Unfair Dungeon

For better or worse, the last couple months have been a slow and steady trudge of UI and presentation-type work coupled with some personal struggles trying to find good time to work on the game.Continuing to Find a StyleI'm still working my way toward a cohesive style and ended up putting together a nice style guide for myself a few months ago. Some key features:Colors from the palette will have more defined roles like blue for UI, yellow for rewards, magenta for metaprogressionFont will be italic Julia Mono unless there's a stylistic need for something elseBloom and Scanlines for visual identitySnappy tweens and animations used liberallyThe initial implementations of the style guide have been good so far! The main game screen is looking a lot more polished than previously. Unfortunately, I think the 'good buttons' will be going away in favor of something a little easier to animate. Title Screen Wonder & WoesI debated whether to include a title screen at all. Cogmind and Haque have both been big influences for me. Cogmind has a really cool opening sequence that drops you right into a game without a title screen at all while Haque has a very simple and stylized title screen. In the end, I chose to use turnip_juice's capsule art as the title screen artwork as well, with a couple added flourishes...Parallax elements follow the mouseParticle effectsA pulsing light on the lantern Together, they give life and movement into the title screen in a way that isn't too distracting and still vibes. https://nuzcraft.com/blog/20260709-slow-roll-ui/048_wip_title_vid.mp4Buttons and TweensI found this video by Mr. Eliptik to be really enlightening, and I've been trying to dig into some of the juice that tweens can provide. You can see a bit of it in the buttons on the title screen. Unfortunately, I will probably get rid of the 'good buttons' in favor of something that's going to be a little easier to animate and customize.Other Little ThingsSome side effects of my work on the title s...

Unfair Dungeon has a fresh new look!! This amazing new capsule art was created by turnip_juice. It has been wonderful working with them and I'm beyond excited to show off what they've created. Thank you Turnip!CosmeticsI started working on one of my key features coming into this project: skins! I started setting up some pre-defined resources for new skins and palettes and built out a temporary screen for switching them on the fly. It's working really well! Here you can see us switch from the Wee Goblin in Lovely Green to a Grumpy Frog in Autumnal hues. In my head these cosmetics will represent significant unlockables for players that will cross playthroughs. I want to make some fun skins and palettes that players will want to find AND I should be able to add buffs and shaders to them as rewards for players who take on some difficult challenges or get lucky.Good ButtonsOver the past couple months a big focus has been visual, and in that vein I created the 'good button'. It's springy, it's juicy, it's a dang good button. Here you can see it in action.FlipperOne of the challenges of presenting Unfair Dungeon is SHOWING that the player's inputs are passing and failing. There are already a lot of visual triggers to help players understand what is going on, but it remains (and will always remain) a huge barrier because it breaks gaming norms. I'm working on a little flipper visual that will show a coin flipping and the player's current combo. The coin-flipping aesthetic will hopefully start to bridge the gap from players controls to randomness, though there are some additional improvements I'd like to make.Refactor+TestingWith a renewed focus on UI, I endeavored to begin decoupling the spaghetti of my main game loop by bringing much of the UI controls into their own scene, which new signals to help connect things together. Prior to this update, most (all?) the UI labels were getting refreshed every frame. This solution is GREAT for a lot of projects, but it falters when y...

Holidays, vacation, and a foray back into color randomization have left me a bit distracted since the last Nuzcraft Newsletter. Even so, I'm happy to talk through the latest features coming to Unfair Dungeon!Wishlist Unfair Dungeon Today!Clicking on Quadrated SpritesPrestigeOne of the ways I want to expand the footprint of this silly random game is to encourage players to chain together runs. After completing a game, returning with the Coin of Rehtaeh, you can flip it for a chance to "prestige". The game starts over and you lose all your upgrades, but you keep your items and earn some currency to spend on items for more permanent upgrades. I'm intending to include some achievements + unlockable skins for prestiging.Accepting the Coin's JudgementShopping & ItemsPrestiging will let you earn currency to spend at the merchant. This was an intense feature to develop because I needed to rewrite much of the that pathing functionality to allow for a branching path to the merchant. It is important to me that the the game doesn't force the player to engage with the shop, they will need to go out of their way to interact with it.Items are intended to directly affect the player to make the next run faster/easier. The most straightforward example is a 'lucky' ring that makes it 5% easier to move the chosen direction. Purchasing the ring is a permanent buff, and raises the floor on which the XP-purchased upgrades draw from. The run, and every prestiged run after, will go faster and feel easier. There is a lot of design space open for interesting item effects.Demonstrating a Shop & Item EffectsQuadrated Sprites & JuiceI'd been musing for a while about 2-color sprites divided vertically down the middle. The Oh No, More Goblins tileset is designed to be 1-bit, but MRMO's art has a couple examples of bigger sprites with the left and right halfs colored differently. To try this out, I built out a simple shader to let me split the sprite into quarters for detailed colorization.Quadrati...