The end of the beginning.

"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 mystery which filled the early years of RPGs.

This is a project that I've been preparing for a long time, so far I've been making content and testing code but now it gets to the point where I have to commit to actually making something. So hopefully in the next few weeks or months you'll be able to step once more in to the dungeons of your youth as you explore my as yet un-named old school RPG.

A little about myself:
I'm an English teacher living in South Korea, I'm married and have a 2 year old son, which makes it rather difficult to devote much time to my projects, but whenever I can I try to sit down and write some code or make some content and keep on building my dream.

Comments

Advice needed on tilesets...

I need some advice on which is the best way to handle building the dungeon. Right now I'm using prefabs for my dungeon, they have a north south east and west section for each "room": The basic tileset. This has several advantages, and also several disadvantages. Firstly I can have curved rooms, I can have tunnels and other interesting shapes. The tilesets can look quite nice with a little work. On the other hand I can't easily get the navigation data before building the map and once the map has been built I can't make changes to the layout, like having active pit traps or believable secret doors. Although the rooms are interesting, they are quite repetitive, and it takes a lot of effort to make even a few different variations. Also rooms are constrained to one size. A newer version of the tileset with a lot of variant parts for making more interesting rooms. To create a tile set is a real headache too. Planning how to lay out the UVs, trying to cra...

Upstairs / Downstairs.

I've decided to make my prefabs multilevel. Later this should allow me to add pit traps and other great stuff. It also makes it easier to line up stairs so that you can exit them on the same co-ordinates where you entered them. The prefab editor is pretty much finished, it just needs some code for loading up prefabs from a saved dictionary, so that they can be checked or edited. The entries will need to be forwards compatible, so I'll be loading each tile and then translating the indexes to a new array, that way if I add extra indexes or extra info (like traps or puzzles) I'll be able to update existing prefabs to work with the new standard. Click for a video.

Video Diary 8

Things are moving along well, there's been a lot of progress on the action manager side of things. Actions have finally moved to the UI, so you can initiate actions by clicking the appropriate button. I've set up some dummy actions to show what happens visually when actions are taken, but the actual dice rolls and such are yet to be integrated. The UI objects are also being added, though some are non functional or empty at the moment. Click on the image to see this week's development video. Every time I add something big I also add about a dozen small things. Like the selection box visualization. Previously this was using render.drawline, and old fashioned Blender function which can be impossible to see at certain resolutions, or at certain frequencies. I replaced it with a function that adds planes of the right size and scale in the right location. I also made all characters a little bigger. I still need to do some work with vectors and final target locations t...

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