a whim, and showed it at the previous Joburg meet. The initial response seemed great, so I worked on it some more.

Invader Crush (working title) (tempted to add "Saga") is a roguelike puzzle turn-based high-score shoot-em-up!

Play Invader Crush - available as web or standalone.

What it looks like and what it does:




As usual, I'm not going to speak about the game much, I hope you guys have the chance to give it a play, and I hope that playing alone is enough to understand the game.

It wasn't intended as a mobile-only game, but I'm definitely building it mobile-format first... It's basically compatible all round, though.

I do have a specific question about the game that I'd like to ask your opinion on, though - I'm not sure about the win condition. I'm agonising over two different win conditions: Target mode and killcount mode.

Target - there's a specific target rolling towards you in the wave of enemies, and to defeat the wave you have to hit that target.


or
Kill count - kill X number of invaders to complete a wave.


I have thoughts regarding the pros and cons of each of them, but I'd like to hear your opinion on them, so I don't want to colour your thoughts with mine.

The two modes can be selected at the start of the current build. So please give it a playtest and let me know what you've found about them!

The upgrades aren't functional yet. It's a taste/idea of what I want to still add.


Play Invader Crush - available as web or standalone.

Thanks for checking it out guys!! :D

Karuji

Err super fucking tired right now, so no kind of depth analysis or answering questions.

But gave it a bash and really digging what you've done with it since the JHB meetup. Totally seeing a cool end product for this :3

Pierre

I like the repositioning of mismatched shots a lot. It really gives a feeling of control/push back. I think this was a great modification.

My opinions....

Win conditions
Both methods are interesting... so I considered them through lateral thought perception...

That said... the target mode makes more sense to me.
It just seems more believable to me that the entire force is obliterated by such a game ending device,
I'd prefer this rather than seeing the remaining forces self destruct just because they lost X amount of companions.

But having both conditions as an option or alternating condition might be interesting.
With Kill count I'd have liked to see the remaining forces retreat, rather than explode. But that's just a superficial preference for me.

Presentation.
Small thing... The current white target isn't very obvious as an "end game" device. It still looks a bit too similar to other units. If it was a bit bigger, or if it flashed, it might stand out more as something unique and highly volatile.

Tuism

@Karuji thanks thanks! :D I'll wait till you're less fried and bug you for more depthness :3

@Pierre thanks for your input! Did you give it a play yet? What I found through making it was that I had a lot of preconceived notions about how each of the win cons affected the game, and when I actually built them and played them back-to-back, I realised they affected the play in ways I never thought of!

I agree that chasing down a target makes more narrative sense. I also agree that the "ending" can be reworked to make more sense... Just think of it all as mechanics placeholders for now :P I'm looking for mechanic tweaks before I go about making solid narrative. (I realise I already overdid it :/ )

I'm looking to implement bigger 2x2 enemies, so yes that'll be a thing, but not yet :)

subjectZero

dude I'm hooked!!!!!

dislekcia

I'm curious, what makes you use "roguelike" to describe the game?

Tuism

I say roguelike because:

- Procedural enemies (there'll be more variety to come)
- turn-based, strategic positioning decisions
- permadeath, push as far as you can gameplay
- upgrade skills to combat upgraded difficulty, like a roguelike ladder

The way it's being fleshed reminds me of Dungeon Raid and 868-HACK, though not as deep yet.

Is that overpromising?

dislekcia

I'm not the arbiter of all things roguelike (far from it, heh), but I'm not convinced that you get much out of using it. Yes, overpromising is an issue - people are going to expect certain things when you say "roguelike" at them.

I'd describe this as an arcade progression right now. See if other people start describing it as a roguelike, because right now it's not clear from what's there - it feels a bit buzzwordy... Also, what's a "roguelike ladder"?

Tuism

The roguelike ladder is something I've heard used a few times before describing the progression in roguelikes. You gain experience, loot, skills, level up, becoming procedurally stronger, and that doesn't break the game because the game is procedurally harder. It's a numbers game.

It came up specifically when I was chatting about what I called puzzle roguelikes (my Tris) with other people who made what they called puzzle roguelikes (Overland, Invisible Inc) which lacked the number-based procedural progression, but instead relied on a more binary puzzle progression rather than the gradually increasing number of roguelike progression.

dislekcia

Okay... What did this concept allow you to discuss? (I have to admit to not understanding it very well, right now I'm not sure why it needs a custom term - that just sounds like progression)

Also, what's with procedural all over the place? When you level up in a game, you generally become stronger in a known way, not procedurally - your progression stats are pre-defined even though players might choose some stats over others. Enemies in roguelikes also tend to have pre-defined progressions - an orc in DC:SS is going to have similar stats to all other orcs and appear on the same set of floors most of the time. You could have procedural difficulty where enemies respond to player level or measured power in some way (Oblivion does this, as does Fallout - I tried it with SpaceHack) but those games aren't really referred to as roguelikes so they seem to be missing something...

... I'd suggest that the things they're missing are an extreme focus on a limited set of resources (and on efficient use of those dwindling resources) and on managing uncertainty and high "swinginess" of risk. If you screw up just a little bit, everything falls apart. Roguelikes are often about playing in that "everything is falling apart, aaaah" state.

If you could make a shooter feel like that, that'd be awesome, BTW :)

Tuism

The difference between roguelike progression, and, say, Oblivion, Fallout, is that roguelike progression is literally taking a whole pile of elements and randomly draws a bunch of them and throws them at the player - both beneficial and detrimental. Picking up random stuff with random attributes fighting random monsters with random abilities. Sometimes it works out to the player's favour, sometimes to the enemies' favour. As a player you try to mitigate the detrimental while maximising the beneficial, and know when to push your luck and when to run away, all within a largely random system. That's procedural.

Oblivion and Fallout have hand crafted progression - the orcs are those orcs, they'll have those things, and the levels are designed, the spells are these, the weapons are those. There are A LOT of them, but they're not procedurally randomly mashed up like Diablo, Borderlands <-- those are roguelikes to me.

Dwindling resources is certainly a part of roguelikes, and yes the "everything is falling apart" state I think is a consequence of roguelikes being precariously balanced on a bunch of random numbers, positives barely keeping up with the negatives, and when something goes wrong - either becuase either side of the random equation goes higher than the other side can handle, or because the player makes a mistake, that intricate random system collapses and results in the player's loss.

I completely agree that that state is cool to be able to have, and I definitely want to build a system capable of that :) If I can manage it in this, great! If not... I'll have learned something :)

By the way, did you notice that it's turn-based? It's not really a shooter, it just LOOKS like a shooter, it's very much I step, enemies step, etc.