Lantern: Caverns of Chaos is a roguelite mining/resource collection game with hack-and-slash combat, procedurally generated cave levels, and a crafting system to create unique weapons and accessories. The game has a heavy focus on cultivating mood and atmosphere with a distinct art style and realtime 2D lighting.
Gameplay
The premise of the game is to delve into procedurally generated caves that contain resources to collect like ores and plants, as well as dangerous enemies.
You can then return to your home base to use the resources you collected in order to craft new weapons, accessories, and consumables which will make your next run easier and allow you to dig deeper and deeper into the caves.
As you progress, you’ll be faced with unique trials, discover new resources, fight new enemies, and eventually uncover entirely new cave biomes.
While currently in an unfinished state, it still contains a wide variety of items, enemies, and challenges and is, in my personal opinion, very fun to play. You can download a playable build on my itch page here: https://npels.itch.io/lantern
Project Details
Lantern is based on a previous project of mine, Cavern Blitz. While working at Saplink, they asked if I would be interested in developing an original game for their studio. I pitched the idea of a bigger, more ambitious version of Cavern Blitz, and they were quickly on board.
I was the creative head for Lantern, as well as the main developer. Apart from one of the Saplink guys who jumped in to help build the audio system, I wrote all of the code in the game and handled all of the work within the Unity Editor. Here are some examples of things I worked on:
- A complex, highly parameterized procedural level generation system that uses compute shaders to generate levels at lightning-fast speeds
- All UI design and programming, including an inventory and crafting system (inventory systems are way more complicated than you think they are)
- Designs for over a dozen enemies, each with unique AI behaviors and animations implemented using timelines
- A wrapper for Unity’s 2D physics engine to allow for finer control and a wider range of behaviors
- 50+ items including weapons, equipment, consumables, and materials
- A fully fleshed-out combat system with damage types, modifiers, armor/resistances, etc.
Much of the art was either done by contracted artists or from purchased pixel art packs, though a good amount of the art for the items was made by me. Looking back, there’s a pretty clear progression in my pixel art skills from the first programmer art I did for the basic weapons to the items you can craft in the second biome.
All of the above sprites were made by me at various points in development. Some of them are certainly much better than others; I think moving away from the hard outlines was a good decision.