Coinflip Castle

A luck-based micro adventure

[coinflipcastle]

Coinflip Castle devlog 07 : Re-invogorated

Welcome back. After a bit of a hiatus, let’s get caught up on what’s been happening with Coinflip Castle lately.

What’s new?

UI update

After showing the game to some friends and colleges, the main feedback was “I really liked it - once you told me how to play it”. The game had an issue with explaining itself, and players didn’t know what their choices were actually affecting. Not great.

So to help address these issues, I’ve updated the artwork, with responsive animations and some basic audio to help convey what the player is doing each time they tap a button.

Players now have much more information about each encounter - with every obstacle, trap or enemy having its stats displayed below its name. So far we have:

Strength - the attack damage they will do to the player.

Heal - how much health the enemy will recover .

Thief - the number of gold coins that the enemy will steal from you.

Armour - how much bonus defense the enemy has.

??? - more to come!

BONUS: Lore-like descriptions of each obstacle helps flesh them out and adds some nice backstory to the world.

Updated art

As well as polishing the UI, I’ve begun the process of updating the character and enemies’ designs, and will be replacing the old Blender models with Spine animations (see above).

The art will come in one huge pass once I’m pleased with the technical side of the game (so pleased don’t get too attached to this skeleton)

What’s next?

New areas

I think this gets put on every ‘what’s next’ section, but it’s always sitting in the back of my mind. I want to make sure the new areas of the game are interesting. I want to try and avoid well-trodden ‘’’videogame’’’ areas if I can. While this is mostly an art task, each area will have unique gameplay tricks to make them both look and feel different.

Refined generation code

It’s a little rough right now -  levels have a chance of being anywhere between 80 and 110 steps long, which seemed like a good idea at the time. I’m planning on locking it to 100 per level, with each ‘gene’ (see this post on the generation) being 10 units in size.

This ties into another gameplay feature I will be adding, where enemies have a chance to spawn ‘gilded’ - golden versions with much higher stats, but much higher rewards!

I’m interested in other ways to layer bonus ‘types’ onto the existing enemies, such as plated (bonus armour), powerful (extra attack damage), resilient (extra health), etc.

Remember that Feature Creep can be an exciting, but dangerous thing...

[coinflipcastle]

Coinflip Castle devlog 06 : Fresh new style!

What’s new?

The UI is having a hefty overhaul

I wanted something that looked a bit more solid and clean. I tried a few variations of where the health bars are placed, the size of the coin etc. I quite like the little circlet in the health bar close to the top (it would have a little ‘clashing swords’ icon inside when in battle), but in the end it made more sense to put the health bar close to the other vital information. The circlet is then covered by the sword, so it’s useless. I kept the same idea in the sides of the name bar instead.

There are small pop-ups that notify what has happened in respect to health and gold. These made the game much clearer.

I’ve changed the UI in order to accomodate a new big gameplay change...

The gold-betting system works quite differently now!

There are no more ‘misses’ - Heads means that you attack, Tails means that the enemy attacks. I find this speeds up the game quite nicely, and elimiates boring stalemates.

Instead of adding to a cumulative ‘power pool’ that both you and the opponent share, now you spend gold on increasing your attack or your defence per coin-flip.

What’s next?

Getting further in the game

In the old version, you can easily get to 99 steps (after which point you will confuse the generation code) but now it’s uncommon to get further than 30 steps (Highscore so far is 44). This might be fixed with a bit of balancing, but it questions how important new areas in the game will be. Do I want to just extend the castle’s prison? It is more interesting to have new areas with varied enemies, but that all takes time. If most players never reach even the end of the first area, is it worth making them at all? I do have a story for the game, but would anyone ever experience it?

Art update

I will be moving on from Blender and will be using Spine for the animations in the game. Spine is much more suited to this kind of style, so the animation can be done faster and to a much higher standard.

The main character and the enemies are also in the process of being redesigned. I based the main character on some art of mine called Snake Knight (mostly because I liked the colours), and skeletons and slimes are sort of generic dungeon monsters. I’d like for this game to have a more unique ‘brand’ of creatures.

[coinflipcastle]

Coinflip Castle devlog 05 : Save system

What’s new?

A save system of sorts. Let’s go into that real quick.

It saves your progress. Great. That’s pretty useful for a pick-up/put-down mobile game.

The system is very simple. Effectively, the entire level is generated as a string of integers, and each of these integers corresponds with an obstacle in an array (see above). By creating small ‘pre-designed’ chunks of integers (genes), I can quickly generate a long string of encounters (DNA) that feel ‘designed’, and can be saved easily. On reload, the game remembers your distance through the level, and rebuilds the remaining obstacles in your path. Done.

This idea of combination of generated and pre-designed levels comes straight from Spelunky (see this great GMTK video about it)

One downside of this system is that I’m limited to 8 obstacles per level type, but this isn’t a complex game, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

Treasure chests. 

These originally had a chance to drop no gold on tails, they now either drop some gold (tails) or A LOT (heads). I found that it was too easy to run out of gold after only a few encounters, and the game quickly lost a lot of the excitement without the risk/reward.

Health. 

Having a game run entirely on chance, it turns out, can be quite challenging. Giving the player more health to start with (9, as opposed to the original 6) is much better.

What’s next?

Save system.

Some way of obfuscating the data. At the moment it’s a literal string of integers that could easily be edited for cheating purposes.

Treasure chests

Now that treasure chests are a guaranteed source of gold, I feel that they need some negative aspect somehow. Mimics, anyone?

Could treasure chests contain other things?

Health

I’m working on an ‘overkill’ mechanic, whereby killing an enemy with more gold than their remaining health will recover your own, and overfill it temporarily (if it’s full). I like this idea because it adds another risk/reward layer to the game, and lets the player stay alive for longer.

Health regeneration. At the moment, you gain +1 health for every heads you get while walking. This gives the coin flip a purpose when there are no encounters, and also gives you a fighting chance when fighting through long waves of enemies. But why should you get all the fun? Some enemies will be able to regenerate, too. 

Other possibilities. More ways of player agency would help alleviate frustration in a chance-based game. The player needs to feel like they did everything they could to avoid disaster with a bad coin-flip, or make the most of a good one. Perhaps health potions could be a useful way of doing this? These would not be affected by the coin, and could be used as a way to ‘beat the system’. Why just cures, why not curses, too!? Throw a cursed vial at an enemy out of turn to balance the battle? 

Other

More enemies and obstacles

Sound!

New areas, and progression in general. It’d be nice to have different stages in the game soon. 

Better at updating devlog! 

[coinflipcastle]

Coinflip Castle devlog 04 : Taking a step back

What’s new?

Nothing new really. I’ve taken a brief pause to see where this little project is going. I’m always teetering on the edge of making this game simple and easy to finish, or making this game more interesting but more difficult to complete.

Perhaps I could add to the combat a bit? At the moment the player either hits, or misses, depending on the Heads or Tails result. Giving the player some agency during the battles might alleviate some feelings of helplessness and frustration. One idea is to add consumable items, such as potions and poisons that can be used, regardless of coin outcome.

I want to keep the UI as clear and un-cluttered as possible. One issue is the massive coin, which is somewhat important to the core aspect of the game. Other UI elements must be made to revolve around it somehow, and ideally I’d like to keep it onscreen at all times.

What’s next?

The above...

[coinflipcastle]

Coinflip Castle devlog 03 : Making progress

What’s new?

General UI update - Steps taken, enemies slain and the menu button have nice little boxes around them, and I seem to have figured out a consistent palette for the UI.

Enemies can fight back now! It was surprisingly easy to fit their turns into the existing system. I’ve tried and failed with making turn-based things in the past so it’s nice for it to finally work out.

Localisation is a thing! I spent about half a day putting in a system that pulls data from a spreadsheet. I’m using a free asset from the Unity store called Base Localization Tool. It took a bit of time to figure out, but now this little experiment has the potential to reach a wider audience. From my time working on Bertram Fiddle, I’ve come to appreciate the importance of localisation, no matter how small your game is, and getting it set up as early as possible is vital!

What’s next?

More enemy types, and more types of obstacles and scenarios in general. This will help keep the things interesting and varied as the player is tapping their way through the game.

A greater number of rogue-like elements, such as health drops, multiple armour types, weapons, enchantments & curses etc. One of the interesting parts of rogue-likes (at least for me) is seeing how much stuff I’ve managed to survive long enough to collect.

Some placeholder google-translate text for each of the languages I’ve added in. These won’t be perfect, but they will help me test the system.

[coinflipcastle]

Coinflip Castle devlog 02 : Catching Up (part 2) 

What’s new?

The basic progression system is in place,with some placeholder art. 

I’ve moved on from the fish coin to a more appropriate heads/tails one to fit the knightly theme, as well as a 3D character & enemy model that I’m reskinning for all humanoids. It’s basic, but it’s working while I set up animations.

I had the idea for the main character to have a shield and a whip to better convey the ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ idea. Also I almost prefer the sound of “Dice-roll Dungeon”...Hmm...

What’s next?

More art!

[coinflipcastle]

Coinflip Castle devlog 01 : Catching Up (part 1)

I’m already a little bit into developing this little game, so let’s get you up to speed!

Originally this game was a sort of ‘loot box methadone’ - popping open an exciting mystery chest to see what’s inside (It’ll be either heads or tails).

While gameplay would be simple, the look of the game itself could be customised. The background, coin, sound effects, and even the particle effects that play when the coin is flipped could be mix and matched. These cosmetic items could be purchased with the mini-coins that were collected during play.

I had planned to keep this app constantly updated with themed ‘unlocks’, be it seasonal, i.e halloween, christmas, summer etc. or perhaps even sponsored unlocks. If a company or brand had their logo on an in-game coin, would players accept that as an alternative to in-game video ads?

After some development and play testing, I decided to change the game’s direction. It was simple, but maybe too simple. It was a bit boring.

So I went with my default game idea - knights in dungeons...