Well I'll admit it, I haven't had much time at all for the project. Finally sat down a couple days ago and got working on it. Then one night while playing Path of Exile I got the urge to work on animating the combat in the game. I wanted to add more feeling to the players actions. Just a simple slide animation. Attacking would cause the attacker to quickly slide towards the target then back into place. Like they just chest bumped them suddenly. Something more than just reading text and assuming who made the attack on who.

When I sat down yesterday I got another urge, and I honestly don't know why I suddenly wanted to try this out, but I did. I thought about making things real time, like Diablo or P.O.E. I threw some quick code together to allow the creatures to move freely from the grid towards way points. Clicking the mouse would set the way points and the player creature would move towards it. Collision checking and everything was implemented. The original system of using a grid and such was and is still completely intact and used more as a partitioning system now. I might even think about implementing a quad tree within its innards for speed if necessary or if I decide at all to bring fog of war back.

The controls were working more like League of Legends than Diablo though, click to move. Hit a key to activate an ability and click again to shoot in that direction. But it felt super sluggish, and increasing the speed of movement just made it clunky. Maybe adding auto attacking and or clicking on target to attack would've made it feel smoother. Maybe it was cause there was only ranged attacks and no melee.

I quickly scratched the way point idea and tried a dual stick design. Moving with 'WASD' and shooting / aiming with the mouse. This felt far smoother. The character was definitely more responsive and felt more in control.

After 12+ hours, a very late night, I now bring you a very basic prototype of a different idea. The original game I was designing is still there, just alot of the systems are deactivated at the moment to test the idea of going real time instead of turn based.

Try it out and tell me what you guys think. I'll be honest it's rather refreshing to me. Though I'm not sure which branch of the project I'll move forward with.

DOWNLOAD ROGUELIKE BUILD 055

Once again the game is zipped up using 7zip but any zip app should be able to unpack it. If you don't have visual studio c++ 2012 installed, install the appropriate runtime redistributable in the C runtimes folder. Run the game from the Game folder, nothing else needs to be installed.

The game only runs in a 1280x720 window, and uses 'WASD' to move the player creature. and the left and right mouse buttons to shoot at the mouses position.