Greater contrast added to the pause background so that you can always see black text.
Restart run feature added in pause menu. Selecting this will kill you and restart you at suit selection screen.
Exit game feature added to pause menu.
Usability changes:
You can no longer open a door if have a key and an upgrade is available. You must select an upgrade first and then the same button can be used to open the door once an upgrade is not available.
Wordsworth descriptions for upgrades updated to be more accurate. 3 descriptions were added that were missing in error.
The drink creation screen has been updated with more instructions for controls. Making drinks was previously very unfriendly to new players.
Bug fixes:
Fixed an issue where the shadow man was sometimes waiting too long to attack after entering his second phase.
Content Additions:
Boss Music added.
3 new melodies added to music generator.
Balance changes:
Temples:
Changed a puzzle that was too cryptic and unintuitive. Added another solution to decrease the chance of getting stuck.
Boss and Mini Boss:
New attack added to Golem: Shotgun. Shoots several projectiles.
All Suits:
You can now only change your upgrades when you get a new upgrade. Swapping on the fly is no longer possible. If you enter the swap menu and deselect all upgrades you can exit and come back until you have upgrades selected when you exit.
New Tier 1 Upgrade: Empty Stomach Bonus. Gives you 0.4 bonus damage for every point of health you are missing.
Suit can heal upgrade changed to tier 2 for each suit (previously only tier 2 on purple suit).
Chance of rolling an upgrade above the tier level you are on changed from 15% per upgrade to 14% per upgrade.
Purple Suit:
Starting movement speed changed from 8.5mph to 8mph.
Purple suit no longer teleports short distances.
Phaser Range increase removed from upgrade pool (a bug allowed you to fall through the ground with this upgrade).
Phaser knock back shot changed from a tier 1 upgrade to a tier 2.
New Tier 2 Upgrade: “Suit Knock-back Defense”. Causes enemies to be knocked away when they attack you.
Red Suit:
New Tier 3 Upgrade: Additional Phaser. Gives you a second phaser, so that you shoot both in the direction you are walking and behind you. All other upgrades work on both phasers, including Sacrifice Charge and Projectile Doubletap.
LAUNCH TOMORROW!
It's finally ready! Head over to the store page and wishlist so that you'll be emailed when it drops tomorrow! All you have to lose are some braincells.
Post your fastest runs to Twitter with a screenshot of the game winning screen with the tag #contingencyrun or in the Steam community forums. I think that there will be some people who can get through the game really quickly!
Some of the final updates leading to launch are quality of life changes and bug fixes. Your custom controls now save and more explanations have been woven in for the more complicated aspects of the game.
New Places to Find Disgusting Meat
Been working hard towards a release. Mostly on bugfixes and making sure the engine works perfectly on as many computers as possible. I've had to work around many of the limitations of the tech I'm using, to make things work as they should (font problems were a horrible pain).
I have also been working on some new content too, to round out the variety you'll have. I've been adding many more areas to explore where you'll find items and resources.
There isn't much to say about each, the screen shots speak for themselves. These areas all have a animal in them that you can get food (health) from and many of them also have a fruit somewhere and sometimes they have items that can be locked behind a door.
EPIC RGB GAMING
I’ve been working overtime on almost every element of the game. Performance improvements, bug fixes and designing new areas to discover. I’ve made huge amounts of content that is primarily auditory and as such not easy to show off. Pages and pages of new dialog for the player’s assistant character, Wordsworth.
I have added more locked off areas with new items inside them. You have to find a key to enter these areas. Like many things in the game, there are 3 colors of keys, red, green and blue.
Expanding on the flowers and other plants you can find on the ground, I've add several more plants which eat have their own ability when consumed.
The first and most common you will find is called Traveler's Herb. When eaten, it transports you back to your ship in an instant. This is really helpful since you can save time for more important things than going back to the ship (the game is timed).
The next is called Root of Pain, which does damage to every enemy on the screen when used. The downside is that it damages you as well.
The next is called Healing Herb, which is similar to the normal health item meat, except that it heals you more slowly over time (meat is instant). This is good because you can take it before you anticipate taking damage and it can help you recover health. Works well with a tanky strategy.
Lastly is Frightful Fern, which makes you frightening temporarily and enemies will run the other way when approaching you.
Here's how it looks in action:
You may have also noticed that the last 3 plants were, red, blue and green. This plays into another important system of the game that I showed in the last devlog. Each item can be manipulated with juice to make even more different items that give different bonuses. It's been a lot of work, but I'm very pleased that each item has even more variations, of which it would take too long for me to post.
Thanks for reading. I hope to release very soon, so please don't hesitate to wishlist me on steam!
Flowery Features
I've been working on tons of misc things, many of which I won't be posting for spoiler reasons.
I will show several random things that haven't been shown before.
Here's a clip of the changes to the final boss battle. The first phase includes the shadowman spawning many random enemies.
Here are some pictures of some consumable items that you can create, flowers. There are 3 different types all of which have different properties when consumed.
The blue flower takes away any negative debuff you have when consumed.
The green flower improves the amount of health you get when you eat food.
The red flower turns you on fire for a while after you consume it (sounds dumb but it can be useful).
I also wanted to show a mechanic that I like a lot, how you can pour juice on the ground. It can interacts with several things in the world. One basic example is how your can pour fruit juice on meat to change it's color. Once the meat is a different color, it gives stat bonus in addition to restoring health.
Lastly, I've changed how leveling up works a bit. Each different suit has 1 stat that will improve each time you earn an upgrade. Blue suit upgrades damage, red suit upgrades movement speed and the purple suit upgrades health.
BOSS BOSSES
Lots of work lately. Manly I've been ironing a lot of bugs out.
I streamed last night. You can see the runs I did here: https://youtu.be/wbD6yBkm9iM?t=177
Been working on bosses a lot. I wanted them to have lots of abilities and variety.
First off, I added more sprites for the boss. You can get 1 of 3 possible.
The first is the classic style that's been in the game for a while:
Next is a more shiny and sleek fool:
And last the most hellish looking one:
Additionally, I've spent tons of time on different attacks and random patterns for the bosses. I won't spoil all of them but I'll show a couple.
Here's a special ability, stealth, where the boss goes mostly invisible and then does his next attack on you.
Here's a fast paced rage smash, where the boss gets really grumpy and then hits much faster than usual.
Lastly there's a bit of a projectile attack where he shoots a wall towards you.
Thanks if you read this far.
New Powerups To Make You Tingle All Over
New powerups:
Suit Healing (Tier 1 upgrade): This powerup lets you recover health if you hold down. It works pretty slowly so it can’t be used in battle. Lets you save food so that when you are fighting a boss you can have food to recover health in the middle of the fight.
Pyro Suit (Tier 2 upgrade): This allows you to set yourself on fire at will. You can also extinguish yourself as you please. Fire does damage to you but also has some other cool interactions in the world that can be useful, from combat to getting into certain areas.
I've also mostly redone my store page. The "About This Game" fits my game so much more now and is filled with the type of dialog and humor that's actually in the game.
I wanted to show the dungeons in the game. Dungeons are randomly generated floor by floor. The game makes a path from the entrance all the way to the top of the building where there is a mini boss.
Here’s what the algorithm spits out for a dungeon before a function in the code goes through and creates world objects for each piece. The arrows indicate the path the player can follow to the top.
An “e” indicates that an area is a room with enemies to fight.
A left or right arrow means there will be a room with a puzzle that you have to solve to move on.
The up arrow means that there is a room to get to the next floor.
0's have random stuff in them, there might be something that can help with puzzles or give bonuses or they can just be empty.
Of course the top floor contains a mini boss. Each mini boss has completely random abilities. He could have an electric shock ability or be able to quickly charge into you if you don't jump out of the way
If you want to see me playing the game, follow me on Twitch where I'll do runs from time to time. As embarrassing as this sounds, I actually haven't been able to beat the game in it's current form, so I'll be trying lots of different strategies on stream to figure out what works best. (I hope to have the stream on the game's Store page on Steam too, but I haven't gotten it working great so far).
>> My Twitch! <<
Contingency Devlog - Music Generation
I’ve been worrying about music for a long time. I’m an extremely amateur musician and I’ve made track after track for this game. I’ve tried to create scores that I felt fit the atmosphere I wanted but even the tracks I’ve really liked got tiring after I’ve put them in the game and heard them a lot.
I wanted to have music sync with the combat so for a long time my solution was to start the music when a battle began and then fade it out when all the enemies were gone. Well even when switching which tracks play depending on the progress of the run and for variety each time, I was just finding the music to get stale.
Here’s my favorite track from before I solved my music problem:
I decided that with this type of game, where you are going to be dying over and over, you don’t want to respawn and then go have vastly the same experience with the music over and over again. Plus only having the music queue up when you are doing specific tasks made the music feel really choppy and turned it into more of an annoyance than part of the experience.
I eventually noticed that when I play the game, I have the most fun with the game when music is just playing all the time. So I started working on how I could have music playing all the time and make it natural. I’ve also been wanting to incorporate more dialog for the sidekick character in the game, Wordsworth.
I realized these 2 problems could be solved together, so I decided to give Wordsworth a radio station. He makes stupid comments about the songs and then plays tracks for the player. It’s one of his software features he has been outfitted with to keep you happier so survival isn’t so hard.
Each track he plays is randomly generated, so that there will be a lot of variety. The algorithm isn’t very advanced. It only puts together preexisting sequences of music, rather than generating melodies. I really feel like game music needs to have easy listening, and be very catchy, but not too distracting.
Here’s an example of a track that could be generated:
All in all, I’m really happy with what Ive got for the music. It adds a lot to the experience and brings more character to the world.
Contingency's Twist on Crafting Requires Skill, Not Just Memory
We've all played many games with item crafting. Mostly the formula is the same, even if the games are different. Collect the ingredients, move the right numbers of each into the crafting menu and after a button press, the menu spits out your new item.
These systems are intuitive and they make sense to use. I think they pop up in more and more games because they are easy to understand but interesting to learn more about. It's fun to see which items can go together in the most useful ways and it makes us feel like we are becoming experts about our knowledge of the world we're playing in.
For Contingency, I thought that a crafting system would be a great way to give my world more depth and make usable items more interesting. The worry I had however, was that a simple crafting menu where you put in your recipe quite passively and then get the result, didn't really fit into the more active gameplay I was wanting to have.
I like games where you need strategy to succeed, but also skill in physically executing the plans that you have made. I wanted Contingency to follow that idea, where there are lots of strategy choices but also skill challenges once you make those choices.
My idea to bring these 2 gameplay types together for crafting was to make a drink mixing system. If you've ever made a smoothie before, you know that a smoothie can taste a lot different based on how much of each ingredient you put in. If you put a lot of dairy into a fruity drink, the smoothie will taste a lot more creamy than if you put in mostly fruit with a little dairy. There's strategy to planning the amount and types of ingredients, but there is skill in pouring the exact right amounts into the blender.
In Contingency's world, you can discover fruit trees, each having a different color of fruit on their branches. Each type of fruit can improve to a different stat the player has, wether it be your attack damage, movement speed or maximum health.
Once you collect fruit, each fruit can be used to make a consumable drink of a different color. Once the cup is on screen, you hold a button down to pour the liquid on screen. That drink will improve your corresponding stat once consumed.
The crafting goes deeper than just making 1 fruit into a drink, you can combine 2 of any of the fruits to make a more advanced drink. Once you finish pouring, the the ratio you poured of the 2 juices will appear at the top.
This recipe system introduces the skills of timing to the recipe, as well as estimation. It is a blind recipe system, where you can only see the ratio of your combination after you try to make the drink. Also just like real life, the juice has some gravity to it, so the pouring can go faster than you want and you can easily overshoot the ratio you are attempting. All of this makes creating consumables more interactive.
What do you like in a crafting system? What are some of the best and worst crafting experiences you've seen in a game? Let me know in the comments.
