Throne of darkness (Card based RPG) (Demo)

this was exhausting. I managed to create a level generator!
the idea was to proceduraly generate a linear level with an entrance, an exit, and some things in between.
I also made a deck that draws the cards on the "table".

I faffed around for far too long trying to first make a system to generate a map through a modified pathfinding algorithm and then for some reason (performance maybe?) tried to cramp the data into a linked list of interface resources, which would then retrieve tile card resources for the world card class.
but decided to abandon it after it became too difficult to follow, I left some of the map generation and instead left the data in an array and used a simple pathfinding to get the adjacent unexplored nodes.

now, the map starts by the deck drawing 1-4 cards, and then when clicked on a card it moves the player avatar and draws adjacent cards from the deck without repeating.
If I had more intelligence right now I would make the bitmask work to get better connections, but just having tiles that are not drawn I think is enough.
btw this part is 3D to take advantage of better card animations, the player will not animate and instead act as a cardboard cutout that moves up and down towards the card, like a tabletop game. it is using a viewport because I could not be asked to create yet another copy of the player for 3D, but I could change it later.

so a lot happened:
the code is getting more complex but I managed to connect the map scene to the combat scene. I also made some improvements to the map generation. there was a bug that caused only 4 cards to be generated, because it was random, now it fills almost the entire map because it's based on a number of cards. I need to find a middle ground between the two.
now combat cards are drawn and I can add any other type of cards, because I input an array and it fills a position in the path every 3 cards. entering a combat card causes combat to start (almost too immediately).
defeating the enemies takes you out of the combat and back to the map, and you can enter another combat card. combat cards get depleted, but I haven't work on art for the world yet.
this is an actual game now, It's only missing defeat conditions and some end, but it's just a matter of adding more world cards.

I also added a menu for changing resolution, volume, going fullscreen and exiting the game.

I also added an animation to tell the player that a card is reshuffled, the card kinda falls near the general "deck" area and out of the screen (need to tweak it too).

when it comes to new cards, I added only two:
use the head: damages an enemy but also damages allies, and then the card returns to the hand to be used again. this card is diabolical.
shiv: the first rogue card, this card damages a random enemy when drawn. the effect it has is that it draws a card.

so: barbarian has cards that generate cards of his own class, discard random cards, heal a little, and can also damage friendly characters.
wizard will get powerful one use spells like fireball, and some cards that return to hand after being discarded.
rogue will have cards that deal damage when drawn or shuffle other cards into the deck. I'm also thinking some traps and maybe effects like bleed. I need to think more about it, for now if there's a mechanic that I like, I will add it.

the cards have a number but I'm not using it, the cards will not have a cost, you can play as many cards as you want until your hand is empty. "let's just say you don't pay with points". this is what will make my game different from others deck-builders.
So I need a new use for these points, like some special ability that charges, or just experience.

on the art side, doing renders I think will be too difficult, so I will be drawing all the cards by hand and then (maybe) painting them.
I was going to use gimp but I'm tired of the stupid GTK3 sliders, it's very annoying. gimp used to be good back in I think 2.6, but they ruined it.
So I tried another program I had very little experience with: Krita. Krita is so much better than gimp, it has shortcuts, I can add a layer by pressing Insert. I made a potion and was much faster and more comfortable.

don't mind the grunge, these are from an old drawing.
I'm going to replace most of the art, at least the art in the cards. the character will remain as it is, and the enemies are a maybe.

Now I gotta go and start drawing.

update: I didn't have much time, but I used it well. I came up with a new algorithm for generating the map that is just PERFECT. I got the idea from the gimp maze filter, so I started to think of a way to do it.
I use the same pathfinding algorithm, but when finding neighbors, I check that the neighbors-neighbors in voxel3 sum a total of 5 or more (every tile starts at 1), and then when adding them to the path I set the tile in voxel3 to 0.
what this means is a sort of tree with random roots is formed, but the roots never touch and there is an end. and it's much cheaper that the wave function collapse people keep talking about so much.

I also added a new rogue card:
ace up the sleeve: shuffles a copy of your hand into the deck.

xyz Watch out. May take months, possibly years.

luckily I have a pile of old drawings to use in a hurry.

Toxe Yeah, I started using it a couple of months ago and it seems really good. As for Gimp, well, I tried it 20 years ago and it never really clicked for me. Have been mostly avoiding it since then.

apparently krita is used to draw anime.
I have been using gimp for over 15 years, it didn't seem bad to me. but the devs have made some very bad decisions, and add to this the deplorable state of GTK usability, like the fact that old gimp versions are not available, compiling GTK2 is f***ng impossible, the stupid thing is written in C, but it was this one annoying GTK3/4 slider widget that drove me crazy with how finicky it was, that was the rhinoceros that broke the camel's back.

Tomcat what IS gimp better at? the only advantage I see is more filters and maybe opening obscure formats, but we have so many more alternatives these days, you just have to go and try them.

Toxe Ugh, this is giving me PTSD. GTK was truly terrible back in the day and the UI of the old Gimp versions that I tried using was atrocious. But to be fair to Gimp I should really give it another try these days.

I actually liked the older version better, it might have been ugly, but it was made with practicality in mind. GTK these days thinks its f**ng apple, with their menu-less windows and gnome integration and fancy yet unusable sliders. The only thing it has going for is it's stable and works.

Toxe Thinking about it, weren't they working on a modernized version 3 or 4 or whatever to be released Soon™?

KDE3/4, a GUI written in C that forces you to write a CSS. the worst of high and low level programming rolled into one. It has been in development since forever.

update: fixed a lot of bugs, glitches and small details and worked a bit more on map generation. also worked towards connecting the parts of the game so I can release a demo soon.
the player now spawns in a tile, and can only move to adjacent tiles left, right, up and down of the current tile. the code is still very messy, but it doesn't matter, I think the "combat" phase is more important.
I added some placeholder images to the world cards so I could setup the shader.
I made some assets for character avatars, like a wizard's robes and a helmet, then connected it to the character creation part and cleaned up a bit. in the character creation it is now possible to select a class and it displays the cards.
I also had to remake the Minotaur to add a death animation, I will add new enemies eventually, for now you go around town getting jumped by minotaurs, and it will probably be like that in the demo.

I also made some assets for the cards and added two new rogue cards:
You've activated my trap: draws 3 rogue cards
We don't need this: sends a non-rogue cards from the hand back to the deck

I noticed from playing the game that the hand tends to get filled with garbage cards from generation, and undesired cards. When using "ace up the sleeve" you don't want to duplicate a card like "use the head" or simple attacks like throw rock. while reckless attack can be used to get rid of these cards, it has a risk of discarding good cards. "We don't need this" gives a change to get rid of undesired cards, and since it returns them to the deck instead of discarding, cards with discard interactions can be removed from the hand this way.
"You've activated my trap" on the other hand plays really well with sneak, since it draws rogue cards, it can draw the sneak attacks or useful rogue cards.

Hopefully I will have a demo ready this month. as soon as I can add victory and defeat conditions.
In the demo you will play as barbarian (with the barbarian starter deck) and maybe rogue if I keep adding cards. you will explore a town that unfolds like a maze and search for the exit.
I should add some "discover a new card" event to make the game more interesting than just fighting the same enemy over and over again, but I will need the ability to edit the deck for that, which will take some time because it requires yet another set of inherited classes and card assets (maybe I can reuse PreviewCard).
There will hopefully also be some "buildings" with events by then.

Tomcat GIMP works better with transparent images. For example, it has cropping of empty fields, which is not available in Krita.

it doesn't anymore XD I remember it being removed around 2.1 and being annoyed at not being able to copy the transparent area of an explosion sprite.
I have been using Krita and working with transparent areas and colors is much faster. you can split the alpha of a layer to alpha filter, duplicate it and move it to another layer. painting then paints the visible and invisible area. but clicking on the (one button) locks the alpha allowing to paint on the colored area of a sprite.
it's SO MUCH BETTER.

Tomcat much easier work with animations (.gif).

how quaint, because I heard krita is used to make anime and has a better animation system than gimp. I haven't gotten to it yet though. as for gifs, gimp has like 3 filters, one of which is to preview an animation, and its really bad. you can only preview loose layers, it doesn't work with groups, so I had to create the animations in different files.
as for layers, it's impossible to select more than one layer at a time so you have to pack the layers into a group to move them to a different file, and then you have to move each layer out of the group one by one to do something else, and once all your layers are in the same group the preview animation becomes useless.
I had to install an addon (tilemancer) to create spritesheets, and in order to do that I had to install some python3 library or something because script support is currently broken.

Tomcat if need to make an icon in Win, it is done with one command.

that's oddly specific.
but if I had to make an icon I would use a vector app like inskape.

update:
I have been connecting the character creation to the 3d world, it is now possible to create a character and have it spawn in the world. I have also been making some dialog windows for credits and game over. I'm getting closer and closer to a Demo, probably next week at this pace.
I've also made it to 20 rogue cards and 20 barbarian cards, so those classes will be available in the demo. wizard still only has 2.
next I need to work on allowing a second character to join the party, and characters dying discarding their cards from the deck.
Oh, also, I made a deck editor, the standard deck will be 20 cards, and new cards will be added to a different pile from which to choose at any point in the game. this makes it substantially different from other deck-builders where getting rid of cards is important.

Tomcat

that is crop to contents and it's a feature krita also has, but it's next to the other options and not spread around 5 menues.

Tomcat creating a light and fast .gif is easier in GIMP. I can't say about anime and cartoons.

since last comment I went to krita and made an entire animation. krita has onion skins and keyframes, which are different from layers. when you add a keyframe you get a new set of layers in a completely new dimension.
in gimp you have to do one frame one layer or group.
there is a play button and other options, you don't have to "compile" the animation to play it.

then I exported it. you can save it as a document or render it, and the options are many video formats including godot compatible theora, mp4, etc, and gif.

Tomcat An icon is actually pixel art. It's probably possible to do it in vector… but… I try to do everything possible in vector, but icons… I do them pixel by pixel.

mhh no. maybe in 1995, but today icons are made with vector formats like svg, that way they can re-scale to different resolutions. that is how it works in linux. if windows is still using ico format then they are just wrong.
but even if windows is being dumb, you can still more easily resize a vector drawing to a new size, while with images you have to remake the entire thing.

Tomcat It's no better or worse — they complement each other.

well I will try to find alternatives to this terrible software and get rid of it entirely. we HAVE alternatives today, it's not 1995 anymore.

Tomcat They may have added it. But when I needed it, it wasn't there yet.

you are right, the option is not there, but there is a crop to selection option, which is a way to do it.

Tomcat What does this have to do with "5 menus"? This is the first, top menu.

Krita has fewer and tidier menues, most things are found in dockers.
gimp has a bad workflow, no shortcuts, things are scattered around different menues, and worst of all they move them in each new version. I don't know why they keep changing gimp, they changed the icons, the menues, the buttons, I had to relearn everything when I got 2.10, so when I need to do an operation I have to start looking around the menues for something I know exists but is no longer were it's supposed to.

Tomcat I just throw in all necessary files at once, they are placed on layers by themselves and just specify their duration when exporting — that's all.

In Krita to place frames is a little more difficult. To begin with, you need to switch to animation...

for that I use ffmpeg from terminal. opening gimp to bake a gif sounds bad.

now, some updates on the game:
I finished connecting things, it is possible to create a character and play the game, reaching the exit spawns a credits window with restart and exit. losing also spawns a game over window, and the game can also be restarted from the menu.
the game was too silent so I added a song I made for combat, I made this in musescore 2 and I'm no professional musician, but it's good enough, and I'm not using AI.
when testing the game, two things became clear: barbarian was too OP with it's healing and blocking, while rogue was too weak.
so I quickly added a new rogue card and mechanic.
Dodge: adds 1 dodge to the rogue.
dodge block 1 attack each and can be stacked.

next I need to fix a few bugs and I will reduce the number of cards to 10, with 5 one use/exhaust/normal cards like health potion or the chair.

the demo will be very sober, as I'm still using placeholder art, and there are some visual bugs, but nothing game breaking.

Devlog: well, I have been trying to get a demo for this week, but as I export it I found a game breaking bug related to the bleed effect on the rogue.
I have been trying to fix this for the last 4 days, which at this point involved changing the enemy from AnimatedSprite2D using await animation finished, to sprite2Ds with animationPlayers and AnimationTrees.
It worked, in part, in solving the bug, but at the same time made it more unpredictable, leading to more bugs, though easier to fix.
moving to AnimationPlayer/Tree lead to some cool features, like when the skeletons appear they come out of the ground, so that's a plus.

I'm still worried about the quality of the game and a bit tired, but I will still release a demo either this week or next week.
I need a name for the game, it can't be "prototype card based RPG", the name of the project is Throne of Darkness, although there is no story yet and have no idea where or how I would fit this throne into the game.
Other than that I have been fixing bugs and testing the gameplay for balance. I think it's too easy at the moment and too RNG. the ability to save some potions for later helps, as they can be put back into the deck as fights become more difficult. some cards will need to be buffed, like the health potion which only heals 4, others nerfed, like second wind which heals 8, draws a card and reshuffles.

Oh, and I implemented rewards at the end of combat, 3 cards appear and you can pick one and its added to your deck. but it needs some animations.
Also, the combats become increasingly more difficult, starting at 1 lizardmen, then more enemies, then skeletons, and at one point one minotaur. 4-5 lizardmen is the point where the game becomes too difficult.

Devlog: after some more bug fixes, I added animations to the rewards and was getting ready to export.
I made a simple icon for the game in inskape, and exported to ico for windows.
then I had to struggle with exporting to windows and the unexpected limitations and conditions, and then 4.3 was released out of nowhere.
I still felt like the game wasn't complete and needed "some" card art to tell the cards apart.
after even more struggles, this time moving the scanned drawings to my PC, I ended up just taking pictures of the drawings and downloading them via google drive.
It must have taken me less than an hour to draw them in paper and then paint them in krita.
I will try to make a few more before releasing the demo.
here's the "new" shiv:

I will keep this "grunge" look for the cards, as it looks good enough.

Devlog: the chair is here and it's the most fun card in the game so far!