Apotheosis, 3D Roguelike, 1st Tech Demo available

[Another_Mr_Lizard]

Hi, I posted here last year about Apotheosis, a 3D, semi-realtime roguelike I'm working on.
It's come on a great deal since then, and is moving toward a demoable stage.


Development Blog:
http://apotheosisthegame.wordpress.com/

I'd love to hear any gameplay suggestions anyone has.


 latest Dev site: http://seanfahy.me/

[Krice]

I have a feeling that totally random placement of rooms in the levels looks even worse in 3D. I think there should be a structure, some kind of reason for placing rooms. Also if you have a 3D engine, what is stopping you to make some use of the third dimension (those levels look flat 2D).

[Another_Mr_Lizard]

I have a feeling that totally random placement of rooms in the levels looks even worse in 3D. I think there should be a structure, some kind of reason for placing rooms.

There is.

Also if you have a 3D engine, what is stopping you to make some use of the third dimension (those levels look flat 2D).

Significant development overhead.

[getter77]

It has definitely been making progress over the various blog entries for this last great while---keep at the fine work and good luck on getting that first version out for Summer.   

[getter77]

Tech demo!    http://seanfahy.me/

This demo shows the bare basics of the game’s dungeon generation system. The room’s are completely unfurnished and empty and are not being generated with any layout / flow heuristics.

I’m  releasing this both as a demonstration and a great way to stress test the current state of the game application, and I’d really appreciate any feedback anyone has, technical or otherwise.

(The demo runs only in windowed mode at a fixed resolution)

Controls: WASD and mouse, press X to generate a new dungeon.

This demo requires the XNA redistributable to be installed in order to run, which is included in the zip file.

So have a look, and let me know what you think !

http://www.d1224964-11229.cp.blacknight.com/Apotheosis.zip


Recent thinkings!

I haven’t updated this blog in about four months, which in internet time is about ten thousand years. Development on the game hasn’t slowed, but it’s difficult to formulate an interesting blog post on the data structure you used for text notifications or how you serialized graphics settings.

Also, I have deliberately avoided working on new assets as much as possible as it’s a process that can continue forever, and ultimately the game is the rules and they have to be prioritized.

This has meant that most of the recent work hasn’t been particularly conducive to screenshots, or blog posts.

With the rudiments of combat and progression in place, I’ve been working on how the player interacts with the world.

Because there are a number of interactions for most objects the player encounters, a mechanism for selecting between them is required. As player movement is keyboard driven with mouse rotation, introducing a cursor-based menu as in standard RPGs would be jarring and unnatural.

I’ve decided to make the menu system as context sensitive as possible.  The player targets game objects, both enemies and environmental objects, by holding the space bar.

This displays a horizontal menu at the bottom of the screen, which contains only and all the valid interactions with this object.  A choice is selected by horizontally moving a cursor with the mouse until the desired icon is highlighted, and clicking chooses the highlighted action.

This menu is affected by the objects state, so for example, a closed door will have one interaction – “Open”, and an open door will only display “Close”.  A living and a dead enemy will present a different set of commands.

This is a departure from the traditional front loaded commands of most roguelikes, but the advantages as I see them are these:

    The player never has to memorize commands
    There are no junk commands
    There is no trial and error
    Interaction is intuitive
    There is no / little learning curve

This is a departure from traditional roguelike interfaces, but traditional roguelike interfaces would have to spray acid in the users face to be any more unpleasant.

It changes the nature of the gameplay system in subtle ways, though. The explicit presentation of an interaction is an invitation to use it. In many roguelikes, discovering possible interactions forms part of the gameplay, in Apotheosis the player is presented with all valid choices for a given context.

It also means that interaction is heavily object driven – the world has entities that present interactions to the player, rather than a player that directs interactions at the world.

I’ve also been working on combat and experience, and I have a basic power curve and progression system in place. At the moment you just chop up enemies until you level up and get better at chopping up enemies, but I want to have this as refined as possible before adding any other variables to the mix, as the basic process forms the backbone of gameplay.

Other than the menu system and disparate gameplay elements, I’ve added some other things to the game such as a deferred rendering system, particle effects, dungeon features and nice big splashes of gore when you hit someone. Enemy path finding and some rudimentary AI have been added, so enemies have basic seek and attack behavior.

My plans at the moment are to develop the minimum viable prototype of the game and publicly release it as a tech demo. This will not only be a great way of getting much needed technical feedback, but also hopefully result in a clearer picture of what areas of the game should receive the most priority. It’s very difficult to maintain a bird’s eye view of how a game should work when you’re deep in its implementation.

This seems closer to how traditional software systems are often developed than games, but as the game isn’t content or storyline driven, I see no reason why it’s unfinished state should be hidden.

Huzzah for context sensitive doings.   

[krabby]

Is this a roguelike... or a third-person RPG game? o.o

[getter77]

3D semi-realtime Roguelike is the main gist, but on the other hand that is certainly such a nice situation that such a question seems apt based on the quality screens.   

Progress~