Presenting USG:Rerolled

Despite the hardships, I’ve been able to at least occasionally dedicate some time for the continued development of this year’s Finnish Game Jam / Global Game Jam game. Worked alone this time, and still made a nice game. With TypeScript :o

Now, with the continued effort, it’s starting to look pretty good! The game itself is a mix of Dicey Dungeons, Slay the Spire and maybe even FTL - Faster than Light. It’s about dice-rolling and loot in a turn-based combat, from encounter to encounter. Originally it was to have gameplay that would have emulated Cultist Simulator in at least some questionable way, and hence got the name SDC: Slay Dicey Cultists. But then it occurred to me that this could be an excellent chance of carrying on the torch from the project that is my unicorn, The Peli – or as more recently known, USG. So let’s give it up for USG:Rerolled!

The main focus of the game is the equipment, and the many effects the pieces can have. This made me to choose to implement the effects with straight up code, instead of trying to codify all the effects in some kind of standardized structural form. It's been a good choice for productivity. But I dread the day I need to make some kind of breaking chance. I also did some snooping, and found that this is how other games have chosen to approach this problem, too. As the game will have (and already has) quite an assortment of equipment, it only made sense to also create and editor for the items. And the editor. Well… I guess I’ve spent as much time on it as the game, or something `:D

The editor has some standard fields for the most basic attributes of the equipment. It also has an integrated code editor with syntax highlighting and auto-completion. This is achieved by embedding the very same text editor component (add diff viewer) that powers Visual Studio Code, the Monaco Editor. The changes made via the editor are versioned separately from the rest of the game, and the editor has an ASP.NET Core backend for implementing the filesystem and code generation functionalities. Upon saving the data, the game itself is automatically reloaded with the new equipment data. I’m rather pleased of the setup. I’m planning on extending the editor for also creating random encounters for the game to balance out all the combat. Then there’s always some quality-of-life improvements to be done… But overall, it’s already in a surprisingly good shape! The editor even has a graph of the saved versions and their relations...

The latest addition to the game was an encounter map, which brings some structure to the game. Compared to the work already put to the game, this was a relatively small addition, but it did take a few days to get the SVG-based drawing and random generation to work in a satisfactory way. Evening out the randomness would be the next step. Speaking of next steps, I’m kinda testing out if I could bring ships with limited hardpoints to the mix, without everything getting too confusing. Then I’d be quite close to the dream that is USG. See you next time!