PGDmC - Duke of Dragonfear: Deathland

[Ñuño Martínez]

As I've said at "What gives?" it's too hot here, in Madrid, and I can't think a lot. You know, I feel lazy (I mean "more lazy" ) but I'm trying to advance in the game. Yesterday I was modifying the tilemap engine from the Allegro.pas demonstration game. Now it loads the tileset and seems to render everything right. I hope I can write a "map-maker" to build random maps this night and then I can show you how it looks.

[Traveler]

Looking forward to it.

[Ñuño Martínez]

I had problems with the dungeon generator; it was harder than I suspected. But here you have an screen-shot:

(No, it isn't MacOS, nor it is Windows: it's Xubuntu. But the game should work on MacOS and Windows too, theoretically )
I have half sprite system finished. I hope I have a crawling player this night.

[Jimmy Valavanis]

I have a dragon in my project too!

[Ñuño Martínez]

The original Duke of Dragonfear has dragons. I'm not sure if this will have, because I didn't find a good dragon graphic for it. May be I should look deeper.

BTW, the player is in!

[Ingemar]

I had problems with the dungeon generator; it was harder than I suspected.

Map generation is sensitive; you can make great maps with a few lines of code, but it has to be the right lines. I made one once, based on a few random rectangles and corridors between them. I didn't care if a corridor crossed over another room, and rooms could overlap. It was that simple and it never created a bad level.

You obviously create visible walls, but if you do that as post-processing, simply detecting edges, then it shouldn't be hard. But you are making things a bit trickier wih pseudo-3D effects. You can't have too narrow corridors, right?

[Ñuño Martínez]

Map generation is sensitive; you can make great maps with a few lines of code, but it has to be the right lines. I made one once, based on a few random rectangles and corridors between them. I didn't care if a corridor crossed over another room, and rooms could overlap. It was that simple and it never created a bad level.

Actually I wrote a similar algorithm on MSX some time ago, but I decided to use a different one here. BTW, I think I'll rewrite the map-making algorithm for the final version, after the contest. I don't know what algorithm to use.

Oh, and now the game engine is almost finished! Here you have: Zombies!


After this shot I added skeletons, similar to the ones from the classic "Jason and the Argonauts" film. Zombies are easy to fight but skeletons are harder.

[Traveler]

Are you going to implement some form of shadows? (simplistic, like circular) Perhaps it's different when you play it, but right now it looks a bit awkward.

[Ñuño Martínez]

Yes, I know. It's like they're floating or something. Shadows are in my TODO list.

I did a test when I implemented the player but I didn't like it. Next step is to add a (fake) runtime lighting to create an atmosphere (there are a lot of light). Then I'll try some different shadows (solid, translucent, alpha-channel, circle, sprite, ...) and select one of them.