Release: Tunics!

[sandstrand]

Release announcement: Tunics!

https://github.com/Legofarmen/tunics
http://tunics.legofarmen.se

Announcing Tunics! - A randomly generated roguelike-like 2D Zelda game for the Solarus game engine with the looks and mechanics of The legend of Zelda - A link to the past for the SNES.

After a couple of thousands of hours spread over 8 months we are happy to announce our first public release.

Story
Hyrule is at peace, there are no supervillains running amok but our hero has found himself in the unfortunate situation of having fallen down a hole and now he needs to get out. The only way out is through the dungeons.

Concept and Gameplay
Starting with basically nothing the player progresses through several tiers of dungeons with increasing difficulty. Each tier will present new challenges and the player will need to use skills and items acquired throughout the quest to progress.

Each new tier is randomly generated and each play-through will feel unique. For each dungeon, the following elements will be random, some purely computationally, others from a vast database of components:

• Dungeon layout
• Dungeon treasure and obstacles
• Room size and shape
• Room content
• Graphic tileset family
• Graphic tileset palette
• Music
• Enemies

The game uses permadeath, meaning the player will have to start over on dying.

A full playthrough will last about 30-40 minutes but the player can choose to continue beyond the final tier. Things will get increasingly hard but there may be rewards in the in the deeper dungeons.

State of release
We have described the current release as a well-polished proof-of-concept, which is pretty accurate. Development will continue.

Purpose of release
The purpose of this first release is to get initial feedback on the game experience.
Apparent issues can be reported in the github issue tracker and will be welcome.

Many thanks to Christopho and the Solarus community which have been very helpful so far.

[Christopho]

Wow this is amazing!!!

People already asked if it was possible to do a randomly-generated game with Solarus, but I had no idea that there was a concrete project like this, even a complete game now!
1300 commits, this is a huge, huge work!

I only played two minutes but it looks great, the story seems hilarious I will play more tonight on Twitch.

The idea of only saving the seed and using deterministic generation is just brillant.

If you guys need help for anything, don't hesitate to ask, even if you apparently did great without contacting us so far ^^

PS: I can't access your irc server, it says that the SSL certificate is invalid.

[oclero]

Wooow! Awesome ! If you project is complete, we could add it to the "games made with Solarus" section

[sandstrand]

Yeah it's quite the project. 1300 commits and at least as many hours.

I believe you've had some conversations with Mattias (mattias-p), our main developer, along the way. The documentation for Solarus is really thorough and well-written so we've not had to ask many questions. It has also been useful and educational to follow the development of the Solarus engine on github over the last 8 months.


I guess you could call the project complete, in some sense, but we have a lot of features specified that we want to implement. We have not planned the next milestone so we'll see how we progress from here. Right now we're just happy to actually have a release after 8 months. If you consider it complete enough, feel free to add it

The IRC server is set up with a self-signed certificate so it can be quirky, you may need relaxed security settings or add exceptions to connect.

Thank you for the praise. Feel free to ask any questions about the dungeon generation if you have any. The code is not exactly comprehensible at the moment

[polyglot762]

This is awesome! Thank you soo much for posting this. I am definitely diving into the code these next couple of days!
Neat-o

[Christopho]

Yeah the code is a bit obscure, but the documentation on your wiki is awewome. I spent hours to learn the mechanisms of components, masks, etc. This is brillant.

[oclero]

Your game is now featured on Solarus website. Congratulations 

[mattias-p]

I'm sorry for the lack of code documentation. The code wasn't really written with general consumption in mind. Rather the priorities were mathy proof of concept, shiny pixels and gameplay fun. If you have questions about the code I'll gladly discuss it. I don't intend to work so much on code maturity as on furthering the generation algorithms though. Hopefully it won't be too long before I'll get the time and energy to dig into things again.

Thank you very much for all nice words and for featuring us on the website! And special thanks for the awesome Solarus API documentation!

[oclero]

By the way, if you have a Tunics logo in full resolution, I would be happy to use it for the page. I looked into Tunics gfx github but didn't find it.

[sandstrand]

Well, the full resolution is the image prepared for usage ingame. Any higher resolution needs to be a multible of it's size with nearest neighbour resampling for proper representation.
I've prepared a few images in acceptable steps: http://tunics.legofarmen.se/logo.

Also to be picky, the title is always spelled with an exclamation mark: Tunics!

Thanks.

[oclero]

ok! Thanks, I already used the nearest neighbour resampling. I thought a non-pixalted version existed somewhere ^^
And I will add the exclamation mark