Tiny Heist

Terry Jan 2, 2017 46 Comments

Released in the last hour of 2016, I present: Tiny Heist! Scale the tower, avoid patrol bots and reach the rooftop with as many gems as you can find!

You can play Tiny Heist online here, or grab the downloadable versions!

It’s also available to download on itch.io, or to play online on Kongregate and Newgrounds!

Some stray thoughts in no particular order:

• This will probably be my last flash game. Oh well! Flash had a good run for me – 2008 to 2017 is a long time for a technology to stick around these days! In future, I plan to release my games primarily as HTML5 and desktop versions.
• On that note, you can try out an experimental HTML5 version of Tiny Heist here! It’s still a little buggy and runs slower than it should, so I’m not including it “officially” above. I built Tiny Heist in my own framework Haxegon, which I’m actively working on, and which should hopefully speed up a lot as time goes on.
• One of the big things I wanted out of this game was to learn about roguelike design first hand, and it’s definitely a success on that front. I learnt a lot making this. There’s a lot of stuff in this game that’s kind of a mess – things like timing, level generation, enemy design – but at a certain point it became more important to just finish the thing. Next time I try my hand at this genre should be a lot better, I think.
• OMG it feels good to have this game finished! It’s been so long since I finished a substantial free game. Recently I’ve been knuckling down pretty hard on a big, serious project, so it was nice to vent and work on something lighter for a while.
• I scaled this game down a lot to get it finished for the end of the year, but a lot of what I love about the project is still in there, though some of it buried very deep. I hope you enjoy playing it and discovering its secrets!

Seven more days: Day 7

Terry Dec 5, 2016 14 Comments

Day 7! Here it is! Very buggy, incomplete, etc etc etc. I’m going to poke at it over the next couple of weeks, aiming to finish it up before the new year. Let me know what you think!

[edit: this game is now finished! get it here!]

Seven more days: Day 5

Terry Dec 3, 2016 5 Comments

Day 5! Trying to wrap everything up now. Spent most of today adding new room types to the generator and fleshing out the floors I’ve done so far. Turns out I made some pretty useable tools for this last year! I’m up to the 12th floor now.

After thinking it through today, I think 15 floors + a boss floor might work better than 20. 20 floors is long enough to suggest needing some sort of shortcut system for repeated plays, while 16 is manageable in a single run – and I think it makes more sense to keep it short and snappy and replayable. Also, conveniently, it gives me 4 less floors to design, which is nice.

So it seems likely at this point that I will be posting something playable here on Sunday night, which is great, but don’t expect it to be completely “finished”. I think I like this game too much to just throw it out into the world arbitrarily – so I’m planning a week or two of public playtesting! Look forward to seeing what people make of this!

Seven more days: Day 4

Terry Dec 2, 2016 2 Comments

Past the half way mark now. Got a lot to do over the next couple of days!

My rough plan for the game is to make a tower of stuff that’s 20 floors high, with four different stages every fifth floor. I’m taking it one floor at a time, and so far I’m up to floor 9. I’m trying to get up to floor 20 as quickly as I can, and get the frame of the game built – then, I’ll go back down and fill in the rough patches!

Seven more days: Day 3

Terry Dec 1, 2016 0 Comments

Day 3! Things are a still too shaky to share a playable build, but I took a video of the first five levels in the game so far!

There’s a bunch of weird code in this game I don’t understand anymore – and that means lots and lots of weird level generation bugs that I have no hope of understanding. So the main thing I did today was to add an AI director for the game.

Once a floor has been generated for the player, the AI director takes over! It makes decisions like “That door goes nowhere, let’s scrap it”, or “You haven’t found a weapon in a while, maybe you should find one on this floor!” or just “opps, this level is impossible, let’s make a different one”. Probably going to be giving it a lot more to do by the end of the project – it’s a lot easier than trying to fix the generator at this point.

Main design change of the day: I’m trying an even simpler version of the weapons/item system where everything is single use. The game’s more fun when you’re underpowered anyway.

Tomorrow, the next five floors!

Seven more days: Day 2

Terry Nov 30, 2016 1 Comments

Day 2! After spending most of yesterday getting to grips with the game again, today I started adding some new stuff. By the time I’d stopped working on it last year, it had become a mess of half finished ideas – so my general approach is to simplify as much of the game as possible, and focus on keeping the stuff that’s fun. For example, I’m trying a system where you just have two or three inventory slots. Simpler than a full inventory system, and probably more interesting too.

Mostly what I’ve been doing today is cutting stuff out of the game – I’ve short circuited the level generator to just go back to giving me one floor of a tower at a time, I’m scrapping items and weapons that don’t have enough individual identity to be worth cluttering the game, and I’ve simplified some basic concepts in the game – for example, all the enemies are robots now, which means there’s no longer a class of weapons that’s effective against humans but not robots, or vice versa.

Tomorrow I’m going to get back to level design, so hopefully I’m not too far away from something playable!

Seven more days: Day 1

Terry Nov 29, 2016 3 Comments

Hey hey! I’ve been feeling an itch recently to finish something small, so I’m taking a week off my big secret project to resurrect an old thing that I wish I’d finished last year!

Some of you might remember this game from last year’s 7-day roguelike (there’s even an early playable build knocking about). Things were looking really good for this one, but then right at the end of the week I botched it – I stupidly decided what it really needed was some huge overworld game structure, and it ended up fizzling out and going nowhere.

What it actually needed was a little focus to get it across the finish line – the game’s already fun and full of cool emergent stuff, and I’m hoping a week is long enough to make that happen. Here we go!

Day by Day

Terry Apr 16, 2015 4 Comments

Sorta can’t believe I’m still working on this. Officially more than a month, now! It’s unbelievable how many things I work on that only exist because I thought they’d take 48 hours, 7 days, whatever. If I knew how long half of what I worked on would end up taking, I’d never start. I guess it’s a good failing, in that sense.

It looks like I’ll be taking a break from this for a while to go to AMAZE, where I’ll be giving a talk about how’s it come together so far, and where it’s going.

Day 29

Terry Apr 9, 2015 10 Comments

More progress!

Ended up spending too long today messing with graphics, but I finally like how it looks. The final version will probably look more or less like this, I think.

The next big thing on my list is to rethink inventory management – the basic idea is that I want items and gadgets to be pretty scarce over the course of the game, and a limited inventory is a pretty good way to solve that problem while still letting you discover lots of new things as you play. But thinking about it, I’m not sure I want the hassle of stuff to pick up bringing up a menu and asking you to drop stuff and etc… this is really feeling like much more of an arcade game than a roguelike at this point, and I don’t want get in the way of that feeling.

Thinking of trying different solutions, like clearing your inventory after every tower or just giving you a hard limit on what you can bring into a new one – which is a hard thing to wrap a game fiction around, but solves a lot of the same problems for a lot less work. Maybe better solves them, actually. Hmm.

Day 28

Terry Apr 8, 2015 3 Comments

Everyday I work on this, it gets slightly better. Today has been particularly good for little changes suddenly clicking into place, making every unrelated thing around it make sense.

I really like how this is shaping up.