Welcome back to our second devlog,

this time we will outline the basics of our dungeon generation (which is still in progress), we will fight with and against some AI controlled actors. We also added a lot of effects like particles, hit feedback, camera shakes and a lot more! Lets start with a mockup of our HUB level where the player has time to breath and prepare for the next fight:

Dungeon generation

The old approach had a lot of flaws: it was hard to extend, the shapes of the rooms were all rectangular, we had little control on where to place decoration objects and enemies. We decided to combine handcrafted rooms with a procedural placement. This allows us to add a lot of details to the rooms, reuse them in different contexts by swapping enemies, decorations and closing off certain connections to the rooms.
This approach can be seen on the next images.

AI and combat

We developed an extendable AI system that lets us combine small bits and pieces to an unique AI behaviour.  Here we see two different enemy types: one that keeps distance to the player, shoots fireballs and even dodges away if the player is too close. The other is a melee fighter that charges towards us (and can stun if he hits). Besides the stun, we've also implemented a silence effect, where the player can't use abilities but is still able to move, slow effects and damage/heal over time. More effects will be coming soon.

We are also able to change the faction of the AI, so that it is friendly to us and fight with us against enemies, as seen here:

Next up...

Currently we are focused to improve the combat as much as possible to make it feel exciting, rewarding, tactical and fun. We've also started to plan out the classes for the player to choose from, which will probably differ a lot from the classes of Coop Crawler. Networking and dungeon generations are also planned to be improved further.

We also plan to update on smaller progress on our tumblr over here:  https://just2dinteractive.tumblr.com/

See you next time.