It’s been ages since we posted our last update! But we’re back! 🥳
Me <– the “game developer”, was actually on another holiday adventure overseas… And still having holiday hang overs for a couple of weeks now hahaha! 😁
So here’s a recap of what we’ve got so far…
Updated Main Menu screen with new background graphics and new button graphics. And some color tweaks to the particle effects.
Clean and new looking Load Character screen.
Added the new Character Builder screen and
New Popup Dialogue graphics.
In the video, I also added background music by Eric Matyas. You can check out his sound and music collection at soundimage.org 🤩
What do you think of the new look?
Don’t forget to like Dyethrow Pixel’s FB page. Mahika has come to life with the help of Dyethrow’s artwork 😊
Back to game development the past week, and we have a small demo clip of the newly designed avatar builder! Check it out! 😊
Newly Designed Avatar Builder
Hope everyone had a great holiday break! We had a blast and we still have vacation hangovers 🤣
But we’re back designing Mahika! The long break was helpful. Feeling refreshed and ready to rock the world again!
On our previous post, we gave a sneak peak screenshot of the new Menu design. Continuing the new design path, we made the avatar builder fit the new look, lowering down click footprints, and improving its visual appeal.
It was a slow 2 weeks for us! Social gatherings, finishing up day job projects and trying to keep a focused effort working on Mahika 🥴
At-the-moment, we are reorganizing the Mahika Unity3D project and cleaning up component clutter. The months of brainstorming have added unnecessary stuff to the build waah!
On the visual side, Dyethrow’s been busy designing the UI and before we go on a holiday break, he’s shared one of his designs with us 🤩
What do you think? Does it capture the magic?
I personally love it! A few animation pizzazz and it’s perfect (in my opinion) for our Main Screen 😊
Hope you all have a great Holiday! ~ Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
We’ve been full on with all kinds of stuff and preparing for the Christmas holiday. Although no visual progress, there is design and technical progress!
The past few days for me was juggling between game development and game design. And one concern that we wanted to address is character progression.
We envision Mahika to be a fast paced, top down, roguelike (or rogue-lite) game. And, adding too much things to tweak makes the game cumbersome to play. This is especially true when we added a long list of character attributes ala D&D game play.
So we ditched much of the complex stuff and left three (3) main character attributes.
Health ~ the attribute that keeps players alive in the game! Avoid getting hit and player survives the level 😁
Mana ~ the attribute that enables players to conjure spells and wield magic weapons. 😍
Stamina ~ the attribute to limit dash and run movement. A simple simulation of the real world 😊
We then focused on designing an easy but comprehensive skill progression. We feel that a solid skill progression will provide more depth to the game without overcomplicating stuff.
Here’s a sneak peak of the skill map we envision for Mahika.
LanguageSkill ~ The first skill and will be intrinsic to the character at the start of the game. Again, a simple simulation of the real world.
Language is one of the foundation for learning. We need to be able to read, write and talk to learn stuff.
In Mahika, the level of the language skill determines the character’s ability to learn other skills, including other nation or race’ written/spoken language.
Life Skills ~ Yep! we’re going all out in real world simulation! We’re going to add four (4) RPG player favorite skills: Farming, Fishing, Cooking and Merchant.
Magic Skills ~ Mahika won’t be Mahika without magic… We plan to add 10 major magic skill group to the game. We don’t know yet how many skill per group, but we already have a list to choose from.
It’s an ambitious list! And we know it’s a stretch to deliver all at once, so we’re targeting piecemeal updates during early access.
Players won’t get all the magic and life skills at start. They need to unlock non intrinsic skills to use them.
But we’ll give the player three (3) intrinsic skills at the start ~ The language skill and two (2) magic skills.
Now the first magic skill will be determined by the Sage Class of the character. And the other skill, life or magic, will be selected by the player.
Any intrinsic skills will get a mastery boost, meaning, players will have the opportunity to level up the intrinsic skills to mastery level. All other skills will max out to expert level.
To unlock non intrinsic skills, the player needs to read books or learn the skill from NPC masters 🤩
And that’s how we envision the character progression!
Been a slow game dev week for us… Life, especially for me, is throwing a couple of curve balls! But we continue to march on with what we have haha!
The forest looks awesome! Though we still need to polish up the trees.
I’m also working on the game balance ~ Leveling up, Hero attributes and Skills.
I admit, I maybe overdoing the RPG / DND aspect of the game… I will trim down some of the DND elements since I envision Mahika to be a casual roguelike game not a full on DND game.
Unwell since last week 🤧😢 But the show must go on!
Dyethrow shared the new dungeon pixel art tiles for Mahika and it looks awesome! 👏👏👏
I finally had the time to use it in our scene and the details of the wall and floor are stunning. Can’t wait for him to complete the map and add it to the auto-map-generator of the game.
That’s it for now.
Stay safe! Always have fun! Thanks for reading/watching our vlog.
This week, been working on improving the game feedback when leveling up. Sounds and effects still need some polishing up but it will do for now.
Then I enabled the game inventory and did some quick panel alignments so it looks fit on the screen. Dyethrow still working on the UI but he did gave me a preview of the environment and new enemies we will use. They look awesome!
Hope you follow him on his Facebook account ~ Dyethrow Pixel, he does time lapse pixel artwork and we gave him the go ahead to showcase Mahika game assets.
Lastly, I added a loot system for destructible game props like the clay jars. Loot will randomly drop when the prop is destroyed.
That’s it. Hope you watch the YouTube demo to see it in action. 😊
Stay safe! Have fun! See you all on the next blog/vlog.
But managed to pull through with another Mahika game update 😁
It’s not much but it’s good visual progress coz now we can see the health bar and experience bar working for our hero.
The XP formula which I was tweaking and testing last week can now be visualized with the experience bar. I still need to add sounds, visual effects and other game events tied up to the hero experience but we’ll get there (soon)! 😅
Dyethrow was all out doing pixel art stuff for the game. He added new props like our own dungeon chest, dungeon torch and destructible clay pot. He’s currently designing the background environment and game UI.
At my end, I was suppose to prep the environment scene but opted to improve our hero’s Level Up logic. I was experimenting on a level up formula that I can implement and I finally got a good formula that I like 😊
And since the level up event is now working, I was excited to try it out by killing enemy slimes! bwahahaha! 😈
The game template I’ve been using has this awesome enemy template prefab that I can pull into my scene and copy over and arrange so the enemies are already lying in wait for our hero.
But what if I want enemies to spawn into my scene when I trigger a trap? Or maybe spawn enemies randomly from a set of spawn points when the hero enters a room?
Unfortunately, the template only have a simple auto-spawner so I had to create my own customisable enemy spawner.
With the new enemy spawner, I can setup a room that will spawn tons of enemies to create an action pack scene! I can spawn random enemies from a set object pool or randomly spawn enemies from a set of spawn points. I can even use it to spawn minions of an enemy boss 😍
Happy that I finished two component this week and hoping to get more done next week!
Thanks for reading and watching the vlog.
Stay safe! Have fun! See you on the next blog/vlog.
Candy Cabinets Studio 