Messages

151

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: May 01, 2013, 03:40:29 AM »

thanks jim, it'll be interesting to see what people think about the combat system when they give it a go and whether it does end up better than any simple RPGs. At the moment, I think it's going to involve optimal tactics fighting until you're 'wounded' and then trying to flee for healing before re-engaging. The complexity is going to have to come from the positioning (or possibly even the presence) of healers, the tactical bonuses for positioning in combat and the bonuses/maluses provided by wizards/priests.

As it stands, two lucky (or very unlucky) hits can drop you from 'healthy' to 'unconscious', and that can happen in a single round from a single opponent if they have the 'swordsman' trait or successfully roll a speed check. Even then the victim would have to fail two toughness checks and have the damage penetrate through their armour twice to be knocked out, so in practice it's very unlikely. This is probably one aspect of the game which might need to be reassessed in light of future play-testing because currently the player can fight a reasonable amount before being 'wounded', but the frustration that will come from what is effectively a very unlucky insta-kill in a game without randomisation would definitely turn off a large number of players.

Of course, they should have made one of their expendable henchmen take the heat for them as they heroically fought from a safe position at the back of their party...

152

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 29, 2013, 06:57:24 AM »

And those kobolds look pretty good in-game, I think:



Maybe I'll play around with the one I'm using as a kobold shaman to add some kind of magic effect so that it's a bit more obvious from just the sprite, but they're not bad!

153

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 29, 2013, 04:37:01 AM »

hey, they look pretty good. The kobold ones are definitely along the lines of what I was thinking they should look like instead of being green men like everything else!

On the topic of my progress with the game, I don't have much to demonstrate new by way of screen shots because I've been playing around with character creation and things like that which don't have much of a visual impact.

Also made a few modifications with respect to the combat system which differ from the Dead Simple rules - firstly, every attack you perform a Speed check which if successful gives you an additional attack on the same target. Characters of the soldier class already attack twice per round so can potentially attack three times per round on a successful check which hopefully increases the importance of dexterity for fighting classes and makes it a bit more of a complicated decision where to invest your skill points.

Secondly, I decided to include a Stealth check for those of the thief class as a kind of backstab attack, but only in circumstances where there is more than one attacker around your enemy. Already this provides for a blanket +1 bonus for all classes when you surround a defender, with thieves getting a +2 bonus, but with a successful Stealth check I was thinking that I would add the amount you pass that check by onto the attack roll with a view to making a thief a poor class for up front solo fighting (because of the lack of shields and anything more than light armour) but a handy support class in that they excel at attacking as part of a group, with ideally your opponent focusing on another of your party to avoid soaking up too much damage yourself.

And here's a screenshot just for the heck of it, with the real development shown being the customised player name and avatar:

154

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 24, 2013, 04:20:02 AM »

The most obvious distinction is going to be the access to magic for wizards and the combat strength of the fighter classes. A bit trickier to convey is the skills of a thief and the support play of a cleric. Under the rules I'm using, thieves get a better bonus in combat when an enemy is surrounded and clerics are reasonable fighters but their value is in being able to heal and deal with undead.

The tricky bit really is that I am only allowing the player to choose one character to play and the rest comes down to writing. It's going to be a challenge to make the game as interesting for a thief player compared to a wizard, because the use of thief skills in an interesting way is going to have to flow from unusual scripted encounters because I don't think many people will jump at the chance to play a class which can open a locked chest better than anyone else.

And there's already allies included in the game to let you flesh out your party with other skillsets, so I'll have to put a lot of thought and attention into which allies are available for which classes so that becomes an interesting challenge in itself.

Ideally I am aiming for a game where picking to play a thief who chooses to hire an apprentice wizard and a cowardly bodyguard gives rise to an interesting challenge without the randomisation of procedural content.

155

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 24, 2013, 01:31:27 AM »

Any help with tiles would be greatly appreciated. It's one of those areas where I've never really dabbled before and I just don't have the skills to do a good job of it.

Here's the tileset currently:



Anyone with a reasonable eye for it will notice the hack job I've done with recolouring different sprites in a fairly haphazard way. The dwarf tiles were lifted from a dwarf fortress set and coloured in pretty badly and I know they can be improved.

The collection of green men is supposed to represent different varieties of kobolds, goblins, orcs and orges. It doesn't really work as is and I need a bit more variety there and I've just tried to fudge it so far - kobolds shouldn't really be green. Likewise, the ordinary human sprites are ok but lacking a bit of variety.

The reality is though that I would be happy to include anything which you'd be willing to contribute - there's no pressure on you! As long as the style remains pretty consistent throughout, the more variety the better and I would be pretty inclined to include anything in terms of a new monster or other feature if the tile was inspiring enough!

156

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 24, 2013, 01:06:36 AM »

Replayability is probably going to be the weakness of this game definitely. Because everything is structured, it means that I'll be able to densely pack in content, with descriptors provided for every meaningful encounter you come across in a very non-roguelike fashion, and of course that means your second run through the same set of encounters is going to be a lot more boring.

Part of addressing that will be to try and make different classes play different and also try and sketch out a plot which means different choices end up affecting gameplay so that you can seek out a different experience. The other way in which I'll hopefully address that is to simply put out a new module with different quests and settings once I've got the game system in place. That's the long-term goal anyway and it remains to be seen just how easy that process is.

I've been playing around with the tileset and a few other minor things, but here's a screenshot for the day - the player scouting ahead to find a party of orc warriors led by an ogre. Knowing that this would probably prove too much for a single fighter, I led them backwards to a nearby neutral dwarf mining party hoping that they would be strong enough to take out my enemies for me.

And it turns out that they nearly were - apart from the ogre.

157

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 23, 2013, 11:42:03 PM »

You'd definitely be able to get a ToME prototype with a custom tileset running in less than an hour I'd say, particularly if you just re-used the example code and ignored gameplay to show off the look and feel of your graphics instead.

Of course if you're keen on making tiles, I know a certain game that's going to be needing some 16x16 tiles very shortly

158

Programming / Re: info files

« on: April 23, 2013, 05:44:15 AM »

So obviously it's not as intuitive as it could be haha.

159

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 23, 2013, 04:05:13 AM »

Cool, thanks for the feedback! It's pretty motivating to hear that people are into what I've been doing so far.

Working on a tileset is a good idea (and that's probably something I'll have to wade into shortly and which I have absolutely no experience in) and there's no problem with plugging away at a setting/story but I don't think there's any substitute for just giving it a crack when it comes to programming your own project.

It's a bit of a steep learning curve if you're starting out with coding, but I would suspect that the time you spend chasing up volunteer project members to code for you, you'd probably be able to give it a pretty good shake yourself! Just believe in yourself and you can acheive `~*anything*~,! Well probably not, but just try anyway is my advice.

160

Programming / Re: info files

« on: April 23, 2013, 04:00:48 AM »

by way of demonstration, here's how one of my data files looks which defines a unique NPC character:

Code: [Select]

name
Arianna
char
296
faction
neutral
x
28
y
4
strength
2
dexterity
2
intellect
5
spirit
5
agility
3
craft
6
fighting
2
knowledge
6
perception
6
persuasion
8
shooting
2
speed
2
stealth
2
toughness
2And to use that file, I iterate through each line until I identify a header which is expected by the program and then it knows what the data in the next line is supposed to correlate to. It's probably stupidly simple but that's really what I'm aiming for.

161

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 22, 2013, 12:26:21 AM »

A lot of progress is being made and the game is starting to have its "role-playing" implemented. I've now got unique customisable NPC's and plot messages being read from external and easy to mod data files so that the real writing of game content is very easy.



I'm hoping that I can keep as much of the game content as possible in the data files so that I can leave the game engine completely alone and focus on releasing modules with different settings and characters without touching a line of code. It's going to get tricky when I get into the nitty gritty of quests, ie. trying to define that a certain NPC desires an item which is located somewhere in the dungeon and the interactions which happen upon success/failure. It's not impossible but just a bit fiddly and I'm finding it achievable as long as I chip away at it gradually.

162

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 17, 2013, 01:53:16 AM »

That's great guys, it's very motivating to hear that I haven't completely missed the mark in terms of the project's goal. That reaction is exactly what I'm aiming for from old-time players of ancient RPG's!

Development has been continuing. I've adopted the Dead Simple RPG Rules which have been almost completely implemented with respect to combat, minus a few things like armour, the negative effect of being 'wounded' in combat, and the combat bonus for swarming your enemy with allies. It seems like a pretty cool system, and of interest to me, has no HP or EXP mechanics!





I'm already hitting one of the problems with roguelike developers dipping their toes into the graphical world - I need more tiles for more monster types! My dwarves look like peasants for now, which is ok for a placeholder but pretty lousy for a proper game.

163

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 16, 2013, 10:29:56 AM »

I think the new grass looks nicer.  It reminds me of old school PC RPGs.  Like the older Ultimas or whatever.  It has a really "tiled" look right now with the black borders around each section of grass, but if you don't like that it shouldn't be too hard to fix.

Those are all things I was aiming for, so that's positive.

164

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 16, 2013, 02:38:07 AM »

Here's the game with a different font and a different take on the grass.



I'm not all that sure about moving in this direction with the grass but the different font for the messages works a lot better in my view. I might switch back to the grass tiles...

165

Early Dev / Re: The Burning Plague

« on: April 15, 2013, 10:47:24 PM »

Thanks for the early support.

To be honest, I already had some reservations about the issues you guys raise. The font itself hasn't really been of much concern to me at this stage because it's obviously not used in the game world itself which has been my focus. Readability always seems to be a problem when there is a square font used - obviously it makes the map look aesthetically better but causes problems when it comes to strings of text.

For example: http://xcomrl.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/tune-up.html

Problem is that libtcod doesn't support multiple font sizes and styles in a single window, and the only workaround I know of is a horrible one where you change from a 16x16 font to a 8x16 or something to increase the readability of ordinary characters but when you print a graphical character to the game window, you would in fact print two side by side to make up the representation of a single object. It's workable but doesn't really look like the most fun in the world to program from my perspective.

Of course I could always ditch libtcod for display purposes, but that decision won't be made anytime soon.

With respect to the grass, yeah I don't know if it's going to stay that way. I hated it more a while ago and it's slowly grown on me but something isn't right about it and it looks messy in a way. I'm still open to experimentation in that respect and I might in fact slot in a different character to replace the grass in due course but it's probably not a priority just yet. The only real criteria for a graphical tile is that I would like it to be mostly black so it doesn't contrast negatively with a character tile next to it which will almost always have a black background.

I'm currently working on implementing the complete set of stats and skills which involves reworking the simple combat system currently in place, and once that's done I'll have a character generator to play around with and hopefully something else to show.