Author Topic: Dungeon Ascendance  (Read 8161 times)

flend

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Dungeon Ascendance
« on: August 15, 2012, 08:04:00 PM »
Hiya all.

My game Dungeon Ascendance is out on Android and I recently updated it with sound and music (very un-roguelike!). It's a roguelike-like puzzle rpg that's been compared in reviews to Tower of the Sorcerer and Desktop Dungeons. However, I hope I bring enough new mechanics to the mix to keep things fresh.

The free version is at: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.seramygames.dungeonascendancefree&hl=en and there's $2.99 upgrade which gives you access to the full range of classes and dungeons.

It's a bit of a depature from DDRogue and PrincessRL and it's certainly been a different challenge taking stuff to release polish rather than having the 7-day cut off.

Incidentally, I use a couple of public domain tilesets. Roguelike vets will recognise the Crawl tiles, which were CC 0ed by a guy called donblas (http://code.google.com/p/crawl-tiles/). I've got a lot of flak for this since it's not widely known that these are CC 0 :)

I also use some of the David Gervais tiles (http://pousse.rapiere.free.fr/tome/). These are CC BY.

Much as I love ASCII, it's great that there are these tilesets out there.

-flend

getter77

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Re: Dungeon Ascendance
« Reply #1 on: August 15, 2012, 08:45:53 PM »
Congrats on the release and may you find ample success with it!   8)

Try not to let the acidic art folk get you down, any number of projects have had to endure much the same, for instance, in the wake of the Oryx set release and whatnot after that TIGSource compo.
Brian Emre Jeffears
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Alex E

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Re: Dungeon Ascendance
« Reply #2 on: August 16, 2012, 05:14:35 AM »
With all of these android roguelikes releasing it makes we wish that I had an android phone.

Darren Grey

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Re: Dungeon Ascendance
« Reply #3 on: August 17, 2012, 12:30:56 PM »
Nice to see this released after your preview at IRDC.  Runs very smoothly on my Nexus 7 (which you should get Mosenzov, they're great!)

Holsety

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Re: Dungeon Ascendance
« Reply #4 on: August 18, 2012, 06:03:20 AM »
Congrats on the release and may you find ample success with it!   8)

Try not to let the acidic art folk get you down, any number of projects have had to endure much the same, for instance, in the wake of the Oryx set release and whatnot after that TIGSource compo.

The Oryx set was absolute poison as far as getting people to put some effort into art, any shit one has to endure for using it is entirely justified. The lo-fi aspect is cute as shit for 3 seconds, but using it in an actual game is cool. If you like your games looking like shit.

Whereas I don't think people will easily be able to find fault with Dungeon Ascendance's art assets.
Hell, if anything tiles will go over a lot better than ascii for the average Android user.
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getter77

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Re: Dungeon Ascendance
« Reply #5 on: August 18, 2012, 12:54:50 PM »
Well, I didn't mean "fault" in the technical so much as the rabid claims of "THIEF THIEF THIEF!" for any game afterwards that used them even in part, even though like the open Crawl tiles that was largely the point of the entire freaking compo.
Brian Emre Jeffears
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guest509

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Re: Dungeon Ascendance
« Reply #6 on: August 19, 2012, 01:34:30 AM »
  I remember that Getter. Claims of rip off were rampant.

  I remember a post for Realm of the Mad God that went something like, "Hmmm...I've seen this game before, HERE!" Then linked to Oryx's tileset, acting like they were linking to a game the RotMG people were stealing from.

-Jo

flend

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Re: Dungeon Ascendance
« Reply #7 on: August 25, 2012, 07:10:27 PM »
As an aside, the graphics in Dungeon Ascendance are scaled from 32x32 originals using hq2x and hq3x algorithms. (see http://www.hiend3d.com/hq2x.html). At IRDC Jeff Lait mentioned that there were decent scaling algos out there for pixel art, so I had a bit of a serach. Jeff also mentioned that 32x32 was big enough to do something with scaling-wise whereas 8x8 really isn't.

Initially I just used a block nearest-neighbour resize from 32x32 to 64x64 and 96x96 which I thought looked better than bilinear or bicubic on pixel art. However, the hqnx really blow those away.

The only issues I had were that some of my GUI icons were 16x16 originally and hqnx occasionally would make circles into polygons etc.

I couldn't find an MIT license hqnx algorithm in Java, so I just prescale the assets when developing and include the scaled-up icons in the game. I have the icons arranged in lines & columns in a big bitmap in 32x32 size. I use an ImageMagick cmd line to split this into individual files, rescale each using hqnx and then use another ImageMagick cmd line to reintegrate the scaled files into a large bitmap. I do this to avoid the scaling algorithm intepolating from the border of one icon into another icon.