Adventure mode's world and arcade game names
Hello! I thought I was going to spend the last two weeks working on my game’s online co-op multiplayer, but that didn’t happen because…
Online multiplayer is working!
I hooked my game’s rollback netcode up to Steam’s online multiplayer backend, ported Chessplosion’s lobby menus to the game, and played some test games with some game designer friends in the US. Against all odds, it somehow worked perfectly on our very first attempt!
It’s still missing a few small features such as displaying player names, and I’m still not entirely sure how adventure mode’s co-op is going to function yet. But other than that, it’s all done.
Building adventure mode’s world
With co-op mostly out of the way, I decided to work on the game’s adventure mode for the first time since last year. In case you haven’t seen adventure mode before, it’s an action-adventure game mode with a connected world to explore.
Last year my plan was for split adventure mode’s world into an overworld and several self-contained dungeons, like The Legend of Zelda series. But after playing more action-adventure games and expermenting with different options I think I’d rather build most of the “dungeons” into the overworld itself, like the Dark Souls series or various top-down action RPGs like Hydlide and Sylvie RPG.
So instead of exploring the overworld and discovering a cave entrance that leads down into a volcano dungeon, you’ll just explore the overworld and discover a volcano section. I prefer this approach in general, and most of my games’ environments make more sense if they’re above ground anyway.
Before I started building the world I added one-way shortcuts, so players can open new routes back to places they’ve already explored:
With that out the way, I started designing adventure mode’s world. This is the first time I’ve done level design on an exploration game, so I figured the best way for me to learn was by building something and seeing what went wrong.
I got about halfway through creating adventure mode’s world before I ran into map design issues:
Some of the outer areas were so far away from the player’s spawn point that I was sorely tempted to add lots of fast-travel teleporters. The early areas weren’t faring much better either, as some of them were much harder to find than the tricky late-game areas.
Now that I have a better idea of how to build a world map, I’m rearranging the existing map into a layout that feels much more satisfying to explore naturally, without relying on teleporters or excessive locks and keys. There’s still work to be done but it feels great so far, and hopefully I’ll be able to show off some gameplay footage next time.
I made an arcade game name generator
I love the names of 1990s arcade games and 2000s doujin games, and I’ve recently spent far too long thinking about them while trying to come up with a name for my game.
I noticed that the names of lots of these games follow a similar two-word format, so I made website that generates them. If you want to create your own game names like TANK PRINCESS or BLADE BREAKER, check it out:
The code isn’t very complicated; it pretty much just picks two random words from a big list of cool arcade game words that I wrote down. I’m not sure what it says about my taste in games that you can just show me two random words from a list and I’ll want to play whatever the result is. Let’s not think about that too hard.
Anything else?
I recently replayed Kururin Paradise on the Game Boy Advance, one of the main inspirations for my game Ducky's Delivery Service. It's still a great game, and its Survive minigame is even more fun than I remember it being!
I love Sylvie's commentated playthrough of Golvellius, a top-down action-adventure game for the MSX. Golvellius is much more focused on secrets and upgrades than my game, and it's fascinating to see how Sylvie figured out the conditions to reveal each of its hidden caves.
Zarithya's video on 16 player multiplayer in Faceball 2000 for the original Game Boy was great too! I'd heard rumours of its 16 player multiplayer when I was younger so it's great to see someone figure out how it all works.
That’s all I’ve been up to recently. As you can probably tell, I fell down a bit of an action-adventure game rabbit hole and I'm going to stay down there for a while before I return to my usual arcade game loving self. I hope you have a wonderful couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!