#epicadventure

Posts and pages on Ape Apps tagged with <strong>#epicadventure</strong>
I am continuing the push on the new Epic Adventure engine to improve controls, game-play and to get the features to the point to where I can start using the engine to make other games. To that end, I am now releasing the v3.2 update to Epic Adventure with new features and content, so let's take a look!


First off, the engine has a handful of new bug fixes and quality of life improvements. Among them, general controls for mouse, touch and gamepad should all be improved in this release. The mouse wheel can now be used to quickly cycle through belt items. Touch users get a new red destructive hit button, so you can destroy tiles instead of just using them.

There is now in-game chat so you can communicate with other players in your server. To go along with that, there is a Clear Chat option added to the in-game menu. The in-game menu also gets a new sound effects volume control.


The engine now has support for door and sign type objects, and so to go along with the engine support are the new Wood Door and Wood Sign objects.

In addition, the Cow has been added to the game, a peaceful surface biome mob. Killing the cow can drop a Leather Hide and Raw Beef. The Raw Beef can be cooked in the furnace into Cooked Beef, and the Leather Hide can be used to make a Leather Helmet.


The new Leather Helmet comes with engine support for all types of Armor and the ability to equip it, so you can expect to see full suits of armor in the coming updates, along with different kinds of weapons you can use. I think the next update will focus on adding Dungeons into the game, which will also come with all new mobs, weapons, armors, and other types of loot you can find. So stay tuned for that, and let me know what you would like to see added to the game!

https://epicadventure.ape-apps.com/

#epicadventure
3mo ago
Today I am releasing the total rewrite of Epic Adventure to all available platforms. Under the hood, Epic Adventure v3.0 is basically an entire different game. What I did was write a new game engine from scratch, designed to go hand in hand with Pixel Paint based graphics (the way My Colony 2 was designed around Voxel Paint), and then I remade Epic Adventure using the new engine. This is just the first step in an "epic" new chapter for Epic Adventure though, so let's get into it!


Putting the actual Epic Adventure game aside for just a second, my ultimate goal with this new engine (called simply the "Adventure Engine") was to create an easy to develop for pixel art based engine that can be primarily be used for both scripted and procedurally generated RPG type games. I designed it to be generic enough to where multiple types of games can be created on it. For instance, I plan to use it also for my next generation of Roguelike games (ie Gone Rogue/Hell and Back), and I also want to do a scripted RPG taking place in the My Colony Universe where you have a ship and travel to different worlds throughout the story (I am thinking of calling that Colony Quest or something similar, sort of like a 2d pixel art Starfield type game in the MC Universe).

All that is for another day though, today I want to talk about the changes to Epic Adventure in this new release, and what is coming soon to the game in the months ahead.

First for the bad news. Because the game is a complete rewrite, all existing save games are gone. Sadly there was no way around this, as the old game format is not even relevant anymore to the new engine. It had to be done though in order to move the game forward, and I think most people will agree that it was worth it as the game now progresses.


Epic Adventure is now the first game to utilize the new Tiny Pixel Token class of token character from the My Tokens app, which has been around for a while now but is now finally getting some utilization.

Game controls have been altered a bit from the previous releases, but I think most players should be able to adapt fairly quickly. On mobile, the game now utilizes two virtual thumbsticks for movement, with the left stick controlling player movement and the right controlling focus direction. The game now has full gamepad support as well. On a desktop device, the controls are a little more similar to how they used to be, except for now you can move your character with keyboard input, using either WASD keys, the regular arrow keys, or the num pad.

The game now has support for chests, allowing you to store a lot more inventory than you could before. The engine also supports finding hidden chests out in the environment that can contain loot, even things you can't craft yourself, but you will not find any until the next update (since I don't have any biomes programmed in that contain them yet).

Epic Adventure now also included enemies! Yes the game did have chickens before (and still does), but they did not really attack you or fight back. Now when you adventure into the caves, you will come across evil spiders who will attack you on sight. The spiders aren't all that powerful, but don't get too complacent because in the coming updates, there will be a lot more than just spiders to contend with...

The long requested feature of Water has arrived in this release, but stay tuned because it is going to be expanded on more later...

For this initial release of the new engine, my primary goal was to code in all of the features needed to bring in every item/terrain/biome/mechanic found in the original Epic Adventure game so that nothing was missing in the update, and I do think that I was able to get there (let me know if I forgot something). The next step though is to start going far beyond what was ever available in the original game, which I am going to talk about in just a moment here.

First though, one think I want to point out is that I forgot to implement the inventory filtering mechanic in this update. You will be able to see in the inventory window what you will eventually be able to do, I just do not have it working yet (but will soon).


The great thing about the new Epic Adventure engine is how easy it is to create content for, both in terms of code and graphics. Because of this, the game is going to now be expanding fairly rapidly, and of course I will always take player feedback and suggestions into account as I build out the game. I do have some of my own ideas though, so this is what I plan on adding to Epic Adventure in the next few releases:

Dungeons
This is probably the next thing on the list, because I have always wanted to have dungeons available to explore in Epic Adventure. These will of course be randomly generated by the game, so that no two dungeons are ever the same, and you will be able to find both loot and monsters in the dungeons that are not available anywhere else. Dungeons will also have the possibility of spawning a nice boss fight for you on the bottom floor.

Towns/NPCs
Along with Dungeons, a good adventure game needs to have towns, good save areas you can travel to in order to rest, pawn off your loot, and get quests. I will talk more about towns and NPCs later, but I will say that I am working on a system of "factions" where different NPCs are part of different factions, and how much they like you will be impacted by that. You will also be able to join different factions, which will impact how your game progresses. I am thinking along the lines of the guilds and whatnot in the Elder Scrolls games.

Travel/Mounts/Boats
There needs to be a way to get around faster in the game, especially as you need to start questing between towns. I am thinking of several mechanics to handle this. First, I think each town will have a sort of fast travel agency, where you can pay gold (which means gold is also on the way) to travel from town to town. I also want to add the ability to ride horses, or to build a boat so that I can introduce full ocean biomes that you can sail across.

Armor, Magic, Projectiles
To help players on their adventures, we are going to need to have better weapons, armor to wear, projectiles to shoot, and magic spells. I plan on adding all of that and more...

Massive Content Expansion
With every update from here on, there will be new content, biomes, items, terrains, mobs, etc. I am probably also going to start introducing some items that require Premium in order to craft, since the game is free with no ads in it, I do need to find some way to make a bit of money on it. But for real, the game is so easy to code content for, you can expect a lot to be coming very soon.


At the end of the day, this is a new beginning for Epic Adventure, and I think the game will now finally be able to reach a potential that it was not able to attain before. Since the engine is still in it's infancy, please let me know what bugs and issues you find, and how I can improve the interface and controls. Also let me know what new content you want to see added, as it will be coming on a fairly regular basis now.

Thank you to those who have played the game in it's original form though, and I am so sorry for nuking all of your save games. But I promise that I will make the game worth the changes in the weeks and months ahead!

https://epicadventure.ape-apps.com/

#epicadventure #pixelpaint #mytokens
5mo ago
Over the past couple of weeks, I have begun rewriting the Epic Adventure game from scratch, converting it to Pixel Paint graphics and greatly improving the ease of adding new content and feature set.


The original Epic Adventure code was my first attempt at multiplayer gameplay, and I made a lot of noob coding decisions that sort of put development of the game at a stand still. It was basically a convoluted mess and there was no easy way to move the project forward, so it pretty much sat idle for years.

Recently though, and pretty much out of nowhere, the game suddenly became popular on the Windows Store to where it has become one of my top played games, and a lot of requests for updates and feature improvements have started to come in via the in-app "Submit Feedback" function. Most of the requests were basically non-starters with the way the code originally worked, so I had the choice to either ignore the feedback and the recent growth of the game, or to basically start over from scratch, so I choose option 2.

The Epic Adventure rewrite (which will be Epic Adventure v3.0 once released) is build off of my new aptly titled "Adventure Game Engine" and incorporates many of the coding lessons I learned during the development of My Colony 2. The engine has been made generic enough that it will also be usable for other types of games in the future, namely Roguelike and scripted RPG type games. It can do procedurally generated worlds (such as how Epic Adventure will continue to work) or is can run off of prebuilt maps and scripts. It now supports not only click and touch controls, but also keyboard and gamepad input.

Game chunks are now loaded on the fly and in a continuous/infinite manner like in My Colony 2, and terrain features and textures can be automatically generated by the engine at run time, so that biome definitions only really need to specify colors (other customizations are possible though). The engine now supports Water, which was a top request for the current Epic Adventure game, but the water can also be given a custom color and made to be dangerous (lava?).


This new rewrite will be available to play as soon as it is able to do everything that the current version of Epic Adventure can, since I can't release an update with less features than the previous version! That basically means I need to finish creating all of the tools/items/craftable things and get them all working the same as before.

After that though, future updates and releases are going to be extremely easy to do with the way the game works now. So besides greatly expanding the current lineup of things you can craft and build, here are some of the near term plans for additions to the game:

Towns
Random towns will be generated on the overworld including NPCs that can run shops and give you basic automatically generated quests.

Dungeons
Similar to towns, dungeons will appear on the overworld, but they will be mainly a single structure with a stairway leading down to the real dungeon area, which will be multiple levels and probably have something cool at the bottom of the floor. Town NPC's will be able to give quests that involve exploring or clearing out nearby dungeons.

Vehicles
You will be able to craft and then get in and control vehicles. I am mainly thinking of boats for the water to start out with, but I also think a minecart that can run on tracks you build would be a neat addition.

Dedicated Servers
I am adding in a dedicated server mode just like in MC2, so that persistent Epic Adventure worlds can be running 24/7 that anyone can join and partake in.

I expect the initial release of this Epic Adventure rewrite to be out in a couple of weeks, and then I will start expanding it out based on feedback. I think that this new version of Epic Adventure is going to be a lot more fun than the current iteration, and I look forward to seeing what people think when I publish the update, so stay tuned!

#epicadventure
5mo ago
I decided to put together a quick update for Epic Adventure today, and so v0.13.0 is now complete and should be hitting all platforms in the coming days. This update isn't huge, but I did add a couple of quick things.

First of all, there is are new Rocky Plains and Heavy Rocky Plains biomes, where you will find surface stone and a higher abundance of caves.


You may also notice another new item in the above screenshot, trees will now randomly drop Saplings which you can then plant to grow... new trees!

Finally, I added three additional new biomes the Sandy Plains, the Grassy Desert, and the straight up Desert!


Over the coming updates, these new biomes are going to be the source of a lot of new types of plants, animals, and other things that you cannot find in the grassy forest areas, so if you have suggestions on things you would like to see added to the desert biomes, let me know!

That is all for today's update. I didn't have a lot of time to work on it, so it's just a quick one this time, but I plan to update Epic Adventure on a fairly rapid basis going forward, so stay tuned because there is a lot more to come, and if you've never played Epic Adventure before, you can check it out here: https://www.apewebapps.com/epic-adventure/

#epicadventure
3y ago
Today I am happy to announce a big new update to Epic Adventure - v0.12.0! My son has started playing a lot of Epic Adventure, and as such his demands for updates have become impossible to ignore, which in turn has placed Epic Adventure on a higher update priority than it has previously been, so expect a lot more from this game in the coming months. Until then though, let's take a look at all the changes in this release!

To start things off, crop farming has now arrived in Epic Adventure! Before, you could collect seeds from tall grass, and you could plow dirt with the hoe, but you just couldn't combine the two efforts into one. Now, you can plant those seeds in the dirt to produce a brand new entity - Wheat!


Once the wheat is ripe, you can harvest it, and using the crafting menu, six wheats can be converted into another new entity - Dough. Of course, what good is plain dough? Not very tasty. But wait, there has been a non-working object in the game from the very beginning, the furnace. Non-working until now, because the furnace is now fully operational, with the new furnace interface. Loading your furnace with the dough and a fuel source such as coal with convert your dough into another new entity, the delicious and edible Bread!


The last update to Epic Adventure added the first mob, Chickens, to the game, but you couldn't do anything with them. Sadly for the chickens, this has changed, as they can now be slaughtered using your weapon of choice. A few hits with an axe or pickaxe ought to do the trick.


The Chickens currently are a little over powered for what they are, so you will need some sort of weapon to kill them, but they will eventually be nerfed a bit. Regardless, killing a chicken will provide the new entity Raw Chicken and also a random chance to get another new entity, the Feather. There is no practical use for the Feather yet, but the Raw Chicken can be thrown into the furnace to create Cooked Chicken, which provides a great boost to your health and energy.

Speaking of health and energy, Death and Respawning are now fully implemented into the game. Eventually you will be able to create a bed to set a new spawn point, but for now the spawn point is locked at chunk 0x0x0. When you die, your inventory will dump at the site of your death and you will have to return to your body to collect everything. Premium users have the option to respawn at their body if they want to.


Going forward,, I plan on increasing the Epic Adventure update cycle from "whenever I feel like it" to once per month. A big part of creating a game is implementing all of the engine features, and once that is done, adding new content can go quick and easy, rapidly expanding the game. I am getting closer to the rapid content expansion phase, but there are still engine enhancements and changes I wish to implement first.

In a prior post, @Amorphus suggested the concept of rooms, towns, and limited visibility. For the most part, I agree with these concepts completely. Right now in the game, you can easily scroll around the map and see everything. I plan on changing the mechanics to something more resembling my game Gone Rogue, in which a player has a certain line of sight which is also blocked by walls and other obstacles. Additionally, caves and enclosed rooms are going to be dark, requiring torches in order see inside of them. I also plan on adding a day/night cycle to the overworld.

Farming needs to be expanded well beyond the current Wheat. There was a thread a while back with contributions from @Amorphus and @GeneralWadaling concerning Agriculture, and now that the basic engine mechanics of planting, harvesting, and cooking have been implemented, I plan on following many of the suggestions in that thread. Expect a lot more to come in the area of agriculture in the near future.

In this thread, @GeneralWadaling laid out a ton of suggestions regarding food and cooking, and many of these will be finding their way into the game shortly. Wadaling suggests a kitchen stove object, and I might implement that and change the furnace so that it just deals with smelting of metals (whenever I add metals to the game). I will also be adding the camp fire, which will allow cooking but will "burn out" after time.

v0.11.0 introduced engine capability for mobs (the chicken), and this update allows you to kill them. We also need mobs that fight back. Monsters, skeletons, bandits, etc. Look forward to all of these things. That's not all though, because Epic Adventure needs some dungeons to explore. My plan is to repurpose the dungeon generation routines I wrote for both Gone Rogue and Dungeon Infinity in order to have random dungeons to appear on the map that you can loot and explore. Dungeons will be filled with items, treasure, and monsters and will give the player the chance to kind more items, gear, and to gain experience and level up, which are two more concepts headed to the game.

There also needs to be a lot more biome types, including the introduction of Water. There is already a little bit of code in the engine to support water (including accelerated crop growth when near water), but there is no actual water in the game. This will be changing. You will also be able to build ditches/trenches to move water from one location to another.

One thing that really bothers me about Epic Adventure is how only one chunk of the world is rendered at a time and you cannot manipulate objects in nearby chunks. I plan to make the world more seamless (like how it works in My Colony 2) to where the entire world feels like one continuous thing instead of something broken up into chunks.

Anyway, I have a lot of plans for Epic Adventure and I think that things are going to start happening a lot faster in this game now going forward. If you have suggestions on things you would like to see, feel free to let me know here in the forum, and let me know what bugs you find too. Beyond that, thanks for playing Epic Adventure and stay tuned because a whole lot more is on the way!

And if you haven't tried Epic Adventure yet, you can play in on the Web, through the Ape Apps Launcher, or find it on various app stores.

#epicadventure #dungeoninfinity #gonerogue
3y ago
Epic Adventure v0.11.0 has just been released, and adds the first "mob" of the game, Chickens!


This is more or less a test of the mob spawning algorithm. The chickens are theoretically able to drop a new "raw chicken" item when killed, but since I haven't gotten combat implemented yet, you are currently unable to retrieve the item.

This release also includes improvements to multiplayer. In-game chat has been added, and if you have Epic Adventure installed as an app (either from Google Play/Windows Store or the PWA installed to homescreen), you can now quickly join with the new Friends List integration.


Finally, there have been various bug fixes and you can now also move diagonally.

There is a lot more to come to Epic Adventure in the months ahead. The game is starting to build up some players, particularly on Kindle Fire devices, so the updates will probably start coming more frequently now, so keep the suggestions coming. Next on the to-do list is getting combat up and running, either Player vs Player or Player vs Mob (so you can kill and eat these chickens). You will also be able to build a campfire to cook your chicken meat, or mix other recipes together. Cooking will also be possible on the furnace. I am going to get Seeds working, since you are currently able to plow the land, but not plant the seeds you collect. Also, procedurally generated surface buildings and underground dungeons are coming to the game, with the dungeons including new mob types that you can fight for loot (and glory).

So stay tuned for more, because Epic Adventure will soon be morphing into a full-fledged multiplayer procedurally generated role playing game!

#epicadventure
3y ago
Today I am proud to announce that Epic Adventure v0.7.0 is now complete and will be hitting all platforms shortly. This update adds some of the key concepts to the game that moves it one step closer to being able to start adding a bunch of content - Food/Hunger/Health/Eating!

When you log into the game next, you will notice brand new Health and Hunger indicator areas at the top left corner of the screen.

As you go around the world and work, you will become more hungry. If your hunger level gets down to zero, you will start losing health! Luckily, you can eat now. Before the game had Apples, and eating them is simple. If you have an Apple in your hand, click on the Apple again in your belt inventory to eat it.

Note: Unfortunately, due to an existing error in the game code that has since been patched, if you are continuing an existing game, you will start off starving in this update. Hurry and eat a bunch of Apples! New games are not impacted by this issue.

In addition, a new terrain/food item has been added to the game - Mushrooms!

Mushrooms are more abundant than Apples but do not provide as much energy. In the future though, they will be used for different spell and food recipes!

There are still a couple of key concepts that I need to add to the game engine before I can start really digging in with content. The next thing I need to add is movable world objects, such as animals and enemies! That is going to be a big one, and will be the focus of v0.8.0. Once those are implemented, Epic Adventure is going to be pretty much an actual game, but there is still a lot to do. Stay tuned though, because the next update is going to be an "epic" one!

#epicadventure
5y ago
Epic Adventure is an in-development multiplayer open world building, crafting, and adventuring game from Ape Apps. It is still in the very early stages of development, and the direction it takes will depend largely on player feedback. My thoughts from the outset are something of 2d top-down minecraft merged with a rougue like RPG adventure, but anything and everything is subject to change, depending on what works.

Your in-game character in Epic Adventure can be either one of the two default skins, or anything you create yourself using the My Tokens app. My Tokens is free, and any Token you create and save to your Ape Apps account will be available to use in Epic Adventure.

The game is currently available on the Ape Apps Launcher (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) and on Google Play for Android. When the code is further along, I also plan on bringing it to iOS, Windows Store, and Steam. Cross platform multiplayer should be working between the platforms on the same LAN/WiFi connection. Multiplayer over the internet will be available soon as well.

As I said, everything in the game is subject to change and will grow depending on user feedback and input. Use this forum for feedback, bug reports, and game suggestions.

#epicadventure
5y ago
I have done some more work on the Epic Adventure alpha, which is now at 0.2.0. There are a few more items you can craft, including an axe. Next I plan to add farm implements and basic farming. Once the code is far enough along that I am confident that new released will not render game saves invalid, I will enable game saving. Here is a quick video:

The alpha is live on the Web right now and should be on the Ape Apps Launcher some time tomorrow. As always, suggestions are welcome as to what direction I should take with this game!

#epicadventure
5y ago

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Ape Apps, LLC is an independent software development company founded in 2010 by Brandon Stecklein. Over the years, Ape Apps has published over 400 apps and games across various platforms. You can get in touch with Brandon on Twitter or by leaving a post on his wall @bastecklein
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