Alpha IzoProject - Isometric Story Driven Boss Battle ARPG

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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
"Are you going there? Good luck, adventurer. You will find the holy man. The miracle worker

He helped everyone in the village. He healed diseases, exorcised the demons of the forest and protected them from evil, all with their divine powers. All with your faith

Once, I took my little brother to him. He was sick, and he healed him.

My brother then asked if the power of that god could cure any disease

He said yes.

"Even death?" He asked.

The holy man was troubled by that question. He said no, that dealing with it was not right, that dealing with the order of life and death is blasphemy, and that God would not allow it. He turned his face, and said he would never try that.

But I felt something in his discomfort, a hint of desire: Deep down, he wanted that power.

Could this be the only thing his god could not provide? Could it be that the power to heal death was his only temptation?"


So Yes, IzoProject is not dead !

Hey folks! How are you all ?

So yes, being a long time not posting anything... The fact it's that izoproject got a new re-scope so I could be able to end it...

So the text above it's a piece of lore that we've being developing in the past days. Also we revisited the game design elements to see what is relevant and what is not.

I'm removing most of the procedural generation ideas of the game and giving it a more story driven pace. This game still getting all the dark and depressing mood of Diablo II and DarkSouls, they continue to be the highest reference of this game.

you can read more lore here: https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.p...iablo-roguelike-arpg.24573/page-4#post-292129

So what is new ?
  • Story Driven game, with focus on Boss battles.
  • Puzzles to solve to progress inside the story
  • Sides to take and possible conversation solving situations instead fights
The battle mechanics will continue the same. So you'll have :
  • Twin-Stick control scheme
  • pack of skills that you will be able to combine freely when unlocked
  • 3 equipment slots (weapon,armor,amulet) that will change your status/visuals and lite level up system.
  • Score / Combo System continues to give frenetic and arcade gameplay on fight sections. (replayability, leaderbords appeal is also something here)
The game will not be :
  • Procedural Generated
  • RogueLike (Lite or whatever)
What still in design :
  • Co-Op gameplay. This was something that was previously designed for the game, but now with a story focus, we might think that this can break the immersion on the story and also is something difficult to implement without meaning.

This is the very first game that I'm trying to do and launch for real, so it's ok to step on some rocks and errors.... The thing is to never give up of your game and your ideas. This is the game that I always wanted to play and now I'm trying to make this a reality... And for sure I'll if I keep hitting the wall until I break it. =)


[ALPHA GAME TRAILER]


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Please feel free to give any comments or critics about it, just please tell me why the reason.



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[OLDER 11/29/2017]
https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.p...iablo-roguelike-arpg.24573/page-4#post-292128

[OLDER 09/19/2017]
https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.p...pg-update-10-20-2017.24573/page-2#post-224904
[OLDER 08/03/2017]
https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.php?threads/izoproject-diablo-style-roguelike-arpg-update-08-03-2017.24573/#post-214229
[OLDER 07/112017]
https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.p...ike-arpg-update-07-25-2017.24573/#post-196422
[OLDER]
IzoProject - Isometric RogueLike ARPG (Diablo Style with TwinStick-Shooter Controls)
 
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lolslayer

Member
The gameplay looks good, but you have to give a look at the tiles overlapping eachother and the strange moments when walls get see-through, otherwise it looks great :)
 
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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
Yes! Still working on that! Depth = -y do not work in some angles, do know why really.

For tiles i'll try to do something like "autotiling", but still a newbie in that lol.

Thanks for the feedback
 
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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
ah... i think the strange see-through is the alpha effect on the walls right? lol, yes... i'm trying to use that effect to when char is behind a wall and the player needs to see him. As you see, testing yet....
 
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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
The gameplay looks good, but you have to give a look at the tiles overlapping eachother and the strange moments when walls get see-through, otherwise it looks great :)
Hey,
Just posted a video showing those fixed that you highlighted!

You can see it here!

 
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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
Looks great! Very reminiscent of Diablo :)... Memories :)
Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, heavily inspired by Diablo and some Dark Souls Mechanics... still working in the melee combat to have some kind of combo but I'm kinda blocked by the sprites that I'm using.

But i think in the end will be more like an Diablo "TwinStick-Shooter" style.... with permadeath.

I want to the player to choose if he'll have a long session of gameplay or a short one...

Like, sometimes you just want to do a quick dungeon crawler survival... and not lose so much time leveling up your char, so ability must count more than levels. But for hardcore players, as higher your char get, more abilities, magics will be available and more styles you'll be able to play at same time.
 
F

Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
Hi Guys,


Just a new update on the game, now using lightning system with day & night cycle!

Please, give your feedback
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="
" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
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Tom O'Rourke

Guest
Hey Felipe,

This looks awesome and very inspiring to me as I'm just about to jump into getting started with Game Maker Studio 2. Would you mind if I asked you a question - how did you get started with isometric grids in GMS 2? I can't find any resources or documentation anywhere...I could really use a good book on Game Maker Studio 2, especially on the subject of isometric games.
 
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YanBG

Member
I'm a fan of isometric graphics as well. Although the perspective of your floor tiles seem off compared the the characters, is any of that a placeholder?
 
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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
Hey Felipe,

This looks awesome and very inspiring to me as I'm just about to jump into getting started with Game Maker Studio 2. Would you mind if I asked you a question - how did you get started with isometric grids in GMS 2? I can't find any resources or documentation anywhere...I could really use a good book on Game Maker Studio 2, especially on the subject of isometric games.
Hey Tom, Glad that you like it!

In fact im using GameMaker 1.4 for this project, since I started with it and I don't have sure if I really want to buy GameMaker 2 yet.

In my personal opinion GameMaker it's not a proper tool to do isometric games. I'm telling this because nothing what I tried to implement was easy, first because there isn't many good tutorials(almost no one) or information out there for gamemaker specific and this engine is really not very friendly for this kind of approach. Instead, I think this is a really great engine for platforms or top down games! Better than Unity I think.

Take in consideration as well that this is my very first project on this engine and was used to Unity.

So, how I'm doing until now ?
Well, there is a few documentation that you can take in consideration to start :

GameMaker 1.4 Isometric Tutorial : This versions ships many tutorials with the framework, if you look there you'll find an isometric tutorial for it that will explain how to do the isometric view on the floor and the depth basics to fake it.

Clint Bellanger artilces(Flare Engine) : This guy here works on a Isometric RPG Engine called Flare Engine(http://flarerpg.org/). This is a open source project and you can learn a lot from there also get some isometric images to use in your project. He Also have some articles that could help to understand :

http://clintbellanger.net/articles/isometric_intro/
http://clintbellanger.net/articles/isometric_math/
This one is good as well:
https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.co...ds-a-primer-for-game-developers--gamedev-6511

You can forget about use Tiled to do your maps. GameMaker Studio do not handle this and the only tool that i found that try to convert the tiles to isometric perspective room is this post on the forum (this do not worked for me, but the guy shared the code and you can try to change to fit for you): https://forum.yoyogames.com/index.php?threads/how-to-import-maps-from-tiled.7617/#post-142594

So, for the maps I've based myself on the code of one item inside the market and changed it to fit in my case : https://marketplace.yoyogames.com/assets/3198/isometric-dungeon-generator
Was good to understand a little bit how to place a map on isometric perspective.


Well, this is more or less how I started it, and many other things that I implemented was on trial and error, trying to implement codes of other tutorials into it... fuzzing around. lol

Hope this can help you to start.
 
F

Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
I'm a fan of isometric graphics as well. Although the perspective of your floor tiles seem off compared the the characters, is any of that a placeholder?
Hey Yan, Thanks for the hands up!

Well, you're talking about the "Hub world" or the wood floor stage ?

The Hub world it's a tiled image snapshot that is on 4096x4096... But I changed the Texture Page on GameMaker to be 2048x2048... so this is stretched.

If it's on the Wood floor stage, you could be right too, this is being generated on a level generation code and this also do the angle for the perspective... Can you explain better how it should be? Maybe help me to fix it. I would very appreciate it.
 

YanBG

Member
I meant the Wood floor, but the Hub world(last video?) has similar feel. It could be because of the characters though, i'm not sure.

Or i'm just used to looking at my game :D and i might be biased. But i use 60d angle, pre-rendered sprites(as yours) and they do the prespective(i don't stretch them), the code only place them on coordinates with isometric offset http://clintbellanger.net/articles/isometric_math/

You can see it here, i actully use the tiles from FLARE RPG but render my own character models:

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/44/43236/Screenshot_2.1.png
http://i.imgur.com/R4YQ28I.png

Why not using the FLARE tiles since i see you use the characters from there and they'll both fit better?

Any tiles could fit though, since i can mix them in my game, as long as their width is twice their height(128x64).
 
F

Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
I meant the Wood floor, but the Hub world(last video?) has similar feel. It could be because of the characters though, i'm not sure.

Or i'm just used to looking at my game :D and i might be biased. But i use 60d angle, pre-rendered sprites(as yours) and they do the prespective(i don't stretch them), the code only place them on coordinates with isometric offset http://clintbellanger.net/articles/isometric_math/

You can see it here, i actully use the tiles from FLARE RPG but render my own character models:

http://media.indiedb.com/images/games/1/44/43236/Screenshot_2.1.png
http://i.imgur.com/R4YQ28I.png

Why not using the FLARE tiles since i see you use the characters from there and they'll both fit better?

Any tiles could fit though, since i can mix them in my game, as long as their width is twice their height(128x64).
Yes, I'm using the same base as yours, but using 45 angle(maybe this is the reason) and Keney Iso Tiles(i think they are in 45 degrees also, dont have sure) with the Flare Char. Well, i'm using keney tiles because they have large definition and they have more scenarios types... so for me would be better to have different sets for my game, since I planning to trow the player to 'different realities'. But the chars sprites i think is more a flaw for my game... i think in the future render my own using the blender base files from Flare as well, but I do not have any experience on this so... will be like the last thing. :D

I'll try to change on the floor code to put 60 angle and see how this fit.

Ps: Nice project of yours! Do you have any gameplay video yet ?
 

YanBG

Member
Yeah, there are a few videos, not from the latest version though. Because i started working on the game couple years ago, but there are many bugs still :D

Edit: I use blender and took a month to cover the basics(hotkeys/animating limbs etc) but that's been a few hears ago and i learn new stuff all the time. Clint posted great scripts with code in python that automate the rendering. With one click it can produce all animations for a character and in .sprite format, which you can drag&drop into the GM:S resource tree.
http://gmc.yoyogames.com/index.php?showtopic=657241&hl=blender

Btw how did you import the Flare characters, are they with separate files for each frame or come in spritesheets?
 
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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
Very impressive project! You are already far ahead with all the mechanics on it! Do you have a schedule for the release ?
 

YanBG

Member
Thank you! I wanted to release it on Steam this year, but it's getting longer to iron out the battle system and i plan to update and/or add more graphics(Flare tiles are very small, but the ones i can create does not look that good), so idk about the schedule.
 
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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
I see, they are spritesheets, did you add them as included files and then used sprite_add?
In fact I have to review this because I've created a gamemaker sprite file for each armor set / weapon movement(for the 8 directions and actions) to test some different armors and weapons.... and now it's too much and is not good to add content.

For Example:
/// First Index 0,7 -> 8 Directions > 360/45
/// Second Index Actions MACRO
spr_array[0,ATK]
...
spr_array[7,ATK]

spr_array[0,MOVE]
...
spr_array[7,MOVE]


spr_array[0,DIE]
...
spr_array[7,DIE]

.............

I had done in that way because I've created an array variable inside it to keep the weapon/armor sprite set for the movement, so when I'm moving the char around it's always looking at the array for the direction and action index for the current equipment, in that way i could create an parent equipment object that could handle each equipment sprite... For example :

Move to right( index 2) and attacking ('ATK' Macro)

sprite_array[dir,ATK] = sprite_file_of_the_equipment_for_that_Action_and_direction

So for any equipment in the char he'll loop trough that indexes and print each sprite... so you can print then using the same index.
And so on ...

I already have set the index interval of each set of movements and will use only one sprite object and loop trough the right indexes to be a better and clean code.
 
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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
Question here, if this entire project was availiable at the market place, would you grab it ?
 
F

Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
Nice work!

Btw i like the UI and tooltips but the enemies doesn't act enough dangerous, could be just because of the test though.
Yes, I'm working on the difficult progression! After level 10 you start to die more often because the enemies are stronger, start to have Elite enemies, etc!

But i need to rework their AI too, like Refectory the code to be more efficient . Also have a bug when the player is too near of a wall, the enemy cant see him.

But I'm taking the opportunity that I'm working on new enemies to do a better code for then and update the old ones.

take a look :
 
F

Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
Hey guys! Just passing by to show you the StartScreen that i just created for the game!

Tell me if you like it or not!

 
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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
You mean the black space?? well, in fact i tried to made it as simple as possible to focus only in the middle! When the player start the game he´ll start at the hub world, exactly at this part but then he´ll able to see and walk the entire map.

I dont know if you get it.
 
C

Chocky

Guest
What parts of GameMaker did you find limiting and caused you to swap to Unity?
 
S

studioWHITEROCK

Guest
Yes, I'm working on the difficult progression! After level 10 you start to die more often because the enemies are stronger, start to have Elite enemies, etc!

But i need to rework their AI too, like Refectory the code to be more efficient . Also have a bug when the player is too near of a wall, the enemy cant see him.

But I'm taking the opportunity that I'm working on new enemies to do a better code for then and update the old ones.

take a look :
Those new enemies look great! Especially the first two - the priest has a bit too much pelvic movement. Keep it up!
 
F

Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
What parts of GameMaker did you find limiting and caused you to swap to Unity?
Well, GML makes you follow very specific ways to delivery a solution.
That could be a good or a bad way depends who and how you´re using the engine!
For begginers is really a good start!

Also it´s difficult to get more advanced examples. The community is good, but it´s not that large and not many professionals really use gamemaker.
Another pain point it´s really performance! It´s not hard to get your game lag if you dont optmize the code, but then we get in that problem of having a limited solution choices.

In a professional view, you can see many requirements for unity and unreal... GML is really not used in professional level, despite having great games as showcase.

But i really can see gamemaker very useful for simple games or ideas, is really really fast to do a simple game mechanics to try it out and also have very accessible shaders and particles effects(but they are heavy)
 
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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
Those new enemies look great! Especially the first two - the priest has a bit too much pelvic movement. Keep it up!
Thanks Mate! This are assets that i bought! It´s very hard to find good isometric assets, but those new looks great inside the game! I´m thinking to add an indian tribe
 

MaGicBush

Member
So this game isn't even using GM anymore? Shouldn't you close the thread, as this is a forum for GM only games.
 
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Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
So this game isn't even using GM anymore? Shouldn't you close the thread, as this is a forum for GM only games.
This game is running with GameMaker: Studio 1.4 until the end.

My Next project will be on Unity, but only after I end this one. Sorry if what I said passed the wrong impression.
 
F

Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
[OLDER]
[UPDATE 07/11/2017]

Hey Folks, so Here it´s the new Hub World that I´m creating for this game!

This current version of the Hub World contains:

-Statues NPC [Works to level Up Status Points]
-Sir Artlocks, Professor Punkswiids, Renegate Warrior NPC[Each one have some Random Missions as you go]
-Better fire and rain particles.

Also, you can notice some audio! Yes, currently I´m working on this and soon I´ll post a new video showing a little bit of the music game and effects!

You can see the entire devlog of the project here --> http://rybakovas.me/izoproject/devlog/

What's Next ?
After work many months on this project, I must say that it's time to move to another project...

But, I'll not just abandon the game. I worked to much time on this to just forget it. So to finish this project, I've set the launch date to 08/12/2017!!!! AT LEAST A BETA!

To that to work out, I'll try to delivery the best what I can taking that date in consideration and I've already set some scope changes to give it a more arcade look.

Gameplay Changes
  • You'll level up after clear each level. So it'll follow the 'Tower Evolution'
  • Combo Score System for Multiple kills
  • No Save/Load. You have one life to go further as you can... Highscore(offline/online) table will be there so you can track the evolution
  • No More Skill Tree. NPC's will give you Skills(Dash and elemental Magic(Fire,Ice,Dark)) as you level up in the tower DEPENDES ON YOUR CLASS
  • AS you level up in the tower, more random mutators could set on like fast enemies,large enemies,strong enemies, only Elite, etc.
  • You'll need to spend the enemies souls on the statues NPC to have more points on the desired atribute.
So if you´re interesting in receive news about this project, go to this link http://rybakovas.me/izoproject/ and subscribe!

Soon I'll make a playable beta available to everyone who has signed up for this link before the final release!

And that's all for today folks!
 
F

Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
How is it going? Do you plan a Steam release?
Hey! Well, I'm silent recently because I'm refactoring some player code.
In fact I'm giving this game a less equipment oriented gameplay to Magic / Skill gameplay!

I'm going to this because I let some friends to play to game and they really liked the Skills, but the melee combat was very difficult or not pleasant/powerful as the skills was.... which results in they really not caring for the close ranged weapons or even the shield.

But I was really glad they've played for more than one hour, even not having so much content for that long, in my opinion.

So I'll focus on Skill/Magic/Spells unlocks during the gameplay... letting the player change the set as he progress inside the game and try new skill combos.
The game stays with permadeath anyway, so i need to give a sense of progression.

To not lose the weapons that I already have, I'll work to then set the primary skill atk... they all will be ranged but for example : The WarHammer will be amost like a granade launcher, firing slow but with great area dmg. The Staff will have rapidfire, but will do less dmg aswell and so on ... So this can set the players to have a variety of gameplay styles.

So for that I'm reworking the UI, equipment system, finite state machine system, weapons scripts and creating the Spell / Skill system....

After end this I'm planning to put a playable demo on itch.io or gamejolt to gather the impressions....
Depending on how it will be, I'll put more time effort and put on Steam... Otherwise I'll let this as a portfolio project and free to download. Maybe put to sell the project code, or even for free... don't know.
 
F

Felipe Rybakovas

Guest
[UPDATE 08/03/2017]
Hi folks!! I just added a new enemy!! It´s more or less some kind of bomb zombie! Weak but if got to neat it´ll cause much damage! What you think ???

[UPDATE 07/25/2017]
Just created into the game the Sickle Zombie! He jumps from the distance and flee aways when it´s with low health! He´s very fast compared to the other enemies, but has low life! What you think ??

[UPDATE 07/22/2017]
Hey folks, just finished a new enemy on the game!
What you think ???

[COOP GAMEPLAY]
 
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