Summary:

A future mining game.

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Tunnel Lords

Brett208 21 Aug 2015 10:01

Tunnel Lords

A vertical 2D scrolling mining game where you have to provide the minerals necessary for the colony to expand and sell the excess for drillship upgrades.

I started Tunnel Lords during Competition #4. My goal is completely finish Tunnel Lords by the end of this competition. If XBOX Live Indie Games is still around, I would like to attempt to publish on that, if not than maybe I can find a different venue, or just be content with the game's completion.

My wife is drawing most all the graphics, which has been great!

Language:	C# and XNA 4.0
Version Control:	Mercurial
Online Repository:	Bitbucket

A demo of the game as it currently stands: https://bitbucket.org/BrettWoodard/tunnel-lords-demo/downloads

Image of updated Fuel Farm and right before competition started:

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Image of new Smelter Graphic (Version 0.5.4)

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Image of mineral text added when minerals picked up

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New Title Menu Screenshot. The Dirt sprite still needs a little work so its tiling isn't so easy to spot.

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Hud Screenshot from Version 0.7.0. The Save Screen is a little more opaque now than shown in this screenshot. I'm very happy with how the HUD is turning out.

Short Term Goals (daily):

• Add a Hit the wall too hard crunch sound effect
• Add rocket fire for when spaceship blasts off.

Mid Term Goals (Weekly)

• Balance game-play so amount of money coming in matches right pace of purchasing upgrades

Day 2:

• Updated Smelter Graphic (no longer programmer art)
• Added Temp damage to drillship.
• Added Pressure damage to drillship
• Added a screen to select the controller in use that opens when game first loaded.
• During death sequence, disabled bulletins and warnings from popping up.

Day 4

• Fix bug affecting ability to upgrade buildings past their first upgrade.
• Add bulletin warning about temperature damage.
• Add bulletin warning about pressure damage.
• Added icon to repair and fuel screen.

Day 5

• Added an 'Unable' Sound Effect.
• Added a Purchase Item Sound Effect.
• Cleaned up minor bugs with the menus.

Day 7

• Added Save Spot Graphic
• Fixed Bug with position of cursor placing wrong for one frame on title menu
• Finalized Map width

Day 8

• Fixed menu sound effect bug when contributing to buildings
• Improved title splash screen graphic
• Improved options screen

Day 9

• Fixed dirt sprite so it tiles better (still needs some minor adjustments)
• Fixed bug that dropped minerals in inventory when loading a game.
• Added list of seen bulletins to save file. This way when you load a game, it doesn't replay them all the old bulletins.
• The letter 'I' now opens the inventory.
• Added the choice to turn off bulletins in the options screen for people who want more mining and less story. It also helps when play testing and you don't want to see the same bulletins 38 times.

Days 10-13

• Added ability to sell or dump a single mineral.
• The Heads up display has been redesigned. It still needs more work though.
• Created a new cargo quantity gauge.
• Refactored gauge and status bar code.

Days 14-17

• Refactored draw code into a separate RenderManager.
• Added a basic Stencil effect when rendering to screen that allows cropping screens. (A new concept for me to learn.)
• Reformated all in game screens to match HUD.
• Removed Pressure damage from game. (It didn't make sense).
• Remade Temp damage formula.
• Added discount amount to fuel and repair screens to show when discounts are applied.
• Fixed bug preventing completing tasks when loading a saved game.

Day 18

• Spaceport Graphic Added.
• Added credits screen.
• Removed credits from main menu screen.
• Added improved gauge cluster.

Day 22

• Heads up display was completed.
• Code was refactored to reflect better filenames and namespace hierarchy. (Precursor to creating XBOX copies)
• An XBOX 360 version of project was completed and tested.
• Made title menu font larger since it was a little small when viewed on a TV.
• Made Version # font a little larger for viewing on TV.

Day 26

• Increased size of controller select screen font.
• Darkened the temperature gauge so it looks better on TV.
• Fixed interface between game and XBOX guide when being asked to purchase the game at end of trial period.
• Updated Spaceport sprite.
• Replaced Rocket Clamp graphic placeholder with final sprite.
• Fixed issue with saveScreen transition looking jerky.
• Replaced placeholder text and graphics on the Sell/Inventory screens.

Day 27

• Fixed XBOX loading new game delays.
• Updated Grass graphics above mine.
• Fixed temperature gauge damping issue.
• Tested ability to delete saved games.
• Tested changing storage containers from in game.

Controls
Keyboard

• Movement - Arrow Keys, WASD
• Accept - Left Control, Right Control
• Cancel - Left Shift, Right Shift, Escape
• Open Title Menu - Escape, Delete
• Cheat Mode - C
• Open In Game Menu - Tab, Y, I
• Sell or dump a single mineral - Z
• Pause - P
• Show Safe Area - V (Debugging Only)

XBOX 360 Controller

• Movement - Direction Pad or Left Joystick or Right Joystick
• Accept - A
• Cancel - B
• Remove/Delete - X (Delete a saved game)
• Open In Game Menu / Change Storage Device - Y
• Pause - Back
• Open Title Menu - Start

Last edited on 19 Sep 2015 09:03 by Brett208 Show more

Re: Tunnel Lords

scjohnson243 21 Aug 2015 14:15

Looks pretty neat! cant wait to get home and give it a shot!

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 23 Aug 2015 18:41

Update 23 August (Day 2)

Drillships now take damage when exposed to too much heat or pressure based on depth. In retrospect, I'm not sure how much it makes sense to take pressure damage, since it isn't like you are a submarine under water. I'm going to leave the effect in for now though.

I'm adding a screenshot to the main listing as well and a newer demo (if my internet and Bitbucket combined can handle the upload.)

Gameplay instructions were also added to the bottom of the main post.

-Brett

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 25 Aug 2015 16:09

Update 25 August (Day 4)

Yesterday was a lighter work day. I just pushed in some bug fixes and a couple of new graphics. There is now a nice icon on the refuel and repair screens. Once the spaceport graphic is designed, I should be ready to get serious about balancing gameplay.

-Brett

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 26 Aug 2015 18:10

Update 26 August (Day 5)

Minor progress adding 2 new sound effects and cleaning out some small bugs in the menus. There is now a unique sound for when you purchase a sweet new upgrade for your drillship and an angry noise when you try to do something not allowed in a menu (like buy something you don't have the money for).

I suppose, overall a better shopping experience.

-Brett

Re: Tunnel Lords

PiscesMike 26 Aug 2015 20:09

Sounds pretty awesome Brett208! I really enjoyed the game when I first played it, and am looking forward to trying out the newer version(s) when I get a chance. Excellent work!

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Re: Tunnel Lords

maximo3510 27 Aug 2015 09:23

Awesome project! If you have some time in future can you make very short tutorial how to deploy this game to xbox 360?

I remember I was trying to publish some sample project some time ago but I was unable to download XNA Game Studio Connect.

I was following manual on microsoft site. - https: // msdn. microsoft. com/en-us/library/bb975643.aspx

Is there any other way to download this XNA Creators club?

Thx in advance!

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 27 Aug 2015 15:46

Maximo,

Thank you for checking out the project.

I'm planning to push the project to XBOX probably sometime next weekend (If I stay on schedule). I'll let you know how it goes and what steps I had to take. I have done it before but it was about a year and a half ago and my account is expired right now, so I need to relearn myself.

-Brett

Re: Tunnel Lords

maximo3510 27 Aug 2015 20:42

Thx, that would be great!

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 13 Sep 2015 14:26

Maximo,

I just ported the game to XBOX360 this weekend, with success after only some minor troubleshooting.

You need to download XNA Game Studio Connect. You should be able to find it when 'browsing games' on your XBOX 360 and searching for XNA. Do not search in the Indie Games section, but search the main XBOX 360 games section. This link will take you to the description of what you are looking for: Microsoft XNA Creators Club.

I downloaded it with an XBOX Gold Membership active. You may need a gold membership in order to download, but not sure. Before using the software, you will have to purchase a Creators Club Account ($99.00 annually). Even if you do not plan to sell your game, to upload it to your XBOX, you have to purchase the Creators Club Account. If you try an use the software without a Creators Club Account tied to your profile, it will prompt you to purchase one.

Once you transfer a game to XBOX using the XNA Game Studio Connect, it starts up instantly. A local copy is saved to your console that can be played whenever you want without hooking your XBOX to your computer.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers,
Brett

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 28 Aug 2015 18:27

Day 7 (28 Aug)

The player now owns a spiffy house where they save their progress. When mining minerals, a convenient text pops up telling you what mineral you just found.

Also, the mine's width has been finalized to 32 tiles wide. This will allow balancing progression into the mine with upgrade costs since the width of the mine affected how many minerals were available. I haven't decided if I want to mathematically calculate out our just go trial and error. I think I'll start with trial and error and switch if it is proving too time consuming to replay for changes.

-Brett

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 30 Aug 2015 19:13

Day 8 and 9 (30 Aug)

On day 8 I made some major improvements to the title screen and options screen. They are both now at about 90% complete, both needing hopefully only minor touch ups that I will probably save towards the end of the competition. Also fixed some small sound effects bugs. Check out the screenshot of the new title screen. The dirt is from pre-fixing of tiling issues. Also, a new demo was uploaded on day 8 if anyone is interested in checking it out.

On day 9, we improved the tiling of the dirt sprite. It is much better, but could still use some minor tweaks that stand out when tiled. I fixed a couple of bugs and non-completed features in the save game process that prevented minerals and seen bulletins from being loaded. I'm not sure why I didn't do this in the past, but now the letter 'I' opens the inventory. This is hopefully more intuitive.

I worked some game-balancing as well, but it is difficult to quantify this as it is just tweaking the settings to make gameplay progress more enjoyably. Things like changing the costs of upgrades, the strengths of the upgrades, and the money recouped from selling resources. It still needs a lot of work to be balanced.

For the first week, progress was good. Now it seems slower than I want mostly due to lots of small requirements that I didn't foresee needing to complete.

-Brett

Re: Tunnel Lords

Emblis 31 Aug 2015 22:01

I just realized, aint this game inspired by Motherload?

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 01 Sep 2015 18:54

Emblis,

Yes, I have taken inspiration from Motherload, Miner Dig Deep, VGA Miner, and Glean. Motherload is the iconic mining game and VGA Miner was the original. VGA Miner has some unfortunate adult content text that sort of spoils an otherwise great game. I don't think these kind of games are too popular, so hopefully someone will want to play it. :|

-Brett

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 04 Sep 2015 05:10

Days 10-13 (Reported on 4 September)

Progress has been slow. I am working on the dashboard or heads up display (HUD) that shows the drillship's status. I redesigned the cargo gauge and am very happy with the results. Individual slots on the gauge fill with a color themed for the different mineral you pick up. This looks great but required redesigning the gauge and the save/load data to incorporate the order in which minerals were picked up. It also required inputting the types of minerals dumped or sold to the gauge so it removed the proper mineral slot based on what was sold or dumped. This all took work since these connections were not planned previously. I'll plan to post a screenshot in the next couple of days. Until the HUD is cleaned up, the shot would look a little jumbled. I'll also plan to release a new demo when I have the HUD and screens at about 80% completion.

I spent some time improving the gauges/status bars base class which makes the code simpler but doesn't show anything different during gameplay.

You can now dump/sell a single mineral or all of one type of mineral. This was a feature my beta tester wanted and wasn't too difficult to implement.

I have altered the in game screens (like sell screen, fuel screen, repair screen) to start matching the new HUD. I have a great idea on how to tie these into the HUD, but I don't have the technical knowledge of XNA to do it. I'm going to spend the next day researching/experimenting and seeing how it goes. If it starts turning into a quagmire, I may have to abandon the feature, but it would be sad to lose. The part I'm experimenting with is how to draw part of a texture that isn't bounded by a simple rectangle.

Experimenting on partially drawing textures

Basically, I want to draw only part of the texture below a 30 degree line. XNA has built in support through the Draw method overloads for drawing only part of a texture, but it has to be the shape of a rectangle. See drawing below.

Never hire me as a graphic Artist. My wife on the other hand has some skills in drawing, as you can see by the in game sprites. I did work on some of the game sprites, so if you feel some of the graphics are not as good as others, this is probably why.

Way Forward

• I cannot simply cover up the unwanted part of the texture because the texture above it is partially transparent. Some of the unwanted texture would blend with the partially transparent texture it was beneath.

• I can pull the sprite's texture data as an array, Color[] and then create a new texture which removes all pixels above the line. The math is straightforward if not a little cumbersome since the texture's Color[] is a 1D array representing a 2D texture.

• Concern #1: Since the texture being partially drawn will be moving over time, I will have to pull and create a new texture every frame. Since it will be a larger texture, say 400x400 pixels (not exact) plus a half dozen smaller textures, will this cause performance issues? I don't know without trying…

• Concern #2: My game's rendering/draw logic was not designed to allow textures to make alternatives of themselves that don't include all the pixels. I don't have a plan on how to integrate this feature yet, and it could be a very time expensive feature to add (by time expensive I mean my time hacking at the code).

If someone has a different solution, I would be interested in hearing. Otherwise, I'll just report back on how it goes.

The graphic below summarizes the in-game goal.

I don't have access to Gimp right now or it would be a little better. The 45 degree lines at the bottom of the HUD are supposed to be 30 degrees.

-Brett

Last edited on 04 Sep 2015 05:15 by Brett208 Show more

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 04 Sep 2015 08:04

So, I'm reading about StencilBuffer, which may be the proper solution to this problem. More to follow after I read some more and test.

Re: Tunnel Lords

PiscesMike 04 Sep 2015 08:47

I was going to suggest a stencil of some sort. A stencil buffer may actually be exactly what you need/want. An alternative would be to render to an off screen render target and composite the final image together from several render targets…. essentially mimicking what the stencil buffer already does. You'd probably have better performance from the stencil buffer if it's an actual hardware implementation (most cards would support that these days I would assume) and a noticeable one even if it's just a software emulation.

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 04 Sep 2015 14:18

PiscesMike,

You are right, a DepthStencilBuffer is exactly what I will need. The good news is I think this can be implemented without major changes to my code. I will just have to render all the textures from the screen to a RenderTarget2D first. I need to work out the details of if this will require a separate SpriteBatch.Begin() and SpriteBatch.End() call since I don't want the DepthStencilBuffer to apply to all textures.

You are correct about performance concerns. After some research, using Texture2D.GetData is not the recommended solution.

I don't see anyone reporting Stencils as being an implementation concern on plausible hardware choices these days.

-Brett

Re: Tunnel Lords

Brett208 08 Sep 2015 14:51

Days 14-17

Stencil
My codebase has been refactored to support adding DepthStencilBuffer to different draw calls from the major game sections like the map, or in game screens, or title screen. When setting a DepthStencilBuffer for a SpriteBatch draw session, I could not get SpriteBatch.Draw() to accept LayerDepth or Color inputs properly. When using a DepthStencilBuffer, the game would refuse to draw any textures without a LayerDepth setting of 0. Also, if I set a color besides Color.White, the game would not shade the texture with the color. I'm assuming these are not bugs, but being caused by my lack of understanding about how DepthStencilBuffer interacts with LayerDepth and Color. To avoid the issue, I separated the SpriteBatch.Draw() calls in a way that avoided needing to set Color and manually arranged draw order as opposed to relying on LayerDepth. Not the prettiest solution, but it also isn't a major hack and I think acceptable for now.

In Game Screens
Numerous updates were made to different in game screens. Some screens could probably be called finished now. A couple like the HUD and upgrade purchase screen will need some more work. I am happy with most the results.

Gameplay Testing
Using Pressure as an in-game limit didn't make sense, so I removed it. Temperature was overhauled to hopefully make a more enjoyable gameplay experience. The temperature changes slowly enough that it has to catch up as you descend or climb in the mine. This hopefully makes for more interest as you see the gauge slowly respond to your depth changes.

Demo?
Unfortunately, I haven't placed the new gauge sprites into the game yet, and I removed the old health status bar. I won't have time yesterday. Hopefully tomorrow, I will be able to get the gauge in and push a demo. It didn't make sense for anyone to playtest until the health bar is showing, much as I wanted to push a new copy.

Unfortunately, taking the time to work the Stencil plus generally being behind already pushed back my XBOX testing schedule to maybe next weekend.

Brett

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