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Very early days for this, but I thought someone might be vaguely interested.



This actually started out by my other half wanting a DROD clone for android, then sort of developed organically (lit. aimlessly) from there.
What it is now is the barest bones of a turn/tile based system. The idea is that ultimately it will be two-player co-op (or single player multi-character) heavily tied to the concepts of light, visibility, and puzzles that need to be approached from multiple angles at one. Although while I'm knocking it into shape I'm finding the idea of a game not a million miles away from the feel of the original "Alien" movie quite appealing.

Pretty self explanatory in use so far - clicking tiles adjacent to the characters moves them, clicking a character or the top-right button swaps characters, and the compass shows the minimap. I've tried to make navigation as fluid as possible for both PC and phones, but I'm curious as to hear opinions. There's also a glitch or two in the lighting setup, but I've already got a fix for that (the lighting actually works for blending multiple colours from different sources, although all the light in the current demo is white). Also the 'turn' system isn't in place here, but that's also an easy fix.

Absolutely all the assets are placeholders. Especially the 'music', for which I apologise for in advance.

Windows zip attached...

This looks really great, well done!

Very cool, Love the flash light from above effect, be a cool rogue like dungeon game, add a little random maze generation, a mini map, some cool looking dragon warrior like mobs (enemies for those that do not play WoW). One problem I have, seems I have to keep clicking on a tile to keep moving, be much better if he just kept walking in the direction if I held the mouse button down. And he doesnt seem to turn and face the opposite direct , example : if heading up and you click downward he still looks north. Turn based combat sounds cool, Not enough of that anymore if you ask me ( Big Dragon Quest fan here). Hope you get this done, cause it looks like it would be fun too play, good luck!

Looks very nice.
I love turnbased battles

I have thought many times of doing a lighting system like this but never got around to doing it. Looks way better than I thought it would. But you really need some pathfinding, but hopefully you are already thinking of that. Especially turn based games will need that. That is I want to click a few squares ahead and my character moves there. Also, great work on the map.

This reminds me a lot of Space Hulk for Amiga. I had a demo of that when I was a kid, which was extremely hard (the map was huge). I recommend that you check it out if you can find it as it would be great inspiration for your game. This also reminds me a bit of the original Xcom, but that one used isometric graphics and the overall feel is different. Anyway, both games are single player with multiple characters, a whole team. Like 8 people in both games IIRC.

Space Hulk used wider corridors than you have, now that might be a problem with phones though due to their small screens. I have always thought about using a large + shape selection system for something like this. You would need something that is quite a bit larger than the finger. Since it's turn based this would work: After the player selects a tile to go to the selection changes to indicate which tile to move to, but also an area around it that the player can tap to confirm. Holding this area reactivates the targeting + again. Tapping outside the area deselects. This system should allow you to have more on the screen. But I don't know how good it will be or how small the tiles can be.

Looking forward to seeing more of this game

It's not called Space Hulk, it's called Space Crusade http://youtu.be/ftmqh97wyqY.

You have the advantage of the lights and I hope you make the combat system better. This is based on Warhammer 4000 with dice and units with 1 health, very random.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions, all

I'm not 100% where this is going yet - I'm actually only 37.26% sure for those who like statistics - so I don't have firm plans. In truth I've not really done any programming whatsoever since I learned BASIC on a Vic=20 waaay back in the early 1980s, so I'm very much just trying ideas out and seeing what does/doesn't work at this stage. But to address a few comments and suggetions...

Pathfinding - not done yet but I'm currently knocking about a few ideas around Dijkstra/A* with various heuristics. Should be pretty straight forward for player pathfinding as long as I use tiles with "weighted" values. For Mobs/Enemies I'm interested in doing something a bit better where they don't pick an absolute path to the player but rather they investigate evidence of the player (for example, they'll head toward a square that's lit, even if the player isn't directly visible).

Movement - having continuous movement onto the next square (and the next, and the next...) if you keep the mouse down might be a nice improvement, so thanks The player walking backward when you click behind is a concious design choice so you can back-off while still facing something, but if it needed changing it's take literally seconds to change it.

Random Map Genetation - This is something I'm really interested in , but for a different idea I have (I don't want to do another RogueLike - not because I don't like them, but more because there are already hundreds of excellent ones out there). I have, however, been faffing about with some terrain gen stuff based on cellular automata, as in the unbelievably basic tech-test below, with the eventual aim in mind of doing an exploration game.


Zipped demo attached to the post for anyone who's interested in that sort of thing ( left/right cursor keys to move, space to jump, click blocks twice to 'mine', up-cursor if you get stuck in a hole somewhere)

Space Hulk
Yup, love it and have thought quite a bit about doing something similar. The problem I actually have with squad games right now is the lighting setup in the game is surprisingly processor intensive, so large squads mean the game grinds down to single-digit framerates on phones. I'm working on it..
But, if you consider Space Hulk to be the movie "Aliens", I'm maybe more interested in doing something more suspenseful along the lines of "Alien". I like the idea of a couple of characters being stalked by something skulking in the shadows *shrug*.
Incidentaly, there's a decent Space Hulk -esque game on android - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tresebrothers.games.templars&hl=en - called Templar Assault. Graphics aren't up to much but it's pretty good otherwise.


Anyway, I've waffled on far to much. I'll have a better idea of which direction I'm going in once I've mocked up a few more tech tests to see what can or can't be done.

Thanks for the heads up on the android game are going to download it!
Love love love space crusade!

I even have it on my amiga cd32