Hey fellow gamers / developers and music lovers!
Here’s another sneak peak video from the gameplay of Skullkeys. Nothing is carved in stone yet, but we are designing game assets and events which will later be used to create the final levels. So consider all this as WIP…you know the drill during game dev. 😋
New features in Skullkeys game engine?
Some new features in the Skullkeys game which will be seen in the video:
- Main menu (rough idea)
- Enemy spawner asset (spits out bats…max 2 out at a time)
- The bats can now go into a “found player”-state and a hunting-state which makes them feel more alive and dangerous.
- Bomb collectible.
In the new demo the camera is a bit wacky (zooming out way too much) in this latest video, but that’s because we have experimented with the camera in our multiplayer mode. We will fix the camera asap.
Enemy spawner asset
We’ve created an enemy spawn asset to the game engine. At the moment (as seen in the video) the enemy spawner spits out bats to hunt the player. Furthermore, the spawner can be used (alternatively) instead of placing individual enemies on the level. A quick helper to throw enemies into a level.
The enemy spawner is customizable with the follwing parameters:
- Sprite – the graphics of the spawner. It’s currently a kind of “cage” / hive. 😉
- Entities (list) – a list of objects (monsters) that the spawner can create.
- TimeBeforeSpawn (int) – how many secs between each new entity will spawn. The type of entity to spawn is randomly selected from the list.
- MaxEntitiesOut (int) – So we can limit the amount of entities the spawner will spit out. When this limit is reached at least one of the enemies need to be defeated before new ones will spawn.
- TotalEntitiesToSpawn (int) – a max amount of entities the spawner can spit out during it’s lifetime.
- CanBeKilled (bool) – Can the spawner be defeated?
- IsAlive (bool) – only spawns when it’s alive
- Health (int) – how much damage can the spawner take before it’s killed?
There’s obviously more rules and parameters on the spawner asset. But these are a few rules to show the flexibility of this asset.
We can basically throw in any kind of monster into it, or a variety of monsters and the spawner will start to spit out these during gameplay. Fun isn’t it?
We also started to dress the levels with some more foley like spider-web, chains, pillars etc. to suite the dungeon theme.
Until next game dev update! Have a good one!
// Mattias