Making a Rogue-like game in Defold

Hi, my name is David, and about one or two weeks ago we had this thing in our school called PRAO. This is a concept in Sweden that basically allow all the students to for two weeks total (one in 8th grade and one in 9th grade) “work” at a real job. Most students choose occupations like cafes or supermarkets, but me being a nerd I thought I would give it a shot at doing my PRAO at King’s office in Stockholm.

My task this week has been to make a game. I had no idea what the I was going to make the game about at first, but then one of the Kingsters told me about the theme of the recent Ludum Dare Game Jam. The theme was One Room, and almost instantly I came up with a basic idea.
The idea developed quite a lot through the week firstly I was going for a timed bullet hell mixed with puzzle and time pressure, but then I dropped the action and thought I would make a creepy puzzle game instead.

The story:
I am still working on it, but it will probably be something like this:

You wake up and do not know where you are, who you are or what has happened, you are in a dark room, with only a flashlight to guide you. You solve puzzles to collect parts that in turn you can use on interactable objects in order to acquire parts for some sort of generator that is broken and needs to be fixed. When the generator is fixed, the lights go on, and you can move on to the next room. As you go through these rooms, fixing what seems to be a giant machine, you find out more about yourself bit by bit. Watch out for the enemies though! They can not see you, but whilst walking, running and engaging in other actions you make noise, indicated by a circle pulsating to show where you can be heard. If the enemies enters this circle they begin to chase you. You can not kill the enemies, you simply have to escape them. Also creepy music and sound effects.

Right now the art is simply replacement art mostly from google, but I believe that my sister who is an artist is going to be able to help me with creating graphics for this game.

The style I am going for is kind of faded-out sketchy kind of style, making the whole thing seem a little “creepier” and less pixelated.

So far I have a room system, flashlight, enemies, interactables, pickups, inventory, fade-in/out, dialogue systems with multiple types of dialogues, notes that you can pick up and read, menu system and cutscene system.

What I need to do right now is fixing the cutscene system since right now I have an object that I scale to what size I want it to be, and when the player collides with the cutscene object, a dialogue is supposed to start, and the player should be unable to move whilst this is happening. The problem is that when I scale the object in the scene editor, the collider doesn’t seem to scale with it so the cutscene is only triggered in a small area. Anyone knows how I can scale the collision object induvidually for multiple cutscenes?

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Hello David!

It was nice having you in the Defold team. We were all really impressed with how far you managed to get with your game within a single week. Personally I think that the visual feedback on sounds were awesome, gave a really good feeling of being chased by something unknown.

Unfortunately, scaling of collision objects is currently not possible. It’s something that’s in our backlog but I don’t know when we’ll get to it. Maybe @saracederberg could give more information about the timeline?

Happy holidays!

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Scaling collision objects is possible but you must delete and create new ones at the new scale you want. Some examples here

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Hi David! It was great having you at the office for a week. You’re welcome back anytime!

Please share your progress with us, perhaps via HTML5 builds that you can share via some kind of webhosting that you own yourself or via GitHub pages (let me know if you need help with this!).

And Merry Christmas to you and your family!

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Hi! It was really nice to be there, and I learned so much!

Hmm, I guess I will just have to calculate the collision manually for now, but it would be a nice feature,

Happy holidays!

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Hi! It was great being there! :slight_smile:

I was thinking of doing that, is there a quick way of uploading it to my website?

Merry Christmas to yourself and your family!

You can do Project->Bundle->HMTL5 Application (check Release build checkbox). This will result in a folder with a bunch of files, index.html, some css and the game itself. Upload all of this to your webserver and that’s it!

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It’s up!

Finally, the game is avaliable to play, I know I haven’t been very active on this thread for a few days, and that is partly because I am on vacation, but also because I have been working on the website that the game is on.

You can play the game on:
http://wolters.se/david/rouge-like/

Please note that it is in very early alpha, most of the graphics are copied from google, the sounds are mostly from Freesound, and much of the gameplay is going to be improved!

I would really appriciate it if you would send me a tip, or report a bug if you find one (Scroll to the bottom of the webpage)

Anyway here is what is new in version 0.2 Alpha:

  • Menu system
  • Help screen
  • Better animations and transitions when moving from one scene to another
  • Fixed the bug with the cutscene system, I did this by setting a width and a height as a property, and then doing some manual collision checking

Let me know what you think!

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Nice! One thing that I didn’t notice until now: it’s Rogue-like, not Rouge-like (Rogue is a sneaky dude who doesn’t play by the book while Rouge is stuff ladies put on to look pretty)

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Haha I didn’t think of that, but thanks!

I have now updated the links and everything I could notice so it should say “rogue” not “rouge”

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Looks cool, how did you do the flashlight (and lights) effect?
Some thoughts:

  1. I’d speed up the dialogs, menu fading and interactions a bit. Or skipping them by pressing ‘space’ again would be nice.
  2. You can continue feeding cogs to the machine after it tirns on, printing out something like “parts 7/2”
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Thanks, right now I am just doing the flashlight effect with a black png image that has a somewhat blurry hole in it,
and when I want to turn the flashlight “off”, I fade in a black overlay, and then I fade in a semitransparent “foggy” png picture.

  1. Thanks! I’ll add that into the game :slight_smile:
  2. Hmm yeah I’ll look into that, shouldn’t be too hard to fix!
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Oh, just a black image - simple and easy solution, cool :slight_smile:

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I have now started designing some puzzles, or just the layout, since I am pretty new to level design, and I did not know of any good software to easily lay up levels, I used powerpoint. Right now I have two levels that are pretty much done I think, and now I have to think about how I will implement all the features in the best way possible!

The first thing I am going to do is design walls that can slide away in a certain direction since this is a thing that happens in most of my puzzles. I also have to make things like pressure plates, buttons, and a system for pushing / pulling objects.

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Sounds fun! Good luck!

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