The Game Has Changed news - Reliquary

Around this time last year I started work on a doomed project called Glimmer. It was a procedurally generated permadeath survival game in the vein of Don't Starve, but set in space and with combat closer to something like Hotline Miami. Like most people new to gamedev, I had some pretty grand designs going on and of course bit off way more than I could chew.

I'd made the decision early on to use sprites rendered from 3D models in a process similar to what Blizzard did for Diablo. In my initial tests the workflow didn't seem all that grueling to get an animated character running around a simple environment. I didn't really follow through on projecting how much work it would be across the entire project though, including the several different monsters and a few hundred props and items I'd need. It looked pretty, but it was killing the project. Needless to say, things bogged down pretty quickly.

A few days before I finally gave up, I was still optimistic enough about the project to look into copyrighting the title, and quickly learned that just a month before that Bungie had filed their own copyright for a game called Glimmer. I guess I took that as my cue to start working on something more manageable.

EDIT: Turns out Glimmer is just what they call their currency in Destiny.

I fiddled around with a handful of small prototypes for a while but nothing really clicked for me, so I eventually decided to start over from scratch on a scaled-back Glimmer under a new name. Work on Reliquary commenced in early January of this year, and within three weeks I got more content up and running for it than Glimmer ever had. This is largely due to a switch to pixel art and a shift in focus from survival to combat. That's not to say survival is gone, but it's on a more moment-to-moment basis, as in a roguelike.

Combat itself is largely unchanged though, apart from there being more of it. I did pretty directly mimic the way Vlambeer handles weapons and animation in Nuclear Throne though, because it was the most elegant solution to retaining the fluidity afforded by Glimmer's multitude of unique animations without having to actually add any. In rare moments of paranoia I do worry that this and a few other similarities will make Reliquary look like some kind of clone, but not enough that I'll change anything. Transparency is the cure for that. Procedural level progression is similar, but that's largely due to the inspirations we have in common, like Spelunky, and it's a system that's been in place since the beginning of Glimmer. My actual implementation is quite different and has more in common with worlds from Demon's Souls than anything else.
(Anyone not familiar with Nuclear Throne should definitely check it out- it's fantastic. Nuclearthrone.com)

As it stands now, there's a crashed ship on the edge of an asteroid field that acts as a hub and base of operations. From there you can travel deeper into the asteroid field via Warp Crystal to more chaotic regions where change is constant. These are the procedurally generated stages. Each stage has it's own crystal shard that needs to be used to progress to the next. Most of these crystals are one-way gates that only lead deeper, but occasionally you'll find a larger unbroken one that can also take you to other unbroken crystals you've found or back to the crash site. Using an unbroken crystal is the only way to return without losing your collected resources, which are necessary to upgrade your equipment.

After traversing four procedurally generated stages, the area is capped off with an authored boss battle. Once the boss is defeated it's gone for good, and it's arena will serve as a sort of waystation from then on, providing an unbroken crystal and some basic resources. Some waystations may even branch to more than one area.

I currently only have the first area's props and monsters done, so I've been using those to approximate the others while I get the framework set up. I'll talk about what those other areas will wind up being like at a later date. For now I'm working on polishing up the beginning of the game through to the first boss, which will be released as an alpha demo in the coming weeks. Hopefully feedback from that will help to inform me on what needs the most attention in the core gameplay before I get so far along that substantial changes won't be practical.

I've never taken a game project this far before, so I'm in uncharted waters from here on out.
Here's hoping I don't sink, huh?