Indie Sonucido: The Mage - A turn-based Dungeon Crawler

[KeighnMcDeath]

I've been thinking of getting some old ipad that can sync with a keyboard. I just need online connection to download Silversword (the bardstale like game). Playing it on a iphone is fucking tedious.

 

[Moaning_Clock]

I had an Android tablet and got a Bluetooth Keyboard. Used that combo for a while for writing - was pretty cheap. But I never really used an iPad so I don't know much about the advantages.

 

[Moaning_Clock]

I thought it was time to switch to a Desktop PC. It's an old used ThinkCentre that my fiancee bought at work for 35€. Replaced the harddrive with my SSD and the thing is running great. Workflow is much smoother, the CPU of the ThinkPad was struggling to give me anything more than 20 FPS but now I get 50-60 FPS with 720p and MSAA 4 on. Which is awesome! I like to work on older hardware since performance fixes matter more but the 10 year old CPU was just a tad too old for my needs. But it did a well enough job for over a year!

The performance chart still is mostly right but the normal category is only true for the Intel half if you have ram in dual channel. I've noticed that because the ThinkCentre has only one stick of ram and the performance is worse than it should be with the normal settings (30 FPS instead of 40). But I don't think that's much of a concern and writing too much stuff on the system requirements list, just confuses people.

Spoiler

 

[Moaning_Clock]

Couple new screenshots from the newest level!

Spoiler

 

[Moaning_Clock]

Hey guys,

I finally wanted to talk about the incident system I implemented. It could be seen in the newest trailer but I didn't mention it really.

It's a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure screen and helps to introduce some stuff that would be otherwise harder, impossible or way worse. These scene for example - the player touches a pressure plate and a trap unfolds. How would I do this in the Dungeon Crawler formula? Especially with these two options. It also increases the number of skillchecks in the game a lot (it is the main part of the game were skillchecks happen) and can lead to some interesting options.
Since the dialogues are pretty short and notes you'll find are also short, these are the "text-heavy parts" of the game (lol). These screens are drawn by my fiancee who also does all the art for Steam and Itch for the game (and the website too). I think it visually enhances the game to have some drawn stuff aside from cutscenes (which there aren't any).

The incident screens aren't used a lot but from time to time one will pop up - a bit more than the puzzles. What do you think about them?

Made some other progress too. Had an idea for a simple puzzle which I implemented right away!

 

[Moaning_Clock]

Found a weird attack sound for this guy and an even weirder one for his death.

Spoiler

Even though many studios don't buy premade graphical assets, normally they tend to use soundpacks but it is every time kind of irritating when I hear a specific sound in different games, especially if it's a key sound. So I always try to make at least a couple of sound myself and in some of my older games (Intra-System: Trust Issues) almost all sounds are made by myself. I reuse some of them, so maybe I'm creating the irritating effect sometimes with my own games for my other games lol

I think it pays off and enhances the atmosphere to have unique sounds that are all made specifically for the game but it certainly takes a lot of time, so for Sonucido I have a mixture of free sounds from online sources and a few recorded.

I tend to not use any soundpacks to avoid sounding like the next Indie title - I mostly search for niche creative commons 0 sounds which I often change slightly (cut specific parts, pitching a bit, etc.) and tend to avoid sounds that are downloaded 30k times or more. I like to use stuff that has 1k downloads or even less.

It's certainly a part of making games that doesn't get enough attention imo

 

[Moaning_Clock]

While searching for new ways to get small performance benefits I stumbled across the anisotropic filtering setting. I never really bothered and always set it to max for gaming after I got my first desktop PC. I knew that there was a difference and even watched videos but never could see it in my own game. Until now! Can you spot the difference? (One is with Anisotropic Filtering set to 4 and the other to 16).

Obviously I could just let the player decide but here's the catch - I couldn't find a way to change the anisotropic filtering from code. Maybe this is a quirk of Godot which will get fixed or it's just not documented and I will stumble upon it.

It doesn't seem to have a noticeable impact on performance even on the Intel HD 530 graphics I'm rocking at the moment. I saw an increase with anisotropic turned all the way down (which looked awful) by about 1-2 FPS compared to anisotropic 16 and this could be just some random spike elsewhere.
At the moment I think about just increasing it to 8 or 16 (from the default 4) and call it a day. I need to do a bit of research if 16 is supported on low-end graphics (msaa 8/16 for example isn't) but if it is, it's likely the best way.

 

[Moaning_Clock]

So, I did some tests and it turns out that there is a performance decrease which varies from 2-3 FPS. I tested it with a machine that is below the 'bare minimum' specs (see the spoiler tag in the third post on this page) and it can handle anisotropic filtering level 16 just fine. So this will be the default. Most computers that will execute the game will likely exceed the 'Normal' requirements easily and are likely in the 'High' or '4K' category (or above), so I shouldn't bother too much. If I happen to find a solution to changing it, I'll put it into the game.

 

[Moaning_Clock]

I found a way to change it, albeit not through code. In the Godot Engine games you can apparently place an override.cfg file in the directory of the game and change settings with it.
The problem is that in Godot Anisotropic Filtering seems to be a change that is not changeable while the game is running; you need to restart. I could include code to make it changeable in the game but than I would need some notification that the user has to restart yada yada yada ... I don't think this is really beneficial but if anyone really cares, they can modify the text file which I'll likely include with the game (or if I happen to not do it, just make one).

That's especially interesting because that likely means that you can fiddle around with every Godot game and change settings the developer didn't intended or did thought of (this includes special window sizes, a lot in regards to shadows, disabling/enabling vsync and more). Maybe interesting for very low-spec hardware gamers but also people who want to get the highest settings even higher than the developer made available.

 

[Moaning_Clock]

I think the puzzles for the game are pretty much done. There are a couple logic puzzles and two a little bit more lateral ones. If I don't happen to have another cool idea, I think this will suffice!

Here's another cool looking but useless perspective screenshot!

 

[Moaning_Clock]

I always thought I needed to optimize the game even more because I had some stutters here and there. Turns out it's actually mostly because of my monitor. I'm working on an uncommon 75 Hz display and it seems that there are minor problems with Godot and monitors which differ from the standard 60 Hz displays.



It's not unplayable or anything alike, just a small stutter/jitter for a moment sometimes but I wanted to fix that - if it's an Engine thing I need to accept it, especially since it's mostly something that frustrated me and not something that got ever mentioned.
I will optimize the game further nevertheless just because it's something that I like to do - but it doesn't have to be a priority since it runs well on a wide range of hardware.

Making progress everyday, working on a couple of different levels, adding some decoration to the dungeons!

 

[Moaning_Clock]

A few days ago I played the game a little bit with my fiancee and since she has a lot more knowledge about art and colours, she pointed out to me that the colour of the water was way to strong and looked out of place. Changed that, I think this hits the atmosphere a lot better. At the moment, I'm mostly focusing on different details and improve them - adding a plant here or putting a slightly broken wall there. I tend to skip over these details while working full steam on new levels and it's great to come back and enhance the dungeons a little bit.

I still do experiments here and there (like the anisotropic filtering thing) to figure stuff in the Engine out that might be useful in this and/or future games!

New

Old

Spoiler

 

[hello friend]

Yeah it definitely looks better

 

[Moaning_Clock]

Thanks!

 

[Moaning_Clock]

My fiancee took a look at the dirt parts of the game and it got the same treatment as the water texture. I think it looks a lot more like dirt and moodier in a way. Sitting at 925 wishlists rn, the additions come way slower but I'm not putting much time into marketing the game at the moment, so it's expected. Although I should produce a new video.

New 1

Old 1

Spoiler

New 2

Old 2

Spoiler

 

[Moaning_Clock]

Two new screenshots!

Work is a bit slow rn. I had a list with all the levels which were planned but I might have lost it while moving. I have an idea how far along I am but it's not concrete enough for my taste.
I certainly need to do a video soon. The last one was in November - I do it this week.

btw. Apparently I'm now a year on the codex and can now enjoy my ability to brofist like a newfag.

 

[Moaning_Clock]

If you are a programmer - do you know that feeling when you find a bug randomly, think your game is broken and it's weird that you never really encountered that bug since to it's very easy to trigger just to find out that you already knew about the bug and it's extremely easy to fix?? Completely retarded.



In other news I'm fixing extremely stupid bugs because I forgot an additional boolean flip. Busy work ...


I also recorded the audio for a new progress report which will be done soon. It will be the longest one yet which isn't hard since all the other once are around 5 minutes or less.

 

[Tyranicon]

If you are a programmer - do you know that feeling when you find a bug randomly, think your game is broken and it's weird that you never really encountered that bug since to it's very easy to trigger just to find out that you already knew about the bug and it's extremely easy to fix?? Completely retarded.



In other news I'm fixing extremely stupid bugs because I forgot an additional boolean flip. Busy work ...


I also recorded the audio for a new progress report which will be done soon. It will be the longest one yet which isn't hard since all the other once are around 5 minutes or less.

I've had it happen several times where I encountered a bug, scratched my head over it, and then realized I had notes from the last time I fixed it, only for the notes to be indecipherable to a sane human being.

I'm not a smart dude.

 

[Moaning_Clock]

I've had it happen several times where I encountered a bug, scratched my head over it, and then realized I had notes from the last time I fixed it, only for the notes to be indecipherable to a sane human being.

Commenting the comments would be the obvious solution

I have written one piece of code in another game which I never understand at first glance. I always need like 5 minutes to understand it but tend to just leave it there. I seriously need to comment it.

While working actively on the game I try to write the scripts as stupid as possible so I can understand them fast lol

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Moaning_Clock]

Thanks for posting!

I had a little chat today in a discord server and remembered a very old video about Sonucido: The Mage - it's only two weeks in but I really like how much it has progressed since then!

 

[Infinitron]

Short video today about the traditional movement that is now an option and Anisotropic Filtering!

 

[Moaning_Clock]

Completed a new level yesterday and you can now move traditionally on stairs (you simply jump instantly to the top or down) if you want to!

It was also time to let my fiancee playtest the game. The last time was quite a while ago (December or November, I think?) and I created a few new levels since then and worked a lot on different details.

I won't go into the feedback since it would be weird (ayo, my fiancee said teh game very gud, pls buy it).
But it was interesting to see how long it took her. When I test the whole game, I mostly speedrun it to get a rough estimate. Obviously I remember all the puzzle solutions, skip most optional potions etc. It takes me around 50 minutes. If I would train to be even faster, I could maybe do it in 40-45 minutes.
She took a little over 100 minutes. She does most of the side stuff, much exploring but she also played the game before, knows the overall basics of it and doesn't take very long with puzzles. Since I don't have saving implemented yet (it's not hard, it's just nicer to have almost all variables laid out) I decided to make it impossible to die for her in combat. Everytime the health points fell to 0, I upped it back to 20. She would have died a couple of times, so I suspect the time for the usual player would be 110 minutes to 120 minutes.

From what I have planned the playtime for one playthrough will be around 3-3.5 hours, at least a second one makes sense but this one will be faster. I think the overall playtime for a 2-playthroughs-run would be 5.5 hours (which would be enough to see 95% of the game).

 

[Moaning_Clock]

I needed a picture of multiple people for one of the incident screens and my fiancee asked me, if she would need to show any women. I thought about it and my conclusion was: I don't have any woman in the game lol
It was an accident but I thought it would be good to have a little bit more variety. So I decided to model the first woman in Sonucido!

This was the process:

Spoiler

 

[Serus]

I needed a picture of multiple people for one of the incident screens and my fiancee asked me, if she would need to show any women. I thought about it and my conclusion was: I don't have any woman in the game lol
It was an accident but I thought it would be good to have a little bit more variety. So I decided to model the first woman in Sonucido!

This was the process:

View attachment 23157
View attachment 23159
View attachment 23160

Spoiler

Or you could ignore women, and also remove legs from all characters. I heard legless manliness is a thing thanks to Battle Brothers.