[PROTOTYPE] Attack The Vault - 2D, Top Down Nuclear RPG/Roguelike - Steal the waterchip!
Hey guys,
Please check out the game I have been working on this year and let me know your thoughts.
Web Build (13 megs - sorry! ) - http://www.attackthevault.com/
And the PC .exe (24 megs) : http://stabackup.s3.amazonaws.com/attack/Attack0126052015.zip
It's relatively feature complete, there is a lot more to add and fine tune but it is playable and hopefully winnable - above all it is hard as hell.
You are stuck in a post apocalyptic world, your waterchip is broken and to survive (and win) you need to steal one!
You start off in the very vault that has a working chip and you need to use your cunning to grab it and escape.
You can mine, craft TNT, kill critters, manage your food, get radiation poisoning and use a basic XP system etc.
I suspect that I need to supply a tutorial of some sort but I have kept the UI and game-play as simple and intuitive as possible.
I have built a level editor that will allow easy production of hand crafted worlds.
Load/Save is not done yet - I am loading the world data programmatically, so the system should be trivial to implement.
NOTE
The initial level load takes a few minutes.
If you cannot use a tool, check that you have the INTELLIGENCE to use it, I'll def add proper error messages in future builds...
To use ladders and ropes, stand over them and click on the character - you will climb up or down etc.
Avoid Green radioactive clouds - manage your radioactivity on the top left.
Night time is harmless in this build but it will be more dangerous in later builds.
Make a fire to cook meat for lots of HUNGER rejuv.
Drop flares to see where you are going when you are mining.
You can sell stuff to the old dude on the top of the surface map.
Avoid critters, but you need to kill them to increase your XP.
Use your concealed inventory to store important things that you don't want to loose when you die.
- Nic
Comments
Wow someone apologizing over 13 megs, "you the real mvp"
The game looks interesting! Will definitely come back later today to provide thoughts.
but yeah a short tutorial or first 5min gameplay video will help us get started.
I'm struggling with stuff which should be basic, like equipping a hazmat suit, etc.
[EDIT] add right click to equip
Every now and then there is an irritating beep sound.
First time I loaded it (Win8.1 64bit laptop), the keyboard controls didn't work, I think it is because I first tried to browse everything with mouse.
Since the game is so hard, I really would like it to pause when I'm browsing the UI, etc.
[EDIT] add auto pause? or option for disabling it, I see now the button.
Looks great, love the minimap and radioactive clouds...
I'm will try to figure it out the controls more, and leave better feedback as soon as I can.
[EDIT] going better, but darn lost hazmat suit after I die! noooo. Need to figure out how to put stuff into concealed inventory, but Hazmat suit will always want to be used?
BTW you came a lot further than I did with my game Meemo's Planet (which was my first try at a game, when it was to early in my career. similar kinda topdown /crafting / survival...so well done! I understand the amount of work you put in!)
However, I recommend you spend a lot of time to make the user experience more convenient (intuitive / easier) in early game play. Things like using equipment and collecting resources is very easy in real life.
I will be following this project, it has a huge potential! I'm a big fan of Don't Starve and survival crafting games...
I am experimenting with the player interactions, I am wondering if using the mouse to interact is a good idea. Maybe I should stick with keyboard only for the player and use the mouse in the Inventory? How did you find the mouse and WASD combo?
In terms of the auto pause while managing inventory, I think that's a good idea, i'll add that in - the game is hard enough without the realtime threat while the inventory is open.
It does need a tutorial - agreed! :)
If you play a little more, let me know your thoughts.
Please give it a try - http://www.attackthevault.com/
- Web build, now only 10 megs! :)
Perhaps make that you can drag inventory items directly to your characters portrait to use them (eat them).
Also perhaps make that axes don't break as easily seems a little weird unless of-course that's the mechanic your using to get players to craft better axes?
Love the game idea and feel, personally (don't take this as advice) I loved when the vault was radio active. It gives the game a kind of horror feel... as if its everywhere and you cant escape it you can only live with it. Sure the surface is full of it but when your just starting out and the first impression you get is that there is stuff that can hurt you everywhere... I like it.
Of-course this is counter intuitive for new players or when you just want to get your basic gear.
See I'm all nostalgic already!
Looking forward to the windows version of your update my browser is somewhat sticky with keys for some reason.
But the setting does seem rad. I love a good post apocalyptic radioactive hellscape. There's obviously a lot of inspiration from Fallout here (with the vaults), and that's a good thing.
I personally hate tutorials. I'm glad there's no tutorial here, but at the same time I really couldn't figure much out. I'd like for the game to teach me how to play...
The sequence in the beginning sort of feels like it might be a kind of tutorial, or at least a safe place for the player to experiment before continuing. Obviously the guards shouldn't walk in and beat you up if that's the case. But (if the guards didn't beat you) I think that'd be a great way to start the game. Offer players a safe place to learn to pick things up and even craft things before they head into the wilderness.
Like I said, that wasn't exactly my experience of it though (because I had to leave, as the guards would wander in and beat me if I didn't move).
Here was my experience of the game as it happened:
I gain consciousness in a small room. There's a door to the South that I cannot interact with. It doesn't tell me if it is locked or not, and clicking over the lock to the right of it doesn't do anything or respond in any way.
I look around a bit. Notice I have some health and some inventories. Looks like I might be able to craft things later. I try left clicking and right clicking on objects around me, and nothing happens.
Then a guard walks in beats me up, then it tells me I have been locked up for good.
I realize I can left click on things now, because it made a sound effect when I clicked on the guard. I punch down the wall.
But the objects in my inventory have been lost, so I restart the game.
I try punching down the wall, but two guards walk in this time and beat me up, so I restart the game.
This time I punch down the wall, and pick up a rock, then after clicking on the rope for a bit I try standing on it and clicking on it. This takes me to a new place filled with green radiation.
I try picking up things around me in this cave. It seems I cannot pick things up while standing on them (the opposite of what the rope taught me), I catch a lot of radiation, but pick a lot of things up, then pass out anyway and I wake up in a new place.
I now have no items. But I find the hasmat suit in the wasteland house, and figure out that selecting my inventory I can drag it onto my person. Now I seem to resist radiation.
I click around and walk outside. Now I'm starving. I find some meat inside a locker, but I can't seem to put it in my inventory. Dragging it onto my inventory (like I dragged the hasmat suit onto my person) doesn't do anything. Right clicking doesn't do anything. Double clicking doesn't do anything.
I pass out from hunger.
I wake up again, but now I have no hasmat suit. And I'm still starving.
I give up at this point, and start to write this post.
I think that difficulty is important for a survival game. I don't think you need to make this easier, but making it more intuitive is probably necessary. It might also be too difficult, but since I don't know how to work the interface I really don't know.
The fact that you're always under time pressure does make it hard to experiment. Maybe if the start of the game in the cell was a bit more expansive, and the guards would put food trays into the cell now and then to stop you from starving, and there were a couple challenges there that you had to pass in order to progress, that might give the players a chance to discover how the game works before escaping the jail and being forced to survive in the dangerous outside world.
I really feel like a tutorial is a last resort. More context sensitive reactions for the mouse, and a safe place in which to experiment and get the basics down, are what I'd suggest trying first. There's a bit about creating spaces for players to experiment and learn in this article: http://stfj.net/DesigningForProblem-Solvers/ (it's mostly near the end, but there are a lot of good ideas scattered throughout)
I really like the mechanic of passing out and being revived, either in a jail cell or in a wasteland dwelling. I LOVE that death is part of the narrative in this game... So often in games death is some kind of reset button, as if everything that went before didn't really happened, what you've done here makes player actions more always part of the narrative, and that's rad.
But losing the hasmat suit felt like a blow that I couldn't recover from. And not being able to take meat from a locker and eat it (even though I assume it is possible somehow) leaves me unable to progress. I did restart the game one more time to see if I could pick things up from a locker, and I still don't know.
I love that death is wrapped into the narrative of the story, but the game is still forcing me to restart, which seems at odds with this. I'd expect that the hasmat suit could be found stored in a locker or something after the player dies. It's too important surely to just vanish?
Thanks :)
First of all, I don't ever play these kinds of games. I don't play survival games and so I have come to this one with incredibly fresh eyes, and so if there are any things that involve the gameplay or inventory management that are obvious to those used to the genre then they aren't obvious to the newbie.
Another first of all is that for some reason I couldn't get the browser version to work for your second build and so any things that have been fixed or improved since then did not apply to when I played. So the next time you put one of your builds out would it be possible to include a Windows version too? I'd like to try play this game properly and I have no idea why it refuses to load up at all on my browser.
Losing your inventory each time you die does ramp up the stakes and the fact that no matter what happens to you the world goes on without you does mean that you'll always be on your toes, but it does also mean that a new player just loses everything before understanding why it happened or even how to prevent it.
Either having a tutorial, or a more intuitive opening, would be a far better way to start the game up. I couldn't figure out how to eat, or how to craft anything (although I think this could be because of the fact that everything seems to require nuclear waste and I only found that once when I ran screaming into the radioactive wasteland after losing the hazmat suit; I died shortly after getting the material though and so I never used it).
I think the combination of WASD and the mouse takes a bit of getting used to, but I've never liked it when you use keyboard only and then using an inventory suddenly switches to mouse controls, although this is mostly because I'm lazy and don't like switching between different controls. So I think that the combo of mouse and keyboard is fine, although a bit more of an intuitive opening would also tell me that I have to use both and the only reason I knew to try both was because your initial post informed me of some of the basic controls.
I'm looking forward to playing some more because I think the setting is really cool... although if you could replace that infernal beeping with something else I think it would make it just a little more pleasant to play.
Ill have another build out this week and I'd love you to give it a spin (will include a downloadable version).
Download windows build (21 megs): http://stabackup.s3.amazonaws.com/attack/Attack_03.zip
Website: http://www.attackthevault.com/
I have not worked on proper tutorial/learning progression YET, but I think the new UI will make things a little easier.
It was very informative and I hope to make the game even better based on this.
As I had previously stated these are not the kinds of games I ever play and so I had no idea what to expect going in, and while your initial build left me intrigued but dead and without any means of surviving the harsh game world I felt that your last Windows build was a much better way of retaining the difficulty while being a little kinder to the newbie by not automatically taking away everything they might have worked towards as soon as they die.
Many of my qualms with the game were purely technical issues that shouldn't be too difficult to fix/adjust:
-There are some item detection problems and sometimes I struggled with being able to pick things up or interact with the environment. Although it is much better than the original build I played.
-Would it be possible to create/acquire some more sound effects for the game? The beeping is incredibly irritating and there is no way to lower it in-game. I had to drop the volume of the game from my desktop, although I do understand that such features (like volume control and such) will be added in when you have the game itself in a more finished state, but that beeping was really getting to me in a very short time. Although many of the sounds feel rather intrusive, and for instance the chickens feel very out of place in both sound and setting.
-Much like the item detection issues there are some detection issues with enemies and fairly often I felt that I had died unfairly due to not being able to hit my enemy despite some rather frantic clicking.
-The hotkeys for inventory and such are on the other side of the keyboard and could easily be placed around the movement keys seeing as my other hand is working the mouse. Most of the keyboard is not used so arbitrarily having "i" access the inventory is unnecessary.
The game itself is far more intuitive this time around and I was actually able to figure out how to eat and craft (previously I had never managed to get at that nuclear waste that is used in seemingly everything, and so crafting was impossible). Looting is also a lot more intuitive with the use of the keep and discard buttons on the top and bottom of containers.
I was more willing to keep trying when I died because I didn't simply lose everything, and so I was able to explore more of the world.
Now seeing as this is a genre I don't generally play, and so I feel some people may like it this way, but the game feels rather aimless and I had no idea what I was actually supposed to be doing. I know that there's something about a waterchip but I have no idea what that is, where that is, why I want it or why I should care. I am a very narrative focused gamer so these may be questions that only one of my kind may ask.
Thanks again for your time! - Nic
I love that menu. The animated menu is great. The loading time is NOT. I realise it is a prototype, but maybe some filler text like "dressing enemies..." or "concatinating/splicing subteranean entities" or something will at least put my mind at ease that the loading process is up to something important and worthy of my time? :)
I LOVE the graphics. Those floating toxic clouds, and some insect thing bit me, it sounded and looked disgusting and I had to take a quick shower while the game was paused.
The start is a bit huh? TDLR; not sure what was posted before, but a tutorial and a big ol arrow to something is needed desparately.
I strangely get a Terraria meets RimWorld vibe here, which is good I think. I got as far as getting the hazmat suit.
i'd try and avoid any references/terminology/lingo to anything that is Fallout. It's a nuclear wasteland, sorry place. Which is interesting in itself. Make it unique and avoid terms like "vault" etc that might make people think of another game.
The UI/interface and inventory screens... very impressive. I can see a hell of a lot of work has gone into this already.
Level design. Are you using Tiled? I'd like to see some randomly generated levels instead of static stuff on replays at some point. I do like destructible terrain and my bleeding fists while escaping the starter chamber made me smile.
Would be cool to see objective based gameplay ala Alien Swarm in this. Maybe there is? I haven't played more than 5 minutes here.
All in all I am very impressed and cannot wait to see how this progresses.
K
Thanks!
I love both Terraria and Rimworld.
The load time does need work, the actual tile/graphics part loads in 3 seconds - its the precalc of the pathfinding that takes the time. Ill think about a better way to maybe stagger this load during the game. It may be over optimization at this stage, but each AI unit calcs all its possible targets and adds them to a shared list that every other AI subsequently checks before they move. It brings the A* graph calc time to zero.
For the levels I have built a tool to design the levels pretty quickly. I have always been more interested in the technology behind the games than the games themselves, and I spent a year developing a tile based level editor. It's very similar to prison architect - you can draw levels up quickly in game (not in unity). It needs way more polish to be made public but that is my intention.
The AI is pretty dumb at the moment, the vault dudes will chase the player or seek them but the critters on the surface just wonder around - they do need more work.
Thanks again!
Nic