#CD50 - "Balatro with arcade games instead of poker"

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

fringe mirage
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Showing off the state of my in-progress game, CD50. I've got a lot of work to do on it but you can see in the current footage the intended gameplay - roguelite runs consisting of fast paced arcade games, where the arcade games include a few recreations of classics and a lot of remixes of classic ideas. I haven't implemented them yet, but the game will also include a bunch of "modifiers" - things like "all spawns x2", "health +1", "spread fire in all shooting games" - and the meta game will be creating broken combinations of modifiers to push your high score to ludicrous limits.

To make fifty mini games and make it so that the modifiers have consistent behavior across all of them, I'm using composition to make every game. There are no game scripts, just objects running their own internal logic and communicating with universal signals. This makes it extremely easy to remix games by literally copy + pasting the spawners for a different game into a new one, or swapping the "patrol ai" brain on an entity for a "player control" brain, things like that.

I'm shooting for a late October launch, and a demo on itch.io by the end of this month. This is my first game, I hope ya'll like it.

fringe mirage
fringe mirage
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Modifers are in place! Points and scoring rebalance incoming cuz right now it's a little wack

fringe mirage
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Planetary Attack! The last game I'm making for the demo, from here it's all about polish and finishing the "Polybius" character.

south grove
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Something to point out about balatro is the main reason people like it is due to the jokers that combo well with each other (something most roguelikes do something similar to this)

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I can't tell if you're actually trying to go for a roguelike style game with this or something else but if you are how do you plan to do upgrades or something like that when you play through multiple different entirely mechanically different games?

fringe mirage
# south grove I can't tell if you're actually trying to go for a roguelike style game with thi...

I'm handling this with the "modifier" system. These are enabled by the composition architecture that I'm using to assemble the games, something like "all spawns x 1.5" just watches the scene tree, gets any spawners that enter the tree, and multiplies their spawn count by 1.5. Shotgun Mode does the same thing and adds a spread to the two extra bullets it adds, Overclocked CPU gets all of my "leg" components and multiplies their key settings by 1.25x, etc.

It does require more than a few special case handlers, though. I'm planning to refactor the core architecture with lessons learned once the demo is polished a bit, but like right now I've got this spaghetti if/else tree doing special handling for a few of my games that are more problematic (the tetris-alikes basically) than the others.

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The game's demo is public! I'm still polishing it up but if you've clicked in here you should check it out - it runs in the browser!

https://ssjmarx.itch.io/cd50

itch.io
CD50: Arcade Mode by ssjmarx

A collection of bite sized arcade-style games with a frantic pace and game-changing modifiers.

fringe mirage
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Just added a custom HTML wrapper for my game which plays a "VRAM boot sequence" when it's loading, looks pretty cool.

fringe mirage
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Working on "Bug Blaster 2", the first game that uses the new V2 component architecture! Since I batch-wrote most of V2 without testing it the going is kind of slow as I have to find every mistake I made the hard way and fix it :P

fringe mirage