Gameplay demo released!

Well, it took longer than I expected. Today I finally ready to share with you the first taste of Dwarfinator in this short gameplay demo-version. Remember - it's not a demo of a full game, there's no such thing as a full game yet. It's more like playable teaser, demonstration of what is ready for now and how these parts may look in the full game. It consists of a three example stages with different tank and character presets. There still might be uncaught bugs, so if you encounter any - feel free to send them to me. Any other kind of feedback is also appreciated. By default, this demo gather some performance and gameplay related data of your play sessions, you can disable this feature via settings, but it would really help me in further development if you don't.

So what are you waiting for? Go play it, share with your friends and follow the updates.

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Demo preparations

Not much to show for a few last weeks, mostly because of release preparations nature - even if it's only an early gameplay demo release. I've added some small features like emitting particles from wall and tank on hit or hiding decorations around the wall to prevent inevitable sorting issues. I've fixed a pack of bugs like sudden mobs death screams after end of the stage. Also there's now some music fragments for a victory and defeat on the stage. The website is now ready to host the upcoming demo with new downloads page. And none of that is able to provide decent content for a new post. But at least check out these new screenshots with updated forest environment.

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Forest location

There was no word from me for a while, and I have a really big bunch of reasons for it. In short - I got broken trying to carry out my daily routine, which for some reasons was a couple responsibilities more than I could handle, and all I could do was dropping some of them off. For more than two months I could not properly work on the game. But now the crisis is solved, I'm more or less stable again and the development continues. Getting back to work was not easy, and I had to start with something less stressful than gameplay demo preparation. So I decided to finish the forest location, which previous state was never meant to be final, it was only "bearable". It took some time to draw all these rocks, sticks and plants. The fallen leaves and grass cover also required some struggling. Funny thing - as I'm no artist, my way of creating 2D location feels more like creating 3D one, I don't draw the background, I create and put the assets around. The result of all this you can see below. Though I said "finish", there still could be some minor fixes and changes, but mostly it's the final design of the forest location.

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Save selector screen

Dwarfinator continues to obtain elements turning it into proper game from in-development monstrosity. This time it's save selector screen and it's altered version for gameplay demo - stage selector screen. As you can see, there is three slots available for player savegames, which should be enough for this kind of game.

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Title screen

Since the beginning of development there was only a simple stub instead of game title screen. But look at this dynamic background now! The location it use and its content are changing according to the game progress in latest save. Actually I wanted to place there some full screen art as background, but as I'm more of a programmer than artist, creation of something like that would take a lot of time which I don't really have.

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Battle UI

For last couple of weeks I've been working on various improvements in battle UI. The changes visible parts suffered are small, but there's a lot of additional information now available through tooltips for most of them. And the pause window reworked from scratch and united with the result window. Now the player will be able to see current stage loot and kill stats at any time.

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Settings window

Some screenshots of a settings window. Most likely not in its final form as there's always could appear a need in another configurable thing in further development. Took a little longer than I expected as I had to deal with inability of Unity to separate UI textures from ingame sprites. So now I have my own mipmapping imitation for the UI which picks a texture for the UI element according to its actual size on the screen regardless of texture quality setting value.

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Freeze spell

It's time for May to have her first active skill. The spell she casts is able to freeze to the ground almost any enemy. Techically, it's instant cast of AoE inflicting "Freeze" effect on mobs, which immobilize them for certain amount of time and does some ice damage in process. I already had snowflakes and ice shards, so all I needed to draw is magic circle and some ice decals.

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Forge UI

It seems I left you without updates for several weeks again. Not without a good reason though. After thouse weeks I can finally say that forge UI is complete and fully functional. I had to draw a lot of new UI elements and redraw some of existing, rewrite almost all the code from scratch and even change some of UI logic. The result you can see on attached screenshots. And now I can finally get back to working on something more enjoyable. As I probably already said - I hate making UI.

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Item parameters

With new parameter system based on new icons and tooltips it's now possible to see all the important item stats in its description panel. And if some parameter is not informative enough you can call its tooltip and see the rest. For example, the armor parameter displays average value for all damage types, but its tooltip shows armor value for every damage type if it's different from zero. And each sub-parameter also has a tooltip.

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