Author Topic: Greetings from a new roguelike developer  (Read 14090 times)

Pickledtezcat

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Greetings from a new roguelike developer
« on: January 25, 2014, 05:41:32 AM »
UG! Anti spam tasks just keep getting nicer and nicer don't they. Hope I don't have to do that too much more to use the forum.

Anyway, Hello to Temple of the rogue like forums, I'm a long time game developer using the Blender game engine (with coding in python) but although I've been looking at developing a rogue-like for some time, this is my first try at the genre.

You can see what I've been working on here at the Blender artists forums:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?257548-Untitled-Old-School-RPG

A little background, Blender is a 3d program which is free to use for commercial or non-commercial projects, it has  a built in game engine which with some python coding allows for very complex games to be made and to use a lot of fairly modern graphics technologies.

I don't have any game play yet, as I've been working on behind the scenes coding and art assets until now, but as the game play elements come Online I'd like to et some feedback from people who actually know something about rogue-likes.

Here are some of the key points about my game:

  • Fully random dungeons with random items and enemies
  • A new turn based movement and combat system in which it is not too easy to die, but death (or other serious injuries) are permanent.
  • A character development system which is not tied down to classes but allows you to tweak your player in response to the equipment and environment you encounter.
  • A magic system based on items (books and scrolls) and a "radiation" type mechanic which stops you from using magic too much.
  • A space/ slot based inventory system like in games such as stalker.
  • Eventually a version with an overland exploration map, with survival elements and randomized quests, shops and friendly NPCs
  • Eventually a team based play system where you will have up to 4 characters to give the player more to do each turn, be more fun and chart your progress as one after another they all die horrible deaths.

But as a start I'm going to be making a single dungeon with multiple floors and a single playable character. Other elements will be added as they develop.

What I'm looking for is people who can give ideas and feedback as well as anyone who can contribute to the project in some small way such as with 2d art, 3d low poly models or sound effects.

So far I've got many of the coding elements already written, such as the level generator or designed and worked out such as the inventory system.
« Last Edit: January 25, 2014, 05:57:07 AM by Pickledtezcat »
A blog about my 3d Roguelike: http://pickleddevblog.blogspot.kr/

guest509

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Re: Greetings from a new roguelike developer
« Reply #1 on: January 25, 2014, 08:49:17 AM »
Welcome brother man.

This is the hot spot dude. We have tons of great programmers (Quendus and Krice come to mind but there are others) and we have tons of very solid developer types that suck at programming (you know who you are) and we have big talkers like myself. We also have just straight up super fans and a great mix of all types.

I've never used Blender so know very little. But code is code and design is design so if you want to make a Roguelike and bounce some ideas off of people you are in the right place.

Currently we've been bouncing a bunch of ideas about monster generation here, as well as yammering on the topic of a Super Hero RL which I figured to be just a 'talkie' but people are actually putting out demos (Trystan!)

Coming in March we have the 7 Day Roguelikes where a bunch of people pretend to be developers for a week and put out some great stuff. I'd LOVE to see a good 3D game, third person or face smash, whichever.

Slashie is the owner and Getter is the landlord (and superfan). I am the nosey neighbor and Krice is the old racist we love/tolerate despite it all. Darren is our over achiever. Legend is the weird guy who plays RL's with a joypad (awesome!), Ancient and Psi do PRIME, Aging Minotaur is our sensible granddad and on and on and on. Lots of new peeps around here as well, which is awesome even if it leads to the inevitable 'what is a roguelike' discussion (barf).

Many characters. Almost zero Trolls, outside of Finland...you know who you are!

And every once in awhile one of us turns 35, drinks a whole bunch of organic hippie beer and decides to hang out on the forums...:-)

Play testing can be hard to get for any project, but these guys will spit ball any sort of design idea/question you put out there.

Holsety

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Re: Greetings from a new roguelike developer
« Reply #2 on: January 25, 2014, 09:09:28 AM »
It's too early to be actually useful, but you should do a search for roguelikes with multiple characters (very specific, no? :V) and play them.
To see what you think of their way of implementing multiple characters (personally I think it's a hard enough to keep 1 character alive  :) ).

My brain's still asleep, can't be more useful sorry. I watched your dungeon exploration video though, it looked pretty nice. Maybe consider showing the outlines of dungeon areas that you've explored but can't see anymore (as opposed to everything just going black again).
Quote from: AgingMinotaur
… and it won't stop until we get to the first, unknown ignorance. And after that – well, who knows?

Quendus

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Re: Greetings from a new roguelike developer
« Reply #3 on: January 25, 2014, 10:14:06 AM »
It's too early to be actually useful, but you should do a search for roguelikes with multiple characters (very specific, no? :V) and play them.
I think the multicharacter RLs that work the best are ones that move characters more than one space per turn, and the ones that give all but one character an AI. Both versions can have problems, though...

getter77

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Re: Greetings from a new roguelike developer
« Reply #4 on: January 25, 2014, 01:05:12 PM »
You have a difficult task ahead of you, as Blender's engine is notorious for not being...well...let's call it "wieldy" for such a task.  Granted, I'd like to think things have gotten better since this Roguelike project's long stab at it some years ago, but I've not actually heard chatter as to such:

http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=2390

Still, I hope to see things come together on the technical front to where you can get the sort of game going you invision.   8)

Welcome to the Temple of the Roguelike!
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Vanguard

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Re: Greetings from a new roguelike developer
« Reply #5 on: January 25, 2014, 02:23:01 PM »
Welcome to the forums, and good luck with your project.

Pickledtezcat

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Re: Greetings from a new roguelike developer
« Reply #6 on: January 25, 2014, 02:56:50 PM »
It's too early to be actually useful, but you should do a search for roguelikes with multiple characters (very specific, no? :V) and play them.
To see what you think of their way of implementing multiple characters (personally I think it's a hard enough to keep 1 character alive  :) ).

My brain's still asleep, can't be more useful sorry. I watched your dungeon exploration video though, it looked pretty nice. Maybe consider showing the outlines of dungeon areas that you've explored but can't see anymore (as opposed to everything just going black again).

Well, there's going to be one character at first, but my eventual aim is to allow more and to try to build that in to the game from the start.
For example instead of giving each PC/NPC a full turn of movement at once, I'm going to break down the turns in to phases, so all the characters in the players team can move in the movement phase, then next the monsters move. Then the shooting/ equipment use phase, where if you're not in combat you can swig a potion or fire your crossbow or whatever. Next will be the combat phase where you can try to kill the enemy or concentrate on hiding behind your shield, and finally the recovery/resolution phase where characters with minus health are going to die (or go in to a coma), or else you will regain your strength and movement points ready for the next round. If there's no enemy around we can skip the combat phase.

I've played a lot of single character RPGs and lots of team RPGs and I just prefer to have a team, someone to tank, someone to heal, someone for artillery, there's just something for everyone to do each turn, and the interplay of characters give life to the game. Also it gives you another level of tactical play, especially with permadeath. What happens if your tank gets killed? What if your healer falls down a pit trap and you have to do without him for 3 levels of the dungeon? What if your scholar gets permablinded by spider venom and can't cast spells anymore? Could you just relegate him to carrying loot while your thief learns magic? It's going to be important not to over specialize your characters in case they need to step in to someone elses shoes.

The videos so far are more kind of code tests, they show what can be done but they will be changed somewhat as time goes on. I'm thinking of having the sections of the dungeon stay visible for a number of turns before turning black, maybe greyed out, or just as it is. If you find paper and pens in the dungeon maybe a character can use a map making exploit/skill to keep the sections permanently visible.
I'm going to see how those things turn out in play testing though.

I have actually produced a fairly "complete" game in the past using the blender game engine, which puts me one up on most Blender game engine users. ^^ I learned a lot about procedural generation and enemy mob generation. It's just a high score game, based on the Battletech tabletop game, I had hoped to continue development but my old code turned out to be difficult to move forward with.

You can check it out here if you're interested:
http://youtu.be/53pDNwKNQ4Y
http://youtu.be/vrgxdWua0b0

I gues it is actually kind of a roguelike as the missions and enemies are procedurally generated, and death results in the total loss of your high score.

For the game I gave each potential enemy a cost in resource points (I wrote a program to calculate this as the original tabletop costs didn't translate well to the real time combat model) and randomly added enemies to the spawn point while reducing the spawn pool of RP. Lists of enemies were drawn up acording to faction and timeline and then selected by using a random index.

I'll probably do the same with the RPG game, with monsters selected by theme and level and then spawned from a pool of RP for each room, and also for a wandering monster pool to populate the corridors. Loot will be handled in a similar way, either placed in a chest in the room, or added to the monster's corpse.
A blog about my 3d Roguelike: http://pickleddevblog.blogspot.kr/

Krice

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Re: Greetings from a new roguelike developer
« Reply #7 on: January 25, 2014, 06:07:44 PM »
Krice is the old racist

I know that can be a joke, but still.. I'm not a racist actually.

guest509

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Re: Greetings from a new roguelike developer
« Reply #8 on: January 25, 2014, 09:56:00 PM »
Oh I was joking Krice!  ;)

Slash

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Re: Greetings from a new roguelike developer
« Reply #9 on: January 25, 2014, 10:17:17 PM »
Nonsense, I've heard there are lots of races in Kaduria, each one with different skills and stats (discrimination)

Pickledtezcat

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Re: Greetings from a new roguelike developer
« Reply #10 on: January 27, 2014, 07:16:09 AM »
Well, races are something I wonder about in RPG games. You know the more recent star wars movies got panned for (among other things) shallow racial stero types in their aliens.
The old tried and tested races like elves and dwarves are fine, but what if you want to add something different? It's not easy to add both a race and a culture.

At the moment all the human NPC heads I've got are white people, I have some black faces (from another project) but adding them will mean making an extra texture set for black bodies too. I'm thinking of keeping them back and adding a different culture group later (when I've got the over land world map up and running) with some new clothes, weapons and armor types. Not a race, but a culture.

But do I want to add races?

I don't want elves and dwarves really, they are a bit [yawn].
I'm contemplating giants, they would be ex-slaves of the meta-humans bred for size, strength and toughness but of limited intelligence, since the fall of the old empires they have started raiding and maruading around the coutryside, forming bands or small giant kingdoms, drinking, fighting and stealing whatever they can get their hands on.
I'm also thinking of adding fairies to the game at a later date as a playable race. They were an early magical experiment, the fairies are simple avatars of a uploaded human intelligence. since the fairy bran is too small to hold a full adult intelligence, their personallity is held in "the cloud" and they have a kind of connection or hive mind with other fairies and magical beings.
They can't do combat, but they would be inately magical, and of course they could fly and pull levers and whatever, making them great scouts. They would play a big part in the second phase of development which will be adding random puzzles, including pit traps, sliding blocks, and other staples of the genre. Their weakness would be dead magic zones as they would sever the link to the cloud conciousness.
Another group is the aquatics, one of the oldest human empires, they adapted to live under water when global warming came and they have kept to themselves ever since, but agents of the sea people sometimes come up on land to find out what's happening. Unlike the fish men or croc-men they are not the decendants of gene spliced animals, but are neary fully old style humans, just with adaptations for living under or in water. Some dungeons in the final game will be partially or fully flooded, so having a water breather in your party would be an advantage, and I may allow the option for characters from the party to visit dungeons solo, for a different kind of adventure.

I'm not sure whether I even want to visit the idea of races right now, they are usually either offensive racial sterotypes or a shallow re-skinning of regular humans (the man in a monster suit effect). It takes a lot of effort to really introduce a fully fledged new race, most games systems usually first introduce them as enemies and then later make them playable.

Anyway, right now I'm concentrating on getting some early gameplay demos up and running, just so people can walk around in a dungeon and give feedback on layout and the feel of movement.
Later I'll have some basic combat demos and then move on from there to inventory, crafting, leveling and other stuff. I'll post a proper WIP thread when I've got some progress to show.
A blog about my 3d Roguelike: http://pickleddevblog.blogspot.kr/