Back to the Basics

I have not abandoned this project, but instead decided to restart it from the ground up using more traditional rogue-like gameplay and elements.

As you can see the world is now in ASCII! I designed the engine in such a way that the rendering is essentially "plugged" into the engine. It's up the renderer on how to draw the world, and interface. I could, theoretically, design a new renderer to draw the game very similar to my previous incarnation and not have to modify the game at all. But for now I will be sticking to ASCII, as I feel it is sufficient and will speed up gameplay development drastically.

Also another big change is turn-based. Every world-interaction, such as moving, using objects, etc requires a variable amount of turns. Turns can be interrupted, and world interaction is much more flexible and in-depth. For example: you can "Use" a "Pickaxe" on a "Stone Wall". It will take 10 turns to destroy the wall, and drop a "Stone" item. But that could be interrupted mid-way by being forcefully engaged into combat. It wouldn't be too much fun to continue mining a wall when an enemy is attacking!


At the moment I am working on combat. After that I plan on line of sight, lighting, memory, saving and loading. I believe once those are all complete the engine will be fairly complete and I can begin on proper game development. The game design is going to remain essentially the same as before, that can be read about a bit in previous blog posts.

Sounds

This past week has been almost entirely engine and technical related programming. One interesting feature I added was a "game sounds", as in sounds that are played within the games map. In the screenshot below the player is opening a door. The orange highlighted blocks are where the sound of the opening door can be heard.

I'll be starting items and inventory next, and continue from there with basic gameplay mechanics such as skills, and combat.

Gameplay and Setting

I've spent the last week working on the engine and technical details, such as I decided to move from native resolution of 320x240 (4:3 ratio) to 428x240 (16:9 ratio) among many more things.

But this weeks blog is about gameplay and setting. I have decided to set the game in a fictional ancient Greece where mythology has come alive. A sort of merge between the Heroic Age in Greek Mythology and classical Greece, but I will not be concerned with correctness in either mythology or history. I like the Greek setting, as I feel it's a bit ignored in video games and it should suite a roguelike fairly well.

I plan on developing the game in two major versions. Version 1 will be an adaption of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, where you, as a hero of your choice, delve deep into a dungeon until you find the labyrinth that contains the Minotaur that must be slain. This is more or less a traditional roguelike game.

Version 2 will include a world map of ancient Greece (mostly southern Greece, and the peninsula of Peloponnese) with a few Poleis who have their own politics and interactions. In this version the player will be a Greek who is set out to become a hero. Upon his death he is judged by his fellow Greeks of his great deeds he has done to see if he is worthy of being raised to the demigod status of Hero, having a monument erect and being worshiped by a cult. Now if you remember, I plan on the world being consistent. I will still have permanent death, but on death the world is not destroyed, you just create a new character where the world left off.

On gameplay, currently the game is real-time but every action in the game takes a set amount of time (turns) to perform. I should be able to fairly easily transform the game into effectively a turn-based game by pausing every time the player has no current action. I will most likely have that as an option.

My motto for gameplay is keep it simple. There will only be four attributes: Strength, Toughness, Dexterity and Intelligence. You get to raise an attribute by one every level. Also every third time you gain a level you will be allowed to select a talent. Talents are a variety of special abilities that favour your character, such as a bonus with melee weapons or faster healing. And finally skills, skills are only things that perform some sort of action upon the character, world or another object. They gain experience through use (but experience is also contributed to the overall character experience). Most skills in Version 1 will be combat, but I would like to eventually include some crafting and survival skills like Smithing and Stealth.

That is all for this week, hope you enjoyed.

Graphical User Interface

This weeks post will be about the graphical user interface. I have based my GUI from NES RPGs, as I feel it give a nice retro aesthetic while boosting intuitiveness over the common roguelike interface. I have updated this GUI style to use the keyboard more fully also.

I do not plan on having mouse support, I don't feel it will contribute to usability or game play. Only times I imagine the mouse would be used would be to examine the world or select a target for ranged combat. Although I do have plans to have more icons and graphical representations on the UI.

Next week I will be discussing theme, setting and game play elements.

Introduction

The idea of the project is to create a PC video game (Windows, and potentially Linux and Mac) that blends NES-style RPG games (Ultima, Dragon Quest) with roguelikes (Ancient Domains of Mystery, Sil) into an unique gaming experience.

My long term goal is to have a large, randomly generated world that is played persistently among each character (only one at a time) with basic quests and variety of environments, objects of all sorts, and survival and crafting elements set in a fantasy, loosely Lord of the Rings based realm.

Now, to be more realistic my short term goal is to develop basic gameplay elements and have, in essence, a more traditional dungeon diving roguelike similar to Moria or Angbang. I would like to keep gameplay elements simple, where less is more, avoiding any unnecessary complexities that can arise with the nature of roguelikes. Everything is to be represented in a graphical user interface using only the keyboard.

This is a very early screenshot demonstrating lighting, line of sight and character memory. I also have a mostly complete graphical user interface system that I will be showing next week.

Please note all material posted on this blog are work in progress. I do not claim copyright for placeholder material being used.