About the Game
Pixel Wizards (working title) is a 1-4 player Couch Co-op game for Steam, where you:
- Blast baddies
- using custom spells
- in a fully destructible world
- where every pixel is individually simulated,
- and your friends are more dangerous than enemies.
The goal is pick-up-and-play chaos, where there's plenty of plausible deniability for you "accidentally" killing your friends.
Just imagine:
You fling a fireball at a flying imp, which your buddy dodges.
It accidentally burns through the roof, causing acid to pour down... which your buddy also narrowly dodges.
But as the acid corrodes it releases a flammable gas, which rises to the burning roof and explodes - bye bye buddy!
Interest piqued? Read the latest news here.
(Seriously, if you want to see screenshots or whatever, go read my latest updates!)
More details
- Heavily inspired by Noita, Broforce and Magicka.
- Pixel art style, since every pixel is individually simulated.
- 2D, platforming-lite - no precision jumps necessary, though some skill won't hurt.
- No puzzles - killing your friend is more fun than watching them flub a puzzle.
Probably true:
- Procedural spell-casting to provide a wide breadth of spells - though probably more like Magicka's element mixing than Noita's wand-programming.
Things I don't know yet:
- Rogue-like? Rogue-lite? Extraction shooter? Contra-clone? Heist game? Mining game?
- Random levels, handcrafted levels, or somewhere in between?
- Is there a story? (If yes, it better not hold up the action much!)
- Are there unlocks? Is it replayable? Is there even a meta-game at all?
- Maybe we allow up to 8 players, just for funsies?
- Wouldn't it be cool if you could play online too?
Status
Being developed full-time by 1 person since January 2024.
Temper your expectations accordingly, especially on the art side ;)
Release date is unknown, but I share updates and playable demos weekly.
Tech
A custom engine written in the Rust programming language, currently using Macroquad for rendering, input handling and window management, with Rapier for physics and egui for placeholder UI.
The engine supports similar things to Noita's Falling Everything Engine:
- Every pixel ("atom") on screen is simulated using a cellular automata-like approach.
- Powder, liquid and gaseous (liquids with negative gravity) atoms are supported.
- Atoms can react to each other:
- coal and wood burn, dense atoms displace lighter atoms, fire atoms react with water atoms to make steam, steam condenses on ceilings, etc.
- Atoms can also be part of rigid bodies for traditional physics-based gameplay:
- Explosive barrels can go flying before they explode, bridges/roofs can fall down, dead enemies will ragdoll, etc.
Unlike the Falling Everything engine, in this engine great care has been taken to ensure that all calculations are deterministic, which is intended to enable things like replays and maybe online multiplayer.
If you are still curious about the tech, I have written many words about much of it.
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