A Holo lot of minigames

Been a bit more of a chill day today, I started on a tower defense version of holozing, don't really have any images to show for it right now as I'm too lazy to open it back up again.

Basically there's a tank creature and two melee ones in a V shape with the tank in front. One lane. "Evil" holozing creatures start entering the lane, they usually stop at the tank creature and start damaging it while the tank does damage back and the other two melee creatures attack the others. Your job as the healer behind the creatures is to keep your creatures alive. Idea is that enemies won't always just attack the tank, with some planned placements of ranged creatures to start to also attack your melee ones in future waves.

It has a nice interface that shows your current creatures placed on the board, their HP and xp, it also shows the timer under the creatures when they're doing their next autoattack. It's all in 3d. Maybe I should just go fetch the images, ehh. Whatever doesn't seem like too many are reading my posts lately, lol. I'll show them tomorrow if there's enough interest.

The waves are meant to be planned out with some rng of what creatures appear. The creatures as well as enemies level up over time, healers do too but at a slower rate to creatures. They learn new moves which have their own cooldown, the moves may evolve themselves gaining a level and base damage. The creatures base stats improve as they level up which improves their hp, defense, attack and crit+dodge chance. While the healer's mana pool increases, it learns new healing abilities such as AOE heal to heal all 3 creatures at once if they're in range to each other as well as evolved healing abilities at higher level costing more mana but healing for more base health. More stats to healers to boost their heals along with a +/-10% range on both heals and damaging attacks for some rng.

The heals take time to be cast, you have to target which creatures you wanna heal and watch the heal go off.

It's quite a lot and it's all in babylon.js which is very light weight.

I took a break from that however midday or so and started back on my holozing survivor game, something we tried to do on the side back when the days were greener and we had extra funding but it didn't feel right and funding quickly got tighter so I decided to cut it off there. The one thing we did gain (aside from some code) was some 2d gifs of a few creatures as they're running that I've been able to re-use now. Quite pricey for that but you know how it easy, you gotta try and learn from things. I don't think we've pretended to be pro's at making games or even handling/organizing the game making, instead we've been up front about that and to make up for it launched the project fairly without giving anyone equity or "free" tokens just for having created it.

Either way, before I sidetrack more, that one's been going quite a bit better. Have made good progress the last 6 hours or so.

There's a healer selection page with 2 healer classes currently available, actually, let me show you some screenshots this time around so I can tone down the amount of text instead.

(Keep in mind this is in portrait mode for mobile)

Healer selection page:

Creature selection page:

and then you're off into the game:

For those of you who've played vampire survivors/pickle pete you probably get the idea quick. You defeat creatures, pick up any zing coins they may drop, this gives you xp, you level up and can pick a range of different boosts that are permanent for this game. Each wave more creatures arrive or stronger creatures, when you level up you also gain stats, there's two debug windows up there currently showing current stats of the creature along with substats and a combat log. The creatures all have their 1 unique move they do currently. The healer is just a blue dot for now as we need to create a proper 2d sprite for them.

When the wave is cleared or your creature faints, you get "permanent" xp, this is based on a range of things depending on how well you did in the game and it also offers some holo dust which our players are familiar with.

Things left to build:

• "planned waves" less algorithmic and more preplanned as well as working on the next maps and placing an end wave to this one along with a boss

• harder difficulty for those who've already gone through all waves and wanna "start over"

• healer gear and crafting, some evil creatures will in rare occasion drop other things than coins, these assets can be used to craft gear and items for the healer to help them keep their creature alive

Compared to VS or Pickle Pete this game will focus a lot more on the healer x creature dynamic, meaning there will be instances where you literally can't escape damage on your creature even if you're the best player in the world, you will have to choose whatever does the least amount of damage and hope your healer is in range to throw you a heal. There may be times where you get overrun if you've focused too much on tanky stat boosts over damage output, or you get chain hit multiple times in a row before your healer is able to cast a heal off, etc. That's kind of the "fun" and challenging aspect of this I'm going for.

I also wanna add some more randomized "elite" creatures to the mix, maybe even some "butcher" from diablo instances where an elite boss runs at you and you will have a hard time dashing away from it and kind of forcing you to faint, etc. (maybe no butcher, dunno).

The idea is that you will connect your real holozing creatures to this game, the stats are already set up in a way to copy the rarities of your creatures from the alpha vial so the better your rarity is there the better start you get in this game, however xp progressionm, achievements, all that stuff is separate to the main game, your healer and creatures will still be level 1 for that one.

Doesn't mean we can't have a little fun with this minigame however, there can be leaderboards, 1v1 "ghost" duels (where you can see what the other player you're playing against is doing/level/wave he's on, etc, to try and beat him to getting a better score over some zing rewards/their holo dust/etc. Naturally there'll also be a spam mitigation where you will need energy to go into the dungeon, so you can't spam it all day long which we don't want both for the ingame economy as well as your health.

The thing I like a lot about the holozing universe is that it is quite unique the whole healer x creature dynamic while at the same time offering for a lot of different games to be created while keeping the focus there and remaining unique. I haven't for instance seen another survivor rogue-like game where the focus is shifted between how well you run around with your creature as well as if you have the healing to maintain it or cover you if you're not doing too great temporarily and I'm looking forward to pursue this in different game modes, engines, etc in the near future. This game runs on Godot, btw.

Anyway, enough yapping from me for today, let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading!