Saturday, 20 April 2019

Burning Knight is now on Steam: Wishlist!

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Yay! This was a long-waited moment, but it finally happened! Burning Knight Steam page just went live (please wishlist!)!

Also, hey, I wasn’t sitting without a task for the last month, so here is a short list of things I’ve done, that are somewhat exciting:

  • Breakable things!
  • Breakable walls!
  • Paintings (they are also breakable)!
  • New enemies!
  • Awesome level editor!
  • Items are now defined in json!
  • New procgen algs!
  • Movement tech!
  • New shadows
  • New website! (https://burningknight.net/)
  • Teasers!

Trust me, there are so many not exciting things, that I had to cut from this list, just because… Well, they or wherein java edition, or just too boring.

So let’s dive into it, and have a closer look at all that cool stuff!

Breakable things!

Before this point, the dungeon did not have much stuff, except walls and floors. I had this idea of having random things here and there for a loong while, and I finally got around implementing it.
And I don’t regret it. It’s really fun to break things, plus if you miss your shot, you have a chance to break a prop instead. I also have plans to let players pick them up and throw at enemies (imagine how fun that would be!!!). Some of the props, tho, are not as simple as they look, for example, cactus hurts, as this commit suggests:

Ouch

Some other props might drop loot or spawn enemies.

Breakable walls!

I really like Hammer-Head mutation from nuclear throne, that allows you to break walls with your head, but sadly, in case of Burning Knight, that would break the game, because you will be able to reach the exit without killing everyone in the room. But I found a replacement: I’ve introduced another wall type, planks, that will break if a bullet or a sword hits it. And of course, it will break with tons of particles, screen shake and freezeframes, so it feels really nice.

Paintings (they are also breakable)!

Burning Knight used to have random decorations on the walls, like mirrors and torches. It was good, but not good enough… So this week I’ve introduced paintings into the game!

Paintings and destroyable props, as well as… Cactus hurts xD
They are a nice way to make the walls more interesting, plus you can collect them, and they are just nice! And I already packed tons of references into them!

More paintings

New enemies!

I don’t want to spoil much, but I will just say: making enemies walk on walls was hard!

Uff

Awesome level editor!

Just look at it! It will be shipped with the game, and you will be able to design your own dungeons!

Items are now defined in json!

Before, items were stored right in the code. And well, that started becoming quite a bit of a mess, and when I moved to C#, sweet sweet hot-swap stopped being a thing, sadly. So, I updated the item creating process, and now you can define items in json! As well as becoming more modular, the system is now more easily moddable for non-c# people, plus now I can hot-swap json, what means, that I can hot-swap items too!

{
  "bk:halo" : {
    "type" : "artifact",
    "pool" : [
      "chest",
      "angel"
    ],

    "uses" : {
      "id" : "bk:ModifyMaxHp",
      "amount" : 1
    }
  }
}

New procgen algs!

Room generation is now split into generating floor (decor) and walls (obstacles), that allowed me to mix floors and walls more, and now the rooms feel much more alive.

Movement tech!

Secret movement technics are fun, so I’ve added a bunch of them, such as REDACTED xD

New shadows

Slimeys

Before, all the shadows were simple circles, but now they are much more complex, and I think it looks much better. It’s a bit more complex to render, but I think it’s worth it.

New website! (https://burningknight.net/)

Before, Burning Knight used to live at rexcellentgames.com/bk, but just a few days ago I bought burningknight.net just for the game. It’s nice to have a separate domain, especially for links like burningknight.net/discord or people, who do not know, who made Burning Knight.

I also did a redesign for the website, minified it (as well as this site), and it might seem a bit less exciting without the cool background, but that background made browsers lag so much! Plus, I’ve added a nicer screenshot preview thingy 🙂

Teasers!

I’ve made 3 attempts to make a nice trailer for Burning Knight. I can’t find the first one, but here are my two last attempts (sorry for the quality):

Version v0.2:

Version v0.3:

And you can see, that I’m not too good at making trailers. So we run a competition on our Discord server, and here are a few trailers teasers, that guys on discord made:


Lovely 🙂

What’s next?

My current goal is to get a test build going before the end of this month. I’m going to post it in our discord server, so you know what to do 😉

Join our Discord! Join our Discord!

So that mostly includes polish and adding items right now, but probably other things will pop up on the way. Will see how it goes.
And by the way, please wishlist Burning Knight on Steam! It really helps 🙂

Cheers!

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