hardpointe

You can play it here.

Gameplay

Hardpointe is a “medium” sized roguelike with a focus on tactical combat and movement. Managing a limited set of powers, upgrades, and items will be critical to your success.

Our Story So Far

Humanity is on the brink of annihilation. Ever since the robotic uprising of the late 1990s, humans have waged a bitter war against their would-be AI overlords. Many decades later, Earth is finally free of war, but elements of the robotic hordes have taken to space and have taken refuge in the asteroid belt.

For a time, many thought the robots dormant, or dead. But they were building. Utilizing self-replicating machinery, they turned countless asteroids into factories, crisscrossed with countless mazes and dungeon-like interiors. Some they turned into weapons, and began hurling them at Earth.

Only a few asteroids have penetrated Earth’s defenses, but even these few have wiped out entire cities.

All efforts to attack and neutralize these strongholds have failed. Your mission is to succeed where others have failed. Infiltrate the asteroid, grab the Control Core, and bring it back safely. Your suit should be able to interface with any weapon systems that you find – human or robot. We cannot get close enough to reliably use our telewarp technology – so you will have to travel on foot. We may be able to link up to your suit at various beacon points. Look for warp crystals – the robots use them as much as we do.

Controls

Winning

Health

Powers

Shields

Dash

Blasters (Guns)

You will find these one-off weapons during your mission. They are installed just like other powers, except they cannot be upgraded or recharged. Nothing stops you from swapping in a weapon (or two), using up all the ammo, and then swapping back. Great for taking out strategically difficult enemies.

At the moment, they come in four varieties:

• Kinetic Blaster – No damage but triggers a powerful knockback effect (like a blast grenade)
• Stun Gun – No damage but temporarily stuns enemies
• Railgun – Simple 1 damage weapon
• Cannon – Powerful 2 damage ranged weapon – use wisely

Enemies

Tactics

Wall Smash

Wreckage

Target Locks

Warp Crystals and Warp Beacons

Hardpointe is set on the asteroid lair of an evil robotic overlord – conveniently enough these lairs are surprisingly similar to dungeons. A bit.

Level design is the great time sink of every roguelike developer. I have a system that I’ve developed over the years (mostly for my 2014 7DRL dungeon dual) that I call the floorplan approach, which basically smashes a bunch of rectangles together. Once you have rectangles, you can easily convert them into rectangular rooms, or other shapes (cross-rooms, ovals, etc.) that will still fit within that bounding rectangle.

For Hardpointe, I have brushed off this algorithm and cleaned it up a bit to make it less wasteful. I am rather liking the results so far.

While level design is great, what I really want to get to is ‘lock and key’ style puzzle rooms. Think of the key rooms in brogue, or the linked challenges in Unexplored. Or zelda. In any event, Tom Ford did a lot of work around this in his 2014 7DRL TraumaRL and then did a great talk on his approach.

In order to accomplish this, I first needed a more intelligent level designer – one that kept track of separate rooms as if they were nodes on a graph. I had to brush off a part of my brain that hadn’t been used since CS classes many years ago, but got a working tree structure that should suit my needs.

I used treant.js to display the resulting graphs.

This first one corresponds with the above dungeon output.

Red nodes/rooms represent the longest (or one of the longest) paths in the level. In most cases, the entrance point will be at the top of the tree and the ending point will be at the deepest node of the tree.

Gray nodes are flagged as “dead ends” in that they have only one connecting room. This makes them great candidates for locked rooms, special challenges (and rewards) that will give the player a reason to explore the entirety of the level, should they choose to.

Here are a few more because I like them:

Finally have a working heads up display (HUD) – one of my requirements for releasing an actual playable version of the game. I really want to keep the screen as uncluttered as possible, but at the same time allow players to get the tactical information they need. In general, all monsters have 1 hp and the behaviors are unique, so there is a lot of information that should be conveyed just from playing a few times.

Other important things to know are status effects, and whatever items or unique terrain is near you. (e.g. is that radiation?)

The code to get this working was actually really fun to write.

Other things tackled this week were ‘conveyed’ flags. Certain powers can now convey flags such as flight, or radiation resistance. In earlier versions I was doing this quite messily – lots of room for error when power systems were being installed or uninstalled. Now it flows quite naturally.

This is important because at some point I plan on adding ‘challenge rooms’ that require you to sacrifice one of your power slots for an otherwise useless power. For example, there is a really amazing item inside the next system of rooms, but the rooms are irradiated. Fortunately, there is a system near-by that conveys radiation resistance – but you’ll have to temporarily sacrifice something else in order to install it. What you choose to do away will may make the next couple rooms harder, depending on what’s inside of them.

Lots of tiny steps this week.

I decided to spend some time rebuilding my FOV algorithm, which made it so ranged enemies weren’t quite so deadly. This had some knock-on effects that caused me to clean up some more of the AI and generic ‘awareness’ code behind the scenes. All in all, time well spent.

A main focus of hardpointe is tactical movement, and using the terrain to your advantage. To that end, there are ways for the player to actually create terrain, through various ‘nano cores’. These are basically tubes of little nano-bots, and eventually their contents will be unknown to the player until they actually try them out (much like your traditional potions & scrolls). As a placeholder, affected tiles were simply a 5-square ‘cross’ centered on the point of impact. For the actual gameplay mechanic, I wanted something more interesting, but also predictable. I didn’t want a quasi-random plume or cloud of gas. The mechanic I settled on follows a few simple rules:
1. always covers 5 tiles
2. always covers the target tile
3. only grows in cardinal directions, in order: up, down, left, right.
4. if any of these directions are blocked (by terrain, or existing nano-materials) it will stretch in the following direction

This allows the player to (somewhat) reliably create structures that will advantage them, and disadvantage enemies. For example, one of the nano-materials makes you invulnerable for 3 turns, but this affects anyone who steps on the tile – it does not discriminate between player or monster. Combine this with both negative and positive effects and you (hopefully) get some interesting gameplay.

Default spread

Corner limits spread in 2 of 4 directions

Hallways can give you a straight line

Surprisingly (or not surprisingly?) fun so far!