War 'n Rog

[Huehnerschaender]

Hello people,

since I haven't had the time to finish my little game for the dogfight compo, I am now in a decision if I make this game complete and build some kind of Gauntlet-style game out of it. The ones who know Gauntlet from good old C64 know what I am talking about. It was one of my favourite games and I wasted half of my youth with it :lol:

So what I wanted to do here is to show you what I have at the moment and get an general opinion if I should use this to make a complete game or if most of you think I should start from scratch again.

So here is the link to get a "playable" version without enemys:

http://www.dino-it.de/warnrog.zip

Here some short instructions:

Arrows - move
shift - run (keep your endurance in mind)
space - pickup
a - throw weapon
s - cast spell
y - use item (potion or eye)

in menu use arrow keys to go up/down and to select character.
press enter to access Options (not much in there yet)
press enter to start lan server or join a game - this is only available when server is active and configured right (see below)

d - die

There are many issues in this because its not ready yet. If you have two computers, you can take a look at multiplayer game. Just configure the Server-IP in warnrog.ini (on the computer which shall act as client) and start the lan server on the computer with that IP. In menu there should appear something like "Server found at: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" and then you can choose to join a game.

Ok, I would be very pleased if some people play araound with it and tell me what they think about it.

Greetings,
Dirk

Forgot to mention required system specs:

3D-Card
DirectX 9.0c installed
Soundcard installed properly

A laptop Pentium 4 1.0 Ghz with GeForce 2 Go! ran it smooth full VSync'd FPS.

[Traveler]

Looks like a pretty solid base to me for a Gauntlet like game. There's definitely no need to restart it all. (unless of course your code is a complete mess and you're already getting lost (I haven't seen it so I can't comment on that myself))

It's been years since I played Gauntlet (although not on a C64, but on a 808, but from what I can remember, you could play this with 4 players at the time and you had to fight many hordes of enemies.

For that to be possible in your version, especially the last part about the hordes, I would cut down the size of every sprite in half (at least). The advantages are quite numerous, not only does your game take less space on my HD it also allow you to create smoother animations.

At the moment I have little more to say about it. Like I said IMO its a good start. It ran great on my pc although I expected no less with my specs. (3ghz, 1mb ram, 6800GT gfx card)

[Huehnerschaender]

unless of course your code is a complete mess and you're already getting lost (I haven't seen it so I can't comment on that myself)

No I'm not lost. I have to rewrite some parts. I did some things in a real hurry because of the deadline, but this is not too much.

you could play this with 4 players at the time and you had to fight many hordes of enemies.

I was thinking about 2 player game only. I don't think that more than 2 players are coming together to play my game :lol: But if so, it should be no problem to update 4 player gaming when 2 player gaming is done and working.

For that to be possible in your version, especially the last part about the hordes, I would cut down the size of every sprite in half (at least). The advantages are quite numerous, not only does your game take less space on my HD it also allow you to create smoother animations.

Concerning smoother animations: I have cut down animations to half amount of frames because of size limit of the dogfight compo. The animations were more than smooth in the beginning :lol: 30 frames per motion. But this was meant to be only for 1 vs 1 gaming, so you are right. If there are hordes of enemys, I have to size characters down. Otherwise it will become much too hard to get an overview of the current situation in the game.

At the moment I have little more to say about it. Like I said IMO its a good start. It ran great on my pc although I expected no less with my specs. (3ghz, 1mb ram, 6800GT gfx card)

#

Thats good to know :lol: I expected nothing else on such a system.
But maybe you should upgrade your RAM a little... 1 MB is quite low for your system :lol:

I have nearly the same except the graphics card... no nVidia card, but ATI X800 Pro.

Thank you very much for your comments!

Greetings,
Dirk

[Traveler]

1 MB is quite low for your system

Oops ops:
That should've been 1Gb,... but I guess you already knew

[Huehnerschaender]

sure :lol:

[savage]

Hi Dirk,
What can I say, A very impressive start! It really is a pity that you could not get it finished in time for the competition.

Assuming your code base is relatively clean and well structured, I think the engine has a lot of potential. It runs very smoothly on my laptop and main desktop machine.

I hope I can suggest some slight usability changes ( of course it is up to you whether you think they are good ideas or not ).
1. Use *standard* FPS keys for player movement ( W A S D ).
2. Mouse for aiming. This allows for the player to be running/moving in one direction while firing over his shoulder. Of course you will need to change your model slightly so that the upper torso moves independently to the the legs.
3. Use left mouse click for throwing and for close combat ( aka slashing ) it should be left click+left ctrl key.
4. right click casts the spell
5. q or e to use and item (potion or eye)
6. Space and Shift keys remain the same.
7. Any chance that the demo will be ported to Linux and MacOS X via FreePascal if you switch from DirectX to OpenGL?

As I said, your demo is a great start, I look forward to seeing it progress and evenually getting a commercial release .

[Huehnerschaender]

Hi savage,

thank you very much for this positive reply.

I was thinking about ALL of your points before, so it's good to know that I am not alone with this :lol:
The steering of the character was only implemented while programming without taking care of playability. I would have redesigned it anyway.

The independence of body and legs is a very important thing I was thinking about 2 weeks ago. This would make gameplay more thrilling and smooth the motion of the game. At the moment the character has to stop when firing. But because of lack of time I let it this way for the compo, but was thinking about changing it later on. I already started doing some character animations for only the legs and only the body. Looks quite nice in a first test when laying them above each other.

The only thing I unfortunately will not be able to do is porting it to Linux. I use Asphyre for the hardware-acceleration and since this is only available for DirectX I am stuck with this.

Your machine specs are the ones you posted in the judges specs?
This is a really important point for me to know, because I don't want to make a game which only runs on high-end-machines.

I look forward to seeing it progress and evenually getting a commercial release

Oh, you are very optimistic :lol:
Thanks for your trust

Greetings,
Dirk

[savage]

Your machine specs are the ones you posted in the judges specs?

Yes it is.

I forgot to add one more item to my list of suggestions.

8. It would be great if the players could swim in the river, therefore they could hide under the bridge and wait for a player to walk over the bridge and then ambush them. Maybe with some dripping water particles when they step out of the river .

[Huehnerschaender]

Hehe, good idea :lol:

Swimming is always a good thing I will think about how I can bring this into the game, since the game will of course have another gameplay, because what you said is only useful for deathmatch... or maybe if AI-enemys are patroulling over the bridge...

But I guess I will surely implement some kind of seas into the game and it would be nice if the characters could swim through them.
I keep this in mind!

Greetings,
Dirk

[savage]

The enemies could also use the under the bridge technique for ambushing