Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

Today I worked on the prototype navmesh for the game. Most 3d games use a navigation mesh, it's easier to store data about where you can walk in a mesh than in text arrays, the mesh can also be edited easier than rewriting an array. Unfortunately with a random dungeon the different sections have separate navigation meshes, and in Blender you can't merge the meshes. So in this project I'm using the meshes to generate the list of walkable tiles and then they will be deleted and the data will be kept as an array. I'll be using simple neighbor checking to create a graph that can then be used with A* pathfinding. It's all very old fashioned, but for me it's interesting to use these methods because it allows me to understand what's going on at a very basic level. I don't really expect to improve on modern AI but I can find what's good for my project and leave what I don't need. Here's the walkmesh: You can see the red areas are walkable,...

From the start the idea of this project has been that everything should be done as much as possible with procedural generation. I want people to come back and play it again and again. That's not to say that there won't be a story, and non random elements, but the key thing is that you can replay it and get a different experience. Anyway, I've been working on the random dungeon generator for some time, more than a year it seems, though I haven't been working on it continuously.  I got some ideas from existing random dungeon generators such as this one: myth weavers random dungeon generator There were three things I wanted it to do: Create interesting rooms which are more than just rectangles. Allow different ways of joining the rooms through corridors. Use different tile types in the same map to avoid looking repetitive.  The first thing required a bit of a different approach from normal generators. Normally we just set a room size and make a room but I...

I've already been working on the project for some time so you can see some of what I've made so far. I try to put things in video form or post pictures on the forums where I go to get help and inspiration. Here's some of the early development, mostly art content, as I've only just started the coding and game content. For some reason Blogger can't find these videos normally so I've had to manually embed them. Anyway, it gives some idea of what I've been working on until now. You can see that my style is partly cartoony and partly realistic, I want to take advantage of modern computer graphics, but that's only part of the game, the most important thing is the gameplay, and because there's only one person developing this thing it needs to use simple art assets.

"Enter Stranger!" Do you miss the old games? Old school RPGs where winning was about tactics and thought rather than how often and how quickly you can click the mouse? Are most of your favorite games ones which you never finished? Are you sick of grinding? Do you remember when a Sword +1 was something to get excited about? Are you the sort of person who enjoys finding 100/100 secrets? Would you like to play a game which is generated specially for you every time you play? Do you agree that permadeath gives a game real consequences and makes you really feel for your characters? Well, hopefully this project will interest you. My inspirations are the old games that I used to play as a kid, I've tried newer games such as Diablo 3 and it seems more like streetfighter than an RPG. Do you remember these: Pool of Radiance. Warriors of the Eternal Sun. Eye of the Beholder. These were all great games and I'll be trying to resurrect some of the charm and my...