I’ve wanted to a dungeon crawler forever but haven’t had the skills for actual, like, assets or anything so I hadn’t bothered. But, I started working on an engine for one in mid-January and HERE WE ARE!
I’ve been posting some WIP clips on Twitter, once I got it beyond ‘roaming around in a dungeon’: you can see a video clip here:
March 3rd status was that I had basic combat working. From then, I added a skills system…
This ended up being quite a lot of work, mostly on getting the targeting flow for the user interface playing nicely with every nonsense thing the user would want to do.
All text is exported from the source xml files into easy-to-edit TSV files which you can load up in any random spreadsheet program in order to do horrible things to them.
Finished::: (updated: april 6th)
Three-tiered program structure: Static data -> Game data -> UI. Each is completely decoupled from the rest.
Event-based communication for all modification of game data. No direct edits allowed.
Fully moddable XML-based structures for all static data. This includes map layouts, scripts, classes, characters(player and enemy), text, etc.
Combat system with full support for Etrian-style reactive support skills, so you can do more interesting and complicated things than just “x hits y!” and buffs.
UI is completely abstracted from the game flow and responds to event flow, so entire game is easily reskinnable to look like whatever.
All abstractions are done in sensible ways for easy rewriting, if needed. Want a new combat engine? Replace the event hooks, done! Different UI? Very simple APIs used to split up the various screen components!
Can play a full set of combat, finish, and go into the camp menu to use skills/items to heal yourself! THIS WAS A LOT MORE WORK THAN IT SOUNDS
4/6: Asset preprocessor chunks big textures up into manageable pieces, which are drawn independently, to save on texture space.
4/6: Full event-based scripting system for events, with branching. Works in and outside of combat.
4/6: Simple dialogue/portrait system, so we can have our totally-not-visual-novel part work.
4/6: Enemy artwork in game.
Currently working on:
Effect animations.
Battle arenas.
Audio.
Finishing up the abstraction of damage algorithms so they are easily scriptable by the game itself.
Exciting! Please look forward to it. Go ahead and ask anything, at any rate.
This looks great! Are you going to do the art too? Or are you going to get artists? I love the checkerboard floors. Are the dungeons going to be randomized? This looks fairly robust and flexible right now - what direction do you want to take this?!
Everything you see right now is done by me, though. I have a decent sense of color and composition, as programmers go, I think, but it’s pretty bad.
I’ll probably talk more about setting/etc when things get further along! Actually almost done with “Engine” things so should be moving onto “Game” and polishing the graphics stuff soon.
The engine is hella flexible and I intend on this being the base for more than one game, if I can help it. I already had a JP developer I showed it to ask if he could use it, I laughed pretty hard at that. It took nearly three months to get to this state, and I expect it to be another 2~3 before we actually have something playable, and at that point it’s kind of… well, we’ll see, right?
I’m developing in Haxe again, which means a custom library built on top of OpenFL+Away3D. Maybe not the best choice overall, but it does work and they do have a promise of maintaining it across platforms so we will see.
I will say that, like, part of my plan atm is to do a very simple scenario that I’d like to release for free, probably on itch.io.
Mainly because I’m one person and I can’t afford QA for this, so guess what, you all get to be my beta testers!
It may or may not be relevant to a larger scale project, so while I have some things in mind for it I haven’t hammered any of it down and in fact I might just decide to do it as a very ‘whatever, I really do not care, just make something you can play!’ kind of thing.
Randomized dungeons are something I can do, but level design is something I’m kind of passionate about and doing interesting level design in a randomized setting is actually something I think that is hard as hell to do meaningfully, so I’m not sure if that will happen.
I’d be lying if I said “Atlus Game” wasn’t the base here.(It definitely resembles a certain other Atlus game in its current form) I still think they are leagues ahead of everyone else when it comes to RPG mechanics and at least try to do things differently.
Setting-wise… Uh, settle down until we get it more hammered out and showable? Persona has some things in mind, and sci-fantasy definitely seems like the plan at the moment, but no guarantees long-term!
edit: my editing ended up garbling my text so i edited it again
What’s with the “RIP Apol” posts lately, he posts all the time on Twitter
Tower of Geheimnis is still happening. I think the issue right now is people’s availability. I wasn’t able to attend the last group meeting. Waiting for everyone else to ditch Slack and move to Discord.
I already follow him on the twit. He pretty much only talks about supernatural stuff these days, he hasn’t posted about his game in forever which is what made me ask about it.
I was summoned from across the internet to say mauve’s stuff is cool too. Also if you are a 3D artist that wants to do dumb anime 90s things join my team because mine bailed out ¯_(ツ)_/ ¯
Dialogue engine works, text appears progressively on screen, you can speed it up in various ways. Hooray.
Word wrap probably needs to be added, but for now I’ll just be careful about how I do text.
I realized partway through this that there’s an easier, more generic way for me to be handling things than the way I am, and I think I’m going to refactor things over the weekend to handle events nicely.
But I think scripting is basically done. There’ll need to be some work on the combat code done to allow nesting of combat contexts in order to allow mid-combat scripts to do damage or heal or whatever without affecting the rest.
Aaaaaaa, hell yeahhhh, dream team happening right here. Looks killer already!!
Idk if you want feedback; it’s a petty thing and I realize yr pretty WIP at the moment but:: I’d open yr second tier menus like item, skill selection etc. immedietaly on top without animating a dismisal of the prior tier for a bit of a better UI flow.
Who’s doing music mauve, spill the goods~
(Cuba we are still working on towerofg OK, just… slowly.)
