Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Game Discussion => Traditional Roguelikes (Turn-based) => Topic started by: mushroom patch on November 19, 2017, 12:11:49 PM
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These guys who were developing The Chronicles of Doryen, best known today as the game libtcod was developed for, pretty much called it quits, they say, because the combat system they came up with was too tedious to build a game around and they couldn't come up with anything better.
My question is: What was this combat system? Has anyone actually played the game?
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Why can't you play the game and figure it out yourself. It's not available for your platform?
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Why can't you play the game and figure it out yourself. It's not available for your platform?
I don't think there's a publicly available playable version.
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Yeah, this was one of those situations where whatever went down was all internal until things finally went boom underground---like the sad fate of Fallow World. :-\
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I don't think there's a publicly available playable version.
Who cares then? It's like talking about Kaduria and wondering what kind of combat system it has. What is the point?
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I don't think there's a publicly available playable version.
Who cares then? It's like talking about Kaduria and wondering what kind of combat system it has. What is the point?
For Kaduria, sure. For tcod, a number of reasons could be listed, like historical interest, learning from past design experiments, etc. How is the combat system in Kaduria, by the way? ;)
As always,
Minotauros
PS. For what it's worth, I never played tcod, but remember it always looked very pretty in screen shots, especially the generated worlds.
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How is the combat system in Kaduria, by the way?
Not ready. My plan was always not to make another D&D clone but maybe more "realistic" system, possibly depending more on ranged combat. I don't know, I always thought that bashing @ against everything until done was too simple and careless.
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It looked like there was something playable, like this pyromancer thing, but I didn't see how to get it and thought someone who follows these things more closely might have already tried it.
Indeed, my interest was in seeing the specifics of an "imaginative" failed design.
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Well who are those developers? Don't they have like e-mail or something where you should have asked first. Yeah, let's ask on a forum if someone knows what was the deal.
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Are you posting on a forum to complain about posting on a forum?
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Are you asking a question to avoid answering to my questions?
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Well who are those developers? Don't they have like e-mail or something where you should have asked first. Yeah, let's ask on a forum if someone knows what was the deal.
Don't you have elsewhere to share your butthurt feels? If you don't know the answer why not shut the fuck up?
I remember that game btw and the hype. It was supposed to be THE shit.
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It's in the Archive but the site and downloads for Arena/Pyromancer are still up anyway:
http://roguecentral.org/doryen/games/arena/ (http://roguecentral.org/doryen/games/arena/)
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If you don't know the answer why not shut the fuck up?
You know the answer, then?
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I'll try to reach jice for comments about this :)
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Hey it seems I've been summoned here. This thread is a good dive into the past. It's been so long it looks like it was another life for me, but it's good to see some things never change in the roguelike community and the pillars are still strong. Slash being the guardian of the temple and good ol' Krice still trolling as always ;D
Anyway this is the long and sad story of The Chronicles of Doryen.
The project started quickly after I discovered roguelikes. I wanted an ascii game with the depth of nethack, but with a modern and intuitive UI and a more diablo-like gameplay.
After a few iterations (notably a C -> D -> C++ language loop), I had something promising. This version can be seen in the youtube videos here (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL432D87A218C0D99D).
The combat system was still bashing @ against everything, but with special attacks and cooldown. Since expanding and balancing this combat system was tedious inside the game, I created The Doryen Arena as a testbed. As far as I know, this game can still be downloaded here (http://roguecentral.org/doryen/games/) and hopefully still runs nowadays. The Doryen Arena showed that during intense real time combats, bumping into things wasn't that great. It's one thing to kill a rat in a cave, but fighting 5 or 10 gobelins running around was actually painful.
The project stalled for some time until I created Pyromancer! during a 7DRL to test another combat approach, much closer to diablo (click instead of bumping). Pyromancer! also brought a lot of improvements in ascii graphics with lots of bells and whistles (anti-aliased shadow casting in ascii ? yes, that's a thing!).
In parallel to all those wanderings, libtcod had started a life of its own and was consuming a lot of my time. People wanted it on every goddamn OS and every goddamn language, not mentioning every goddamn compilation system on Earth. I finally gave up libtcod. I lacked the strength to stay focused and not try to please every people interested in the project.
At this point I was trying to expand Pyromancer! code into a new TCOD engine, through other 7DRL (The cave, then TreeBurner). But developing a complex game engine using 7DRL crunchs is not the right way to do it, at least for me. Eventually, the code collapsed under its own crappiness as I had to spent months in debug hell to add a simple feature.
This was 7 years ago. Since then, there hasn't been a year without a new try at a TCOD version. I have 3 or 4 C++ libtcod based versions, a Unity 2D sprite version, an ascii typescript/phaser version based on yendor.ts that can be found on github (https://github.com/jice-nospam/yendor.ts), an 3D voxel openGL version using the Rust language and more recently a 2D Godot version.
So the project is still alive, is still one of my main projects, but there's no point making noise until I've got something else than fluff.
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People wanted it on every goddamn OS and every goddamn language, not mentioning every goddamn compilation system on Earth.
Why would you need to care about that? It's not that they paid anything for it?
Anyway, when I read about your attempts to use multiple languages and libraries it's like me trying to make music. I'm just thinking about what gear I need rather than creating whole songs. Maybe the most ridiculous thing was that I got drums (real ones, not electric), because I thought I need to actually play drums (and other instruments) in my songs. Well, maybe I have to do it that way, but it wasn't the point. Or was it.
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Why would you need to care about that? It's not that they paid anything for it?
Yeah I should have known better. On the other hand, it was nice for a while, all the people using libtcod for their 7DRL, but it never became a community library. I probably suck at community management. That and maybe also the ugly hairy rendering system code was probably scaring a lot of people ;D