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Ñuño Martínez
26-06-2011, 06:19 PM
I'm tracing my advances in my blog (http://bitacora.burdjia.com/) but it's in Spanish and everybody created a thread here so...

My game's name is Duke of Dragonfear: Deathland, as a tribute to Tim Harnell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hartnell), whose books teach me a lot about games and general programming. The game itself has some of hte original Duke of Dragonfear, random maps, caves and treasures, but will be a lot different too. Instead of dragons there will be zombies and skeletons.

Last weekend I was planning and looking for graphics. I've found a great isometric character set (http://www.opengameart.org/content/isometric-hero-and-creatures) in OpenGameArt.com which is almost perfect for my game. For the scenery I didn't find any tile-set that fits the character style and my tile-map engine (the one used by the Allegro.pas' demo game) so I'll adapt some I've find.

That's all at the moment.

Traveler
26-06-2011, 06:36 PM
Excellent! Another game in the competition.

Looking forward to some screenshots!

WILL
26-06-2011, 07:17 PM
Sounds great can't wait to see more as you progress. :)

Ñuño Martínez
30-06-2011, 08:24 AM
As I've said at "What gives? (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/showthread.php?9340-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
30-06-2011, 09:03 AM
Looking forward to it.

Ñuño Martínez
06-07-2011, 07:52 AM
I had problems with the dungeon generator; it was harder than I suspected. But here you have an screen-shot:
http://bitacora.burdjia.com/fotos/duke01.png
(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
06-07-2011, 08:42 AM
I have a dragon in my project too! :) :)

Ñuño Martínez
11-07-2011, 07:56 AM
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!
http://bitacora.burdjia.com/fotos/duke02.png

Ingemar
11-07-2011, 08:19 AM
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
15-07-2011, 07:26 AM
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!
http://bitacora.burdjia.com/fotos/duke03.png

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
15-07-2011, 09:27 AM
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
15-07-2011, 10:20 AM
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.

Ingemar
15-07-2011, 10:47 AM
Yes, I know. It's like they're floating or something. Shadows are in my TODO list.

Mine too. Shadows are important, I certainly will add it some time, but not likely in the two days left. It is not very hard to create shadows, but to create good-looking and still fast shadows, that is a lot harder. Pushing myself into desperate speed optimizations in the last minute is not a good idea.

paul_nicholls
15-07-2011, 12:13 PM
cool...zombies :)

fun!

cheers,
Paul

Ñuño Martínez
17-07-2011, 11:16 PM
Uploading my entry just now. It's too late here in Spain (1:15 a.m. Monday 18th) and I must get up early today to go work so I'll comment tomorrow.

"God night and good luck."

Traveler
18-07-2011, 07:48 PM
An interesting concept. I has a Diablo-like feel over it. It's a shame you weren't able to develop it further. Are you going to continue this game?

Ñuño Martínez
19-07-2011, 08:13 AM
Yes, I will continue this game, but I'll start my summer holidays soon so it will be in stand-by for a while.

It will be an arcade game, I'll add more enemies, re-ensamble the graphics (I don't know if change it from 64x64pixel tile size to 32x32pixel or increase screen size from 640x480 to 800x600), add items, a 2 players mode, etc.

Here you have the last screen-shot.

http://bitacora.burdjia.com/fotos/duke04.png