Skip to main content

The name of the game.

 It's possible that I've settled on a name for the project after nearly 2 years of it being untitled. I'm still not 100%, as giving a game a name pretty much ties down what you want to do with it. From that point you can't go and change a lot of what you've done without the name seeming to be a bad fit. That's unless you've got some vague name like "Dirt" which could be about anything. I think "The Treasures of the Deep Dwellers" is a good working title, though it'll probably be more of a module title, with later releases having a core name. It has the tag line "A level zero adventure" which reflects the idea I have for the game as being more about stretching out the lower levels, that time before players become lightning bolt chucking, +5 sword wielding demigods. I want a low magic, low power adventure, where things like food, potions, scrolls and tools and using your brain is more important than just blasting everything and then casting mass heal on your party.

The dwellers of the deep. 
The result of my second attempt at hand painted textures.

The deep dwellers of the title are Morlock type creatures. They are divided in to two castes, citizens and slaves. They are the twisted descendants of the great empires that once ruled the Earth before they destroyed themselves with an apocalyptic war of magic. The Citizens are more intelligent but physically weaker, while the slaves are pretty stupid and cowardly, but are tough and strong and suffer no penalties for fighting in the dark.

To go with the tile, I've finally got around to putting the finishing touches to the title screen. This is an in game render running at 60+ frames per second, it has a single 1024x1024 texture plus a small texture for the lamp. I tried to give the scene a bit of narrative while making it look like an old school adventure pen and paper module cover. I may change the text a bit, and a few other things later but for now it's finished and ready to be used in game.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...