Necken is a tile based roguelite set in the dangerous Swedish forest. Your quest is to find the water spirit Necken, a creature living off of drowning people in the water where he lives, luring them with his beautiful music.
Collect resources, craft your equipment, and battle the creatures trying to stop you from getting to Necken. Animals, folk lore creatures and humans alike will try to stop you.
Features
The game is under development, and features are subject to change.
In this Necken update, the following features/updates has been added: A partial HUD rework, building of tiles, combat HUD updates, and the protection - an extension of normal combat.
The HUD
While not adding anything spicy to the game, it makes it a bit more clear. The plain numbers and icons has been reworked into a bar, with some smooth movement. Both the normal HUD and combat HUD has gotten some polish in terms of 'juice' - the small effects that improves the flavour of the game.
While not being final, they look much better, while not cluttering the screen. Or, at least that's what I think.
Spawn combat
The spawn tiles needs to be destroyed, and that has not changed. How you destroy them, however, has been updated. Before, the player activated the tile to deal sword damage to the tile, while not in combat.
Now, instead, the player enters combat with the spawn tile for one round (with three moves). After that, the combat is aborted. This gives the player the ability to choose which damage source to use - the body, the weapon or the shield.
Protection
As an extension to the combat system, protection was added to the enemies. This means that each enemy has strengths and weaknesses against the three damage sources, in three stages - normal, weak and strong.
Strong negates 2 damage, weak adds 2 damage and normal is, well, just normal.
In the case where the player fights a spawn tile - the spawn tile is weak to sword damage, and takes +2 damage whenever it is used. This makes for a much deeper combat system, where the tactical choice between using the 'effective' damage source or not could be important.
A new enemy
While not that exciting, a new enemy was added. It spawns from a spawn tile whenever another spawn tile is destroyed, and it heads straight for the house tile. If the house tile is destroyed, the game is lost, so the player has to be ready for the attack.
Building
While not fully fleshed out yet, the player now has an ability to build stuff on empty tiles. For now the buildings are just placeholders, but will eventually help the player beat the enemies roaming the level. The first building will be a wall. Simple but effective. It will stop the enemies from roaming freely.
The player builds by holding the space button (activation button). If the activation button is pressed (not held), the player will activate a tile instead.
The devlog video covers the new features in Necken, mainly the Greed system, Mushrooms, Animations, Losing and Breaking tiles.
How do you go about designing an enemy that spawns only when the player is greedy, and how do you make it feel "right" with the other game mechanics...
Love it so far! Very simple but at the same time super challenging. I think the basic game mechanics are spot on and I am looking forward to all the future additions! :)