Something like this would be cool.

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Microsoft XNA MVP

Reminds me of the original blood omen.

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1. where does the player start in a dungeon? In any room? In any hall? Anywhere on the map? In a special start room? or in a hall leading to the first room?



2. what kind of connectivity do we want between rooms?

Minimal: A sequence: room - hall - room - hall - room ... (number of halls = number of rooms)

Maximal: Every room connected to every neighbouring room as much as possible? (number of halls = 3 * number of rooms - 6)



3. Can halls have junctions? What quantities of junctions in a typical hall would be okay?

1. A tile of a hall or room would be designated as the entrance.
2. Somewhere between those two would be good.
3. Yes. Anywhere from 0 - 2 or 3 I think would be ok.

Good questions.

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There are plenty of random level generators out there you can model it after. Generally you start by building a working maze, then you remove the dead ends, then you add the rooms on top of it. The end result is what usually ends up to be a completely viable level and the "room to hallway ratio" generally works itself out.

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A link on the Creators Club forums led me to this GUI library which I think might be useful for some screens. It's currently in alpha, but looks fairly full-featured as far as the type of controls in it. If someone wants to take a look at it and try to mock up some screens (character creation, inventory, store, etc.) that would be cool. First person to reply gets the job.

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Nice! Though the fact that it's alpha is way too dangerous.

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If necessary we could just take the source code and run with it, branching from his development. Not great but a possibility.

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Machaira, I should be able to have a prototype up and running by tomorrow with those gui libraries. Seems a lot like c# windows programming. I have a lot of free time at the moment.

Problem with using this under developed library is that is not supported by the xbox 360. But I'll see if I can have something done by tomorrow and see how it goes.

Is it really that hard to create our own gui? All one needs to do is define an array of rectangles to draw stuff in and trigger mouse events within.

Also, be cautious about creating a specific gui until we've decided what the screen layout is going to look like, because that will have an effect on how we go about programming a gui... which is in turn influenced by what the game graphics is going to be, and the kind of con/osd we will provide for the player.

Building the gui shouldn't be a priority. I'd say our immediate priority is designing and discussing what the screen will look like for the player, including the rendering method, be it flat 2D overhead, 2D with a height vector towards the top of the screen, isometric, 3D, or something else.

We shouldn't just be choosing what is easiest or make-do. If we want people to play and enjoy our game, we should create graphics which is enjoyable to look at. I remember reading once, that in computer games, it's wrong to think of game programmers as product manufacturers. Games are for entertainment, so it's more correct to think of our role as entertainers. Flat 2D overhead may not be the right choice in that respect.

Let's do some layout sketches or graphics mockups for what we want our product to look like.

If we actually want to see this thing through flat 2D is the way we're going. Considering most MUDS are either text-based or drawn in ascii characters I don't see people having a problem with this. Besides, 2D doesn't have to be ugly, and 3D doesn't make a game more fun.

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GUI programming is difficult. It's nice to say 'all' you need to do is draw stuff into an array of rectangles, but you have to consider:
Changing the layout (do you really want to be changing dozens of constants to move a rectangle? Automatic layouts aren't much better because they can break or look awful very easily).
Text drawing and wrapping.
Different controls (you start out with just buttons, then you need a slider for volume, perhaps a drop-down box for graphics adapters/resolutions, numerical selectors, etc, etc... you may as well plan all that in at the start).
Different modes of input. Do you just allow mouse control? Why not keyboard? What about navigation with the controller on the 360? What counts as a click/event?
Localisation... possibly not such a problem here (yet), but if you ever wanted to get the game translated and sold in multiple parts of the world, you need to have support for right-to-left languages there.
etc. etc.

It's so much easier to just get a GUI library that allows skinning and use that for a game than do a sub-standard job that will make the game look unfinished and awful. You also need to know which GUI early on so that you don't just tack it on, and instead integrate it properly with the game.


Can you tell I've had this rant before?

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God must love stupid people, he made so many.
theraje: 'God doesn't love stupid people, they're just easier to make'
http://sharedillusions.blogspot.com

As the wiki page stated:

"The view will probably be top-down and basic 2D sprites used for entities."

The video I posted is kinda a prettified version of what I'm thinking. It's completely 2D since the Zune only has a software renderer. Graphically this will be much more basic.

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Amen! Components for things like GUIs, networking, etc. should be used where possible.


Added a mockup to the wiki page. Feel free to play with it.

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Added a flow diagram of the game screen to the wiki page.

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Solid. Makes me wish I had one for everything I wrote. I rarely, if ever, create flow charts. I should get on that.

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I think a GUI is extremely important for a game and especially a MUD or RPG games because your GUI is practically how you play your game. Our GUI should be the basis of our gameplay. Another similiar concept from Diablo would be to allow the player to player the whole game using only his mouse. What we could do with Jasmines idea about making our GUI textures and displaying them with Rectangles, is that we could take screenshots from the GUI we make in the recommended "Neoforce" library and use those screenshots as "textures" for our game GUI. Kind of like the technique studios use to get pre-rendered cut scenes into their games to save performance. This shouldn't be "too hard" to do and it would avoid any complications and coding to get the actual source code of the neoforce library to work with our game engine. Especially since the neoforce library can be changed at anytime leaving our code useless.

Ok, I don't know if I'm going to be of any help, but after reading the wiki, here it goes...

Death Penalty
perma-death is great, I think it's the best option. but hey, people just don't like to lose all the time they had to develop the characters. so you can mix things up.
I always wanted to make a system like this one: If you die, you lose your character. But wait! You don't lose the entire character, you have two options now (actually three). The first: you can create a new pure character, as if you're starting the game again. The second: you can create a new character, but it will REMAIN 80% of all skills it had, and, of course, it will have the same class (fighter/mage/whatever) (and also the option to stop playing the game, that makes three )

Stats: why not adding HP and MP there? this will give more options to develop your character. You can make a wizard that has FULL HP and less MP, so he could resist more but use less spells. And why not making a FULL MP fighter? it could use more of his "fighter spells" than being invencible.

Classes: you planning to make fighters decide either they want to use swords or bows, right? if not, archer please.

Monsters: just a tought, in all games I've played, only a few gave me the option to fight... other people. wait, not real people, but npc.
why not a... Bandit, or a Pirate? It's cool to kill humans ( )

I really wanted to know more of game programming to help you with the code thing, but, unfortunately, the only thing I can help you now is with ideas. I don't know if everything I said will ever help you, but if you need more ideas, you can count on me haha.

HP and MP are usually derived stats (normally from strength and intelligence)... as such you could easily have a brawny wizard who has full strength (probably at the expense of his spell casting) or an intelligent fighter (which would make more sense... fight smart, not hard and all that )

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God must love stupid people, he made so many.
theraje: 'God doesn't love stupid people, they're just easier to make'
http://sharedillusions.blogspot.com

My personal preference would be for something similar to Diablo - a regular mode and a hardcore mode. The regular mode would have a death penalty of just losing everything you've gained in that dungeon. Hardcore would be perma-death, but the rewards would be greater than normal.


Hit points and mana are calculated stats as work said. I'll have to update the wiki for these.


Any class should be able to learn any skill. Some classes will learn some skills easier than others however.


This is a dungeon-crawler only. The only multiplayer would be co-op.

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