I've had a few ideas:
- A Doom like 3D game. (Doable, but would stretch vb to it's limit I think. On my computer, 1000 textured polygons is about the limit before the framerate starts to be affected. The hex grid above has 16000 untextured triangles (32x32 hexes each with 16 triangles), and I would guess that it runs at about 25fps. Bare in mind I have an Atom CPU with CPU-integrated graphics.)

- A clone of the best game on the Amiga : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPuM3Ss8nA8#t=3m55 , Surprisingly, nobody has remade it yet. Rather than clone the game precisely, we can clone the engine, make a level editor, and design our own levels. And others could remake the original levels if they chose to.

- You said in my other thread that you most like RPG and Strategy games... So what about a dungeon RPG game with strategic gameplay?

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Something like Dungeon Quest maybe?

I've always wanted to do a computer version of that.

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Ah, I see where your inspiration for Isis came from

A dungeon RPG game with strategic gameplay sounds very cool. I like the idea of procedural generation of dungeons. Could also make it turn based to favour a strategic mindset.


I'm woefully ignorant when it comes to board games. Would you mind explaining the general game idea?

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

Yes. Both that and LaserTank were my inspirations for Isis.

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

Rules can be found here.

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Bored? Head on over to my blog and see what I'm up to.

Microsoft XNA MVP

Looks pretty cool, I'll read them completely tomorrow morning some time. Should be quite adaptable into game mechanics.

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

Since it was made only in 2010, we shouldn't clone that game, nor clone it's mechanics. But the general idea of a Proc-Gen grid based dungeon I like, perhaps something like Desktop Dungeons, but with rooms + stats + dice? We could even have hexagonal rooms to be different.





[Can we have a thread split? For all the posts since I've started talking about making a game with Igthorn ]

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

Abracadabra.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Desktop Dungeons looks pretty cool, I'm going to download it and give it a shot. Amazingly, I got into playing the Adventure mode of Dwarf Fortress right before my mid-year holiday. The controls were pretty gruesome, just like Dwarf Fortress, but the randomly generated worlds were awesome!

Do you want to go 2D or 3D? I've been meaning to brush up on my 3D skills recently, so it could be a nice opportunity to delve into that.

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

2d/3d depends what we're making.

Are you are most interested in making a strategy/RPG game?

Desktop dungeons is quite strategic. I've played it about six times and only managed to win once! The last few monsters (lvl8+) are difficult to kill because you can easily run out of health potions. It's tempting to use resources in the early game unnecessarily. You have to think several steps ahead.

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Heh, I just downloaded it and I've beaten around 3 out of 5 attempts Halfling Thief is an awesome class, you can turn the mostly useless spells into health pots. Then the health pots also give back mana, so if you find the fireball spell early on then you can usually fire off a fireball right after you chug a potion. It's a pity you can't keep your character, the first level I played and beat had me feeling really attached to my character.


Yeah, that sounds good. Let's try and make the core game mechanic as simple as possible so that we can focus on implementing proc-gen, power-ups and spells.

Just bear in mind I'll only be able to really sink my teeth into coding when I'm done with my end-of-year project (which should hopefully be pretty soon! Yay!)

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

I'm drawn to doing this in 3D. The dungeon itself would not be a problem, but what about the hero and monsters?

So if we do 3D, we'll either have to:
-- make 3D models. I've never done this. My 3D has always been hard coded (whether it's animated or not). We could take the minecraft route of making characters out of half-a-dozen cuboids, but that wouldn't be much to look at.

-- Go first person, or third person with camera always at eye level. Then we could have sprites like in DOOM: drawing sprites as a textured quad that faces the camera. (This technique doesn't work as well when the camera is hovering over the dungeon, looking down.)

Or we don't do 3D.

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I think this'll be a lot simpler, we'd only have to draw a front-facing frame. 1st person would be best I think.

Do you want to do a turn-based style, where the monsters and player always occupy a single tile? It could lend a cool turn-based combat flavour without having to switch to a combat screen.

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

I'm happy either way. There's also turn based, while animating motion between turns so that things don't lurch from square to square.


Another graphical style to think about is isometric rooms like this. I can imagine that working well.



Also, where is the strategy going to come from in our game?

The way I think of strategy is three fold:
- The Plan Component: The player has various ways to play (eg an upgrade path/ability tree), and they should have freedom to either follow through or change their path. But the more invested into one path, the harder it will be to change path. Each path has a slightly different style of play, and uses slightly different player skills.
-The Complexity Component: Throughout the game, the player is presented with choices. Some options help the player in the present, but are harmful in the long term, and vice-versa. The player has to balance investment and sacrifice
-Greyness: In a puzzle, there are right and wrong actions. In strategy there generally aren't. Everything is measured in shades of grey.

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Ah, does that picture bring back memories!

Re the Plan Component -- You could do upgrades/abilities pretty vanilla for the most part and come out OK if you do it right. Basically you can give players the occasional "Talent Points" and let them allot them where they want. Once they are used, they can't be repositioned, so that solves any issues over the skill investment/path change deal.

Re the Complexity Component -- I have a few thoughts on this. One of them is to allow the player to form his own adventuring party. The player can hire NPC mercenaries; enlist the help of people who owe the player a favor... that sort of thing. Of course, something must be sacrificed, and if you "throw good money after bad" in that sense, it can end up being a real hindrance. Also, you could do things like make items -- and the capacity to carry them -- limited. If you really need to carry that 300lb. load of gold bars out of the dungeon, you have to shed some weight -- do you leave your stock of healing potions behind, since you have (as far as you know) eliminated all threats within the dungeon... or do you take just some of the gold, whatever you can carry, in exchange for not leaving yourself open to an unexpected threat?

Re Greyness -- If things will be turn-based, and you have a party that you can control as individual members, then that would go a long way towards the "grey area" of decision-making. If you have the wrong character in the wrong place, at the wrong time, it can spell disaster for your crew.

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Thanks for your input theraje. I imagined it being a lone hero; I hadn't thought of using an adventuring party ... But that sounds scarily like another project I have on the go at the moment, which is a first person Dungeon Master style game using a party of four...

[aside]
These are screenshots of the 3D part of that game, without the GUI.
http://img.ie/65757.jpg
http://img.ie/ccb29.jpg
http://img.ie/880b8.jpg
http://img.ie/c0145.jpg
[/aside]

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

I have actually really been digging the Desktop Dungeons game, tempted to maybe buy the latest version next month and see what they've done with it. The gameplay there is very much based on tactical decision-making, it's very cool. In terms of upgrade paths, it doesn't feature much of anything, you choose your class beforehand, and then you basically just get increased damage as you level up (on both the spells and melee damage). Diablo 3 seems to be taking a similar approach and going away from the tech-tree kind of thing. In D3 your character becomes stronger automatically, and there is no choice for the player in terms of what skills to get. The player's choice comes in choosing which skills to have available for use in 5 skill slots (the other skills remain in reserve, and can be swapped in at any time not during battle).

This might seem like it's taking something away, but in truth, if you give the player all the skills, then you're letting them decide which ones to use in battle, which is the more interesting decision. So I'm drawn to this idea, levelling up leads you down a fixed path of upgrades, and then you get to make strategic decisions about what skills to have active (limited slots for abilities) and tactical decisions about how to use them in an encounter.

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

What about something inbetween real-time and turn-based?

Like that old Spectrum game, movement from room to room can be real-time, and there can be a day/night cycle which affects monsters in some way. Monsters can be aligned by Day/Night/Neutral. Night-aligned monsters can have some buffs at night, and nerfs during the day, such as double HP regeneration at night, but none in the day.)

The player can pause the game, or sleep to either halt/accelerate the passage of time.

When entering a room with a monster, all doors will be inaccessible, except for the door through which you entered. The other doors will only be accessible once the monster is killed.

The player can initiate combat by entering combat mode. Combat will be turn based: you decide your attack, and the monster will decide its attack, then one combat round takes place. One will get first strike, etc.

The player can exit the room if they choose, rather than seeing combat to it's end. The player doesn't have to enter combat mode, and can leave the monster alone.

Perhaps if you linger in a room with a monster for too long, the monster may automatically attack. The monster can have an "aggro" bar that slowly grows as you remain in it's presence. Aggro is reset to zero once the monster attacks, or fades to zero if you leave it's room.

Killing the monster gives experience and may drop items, and of course allows passage through the other doors.

Some rooms will contain unguarded items.

Some monsters may resurrect after so long, like ghosts, meaning you may have to defeat them more than once, such as if they block your path. This discourages sleeping. For resurrecting creatures, you may only get experience the first time you defeat them, or they may simply not give experience.

Monsters may apply curses on the player that take time to fade. Players can dispel curses, or sleep them off (although monsters can regenerate during your sleeping time)

Monsters may have schooled attacks (fire/frost/lightning/sharp/melee/etc) and have resistance to some schools (eg, 15% fire resistance). This encourages the player to train more than one school, and encourages exploration to see what monsters they have to defeat.

The goal could be to get to a treasure room, which is guarded by a boss. You can only defeat the boss with sufficient experience and potions.

The final part of the game is to escape with as much treasure as you can carry, which means discarding some of the items you are carrying. If any resurrecting monsters block your path on your way out, then you have to be able to deal with them to escape.

//edit
The gold you take from the dungeon can accumulate in your player account, and be available to spend on special items that you can use in later dungeons. An in-dungeon shop "Goblin Merchant" may be open during the day, but closed at night.

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.

So it's Jasmine the Corpse Bride now, is it? (Just noticed the title)

A pretty cool levelling system that I haven't seen used in ages is the one found in Mega Man for NES. You gain abilities when you defeat bosses. This allows you to build your character up in different ways based on your chosen order of fighting the boss monsters. We could tie in the 7 deadly sins or some other kind of story element to give the boss monsters a theme.

I think we've got quite a few ideas to play with so far. I'd like to let them stew in my brain a bit. In any case - I'm going on a short break for the weekend with my parents. So probably not going to have internet access from mid-tomorrow until Tuesday.

The other thing is that once we get the main idea of what the game is about, then let's strip away as much as possible of the non-essential stuff. A lean, focussed design should increase the quality of the game and simplify the development.

Are you using VB6 or VB.NET?

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Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve

It's for halloween.


VB6



For our game, what if the character carries over from one dungeon to the next? Leveling up is a rare thing, that happens maybe once per three dungeons.

Then experience would be relatively unimportant to completing a dungeon, so there would need to be something in it's place: runes could be awarded for kills, and these are dungeon-bound, so you lose them when you leave the dungeon.

You could assign these runes to your Weapon, your Body, or your Mind, to provide benefits in various ways. This is like assigning talent points, and it allows players to choose a path.


BLOOD Rune (manipulates magnitudes)
- Weapon : Buff attack power
- Body : Buff HP (allows an overloaded HP bar, eg 700/600)
- Mind : Buff spell power

SHADOW Rune (manipulates chances)
- Weapon : Increases chance of physical hit/crit
- Body : Increases chance of evasion
- Mind : Increase chance of spell hit/crit

HOLY Rune (anti-magic)
- Weapon : burn mana of adversary upon physical attack.
- Body : reduce duration of curses cast upon you.
- Mind : reduce mana costs of your spells

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I ain't pushing no moon buttons.