The Mog

"The Mog" is a challenging roguelike survival game where players face waves of enemies and powerful bosses. Survival depends on defeating foes, collecting dropped items for upgrades, and unlocking a diverse arsenal of weapons to turn the tide of battle.

How I Started

I knew making a roguelike game would be difficult, but I still took on this challenge. First I started with making an infinite generating map using the tile map feature to map out 18 x 18 map chunks. The map generator creates a new random tile map offscreen depending on which way the player is heading and how close they are to it. With the map being nearly endless, I made previously generated tiles inactive when the player was far enough away from them, and reenabled the same tiles when the player returns.

With the creation of the map generator, next in the pipeline would be the spawning system. Building upon the map generator the focus shifted to developing an enemy spawning system. Utilizing a wave-based approach, this system allows for pinpoint control over what spawns each wave and offers flexibility and scalability as the game progresses while keeping track of how many enemies have been spawned and defeated.

Complementing the spawning system is the implementation of enemy AI. These enemies exhibit different behaviors ranging from stationery hard hitting turret-like enemy to muilt-state bosses.

With these systems in place, the start of the game loop is created. I then started the development of an inventory and upgrade system.

The inventory would store the player's current weapons and passive items. When the player would level up, they would be offered two new items or weapons and two possible upgrades for the weapons and items the player currently has equipped. 

To allow even more varied gameplay I have created a character selector. Each character has a different starting weapon and stats ranging from movement speed to health and  projectile speed. Setting this up using scriptable objects was simple as passing data over from just one button click.

Though the use of scriptable objects and base classes to inherit from creating new weapons, enemies,  and characters is a streamlined process with clean and easy code to understand. Using scriptable objects make balancing characters, weapons and enemies simple.

Now all said and done, the core game loop is to survive for seven minutes, collect drops from enemies defeat spawning bosses, and grow in terms of power.