Dungeon Crawler Jam 2022

[dulsi]

https://itch.io/jam/dcjam2022

I started thinking of ideas. I initially thought of doing a dark elf game. You start in the dungeon and need to travel to the surface to attack the humans. Maybe give you a spider as a race/class. However we don't have a lot of dark elf images. I found some free pixel art dark elves but there isn't enough art for all monsters so it would look out of place.

I did find there is a goblin, goblin thief and goblin shaman. I could do that. Thinking of maybe have you start in the wilderness. Travel to the drow and then attack the human city. Not sure how much time I will be able to devote to this.

[Methuselas]

How long do you have?

My priority now is making a new tileset template. Daz Studio is a free to use program and if you were doing old school flat walls, like I originally did, you could change the default wall texture to yours and render it out to make your own tileset. This new Tool would allow you to render horizons, placeables and walls at Height 0, 1, or 2. Daz comes with a rather brute force IRay renderer that's good for what it is.


I don't have a DAZ or iClone directory right now. When I lost my drive, I lost it all. I didn't bother rebuilding one after setting up my base directories, 'cos it's so time consuming. It wouldn't take much to install enough to crank out some quick still frames, if you wanted to do a Dark Elf Game. I may have a better solution, however.

I've got updated fonts for BTBuilder. I also DID install all the Robots I planned on eventually rendering. *ALL* 50 or so of them. If you were to use Starsong as your base, I'd have 50 robots I could give you, to start.

That's why I didn't want to keep going. I had to install them and then manually move them around, so they were all organized how I wanted them.

I have to do the same thing for iClone and then set up to transfer between the two.

[dulsi]

How long do you have?

It runs until the 15th. I debated asking you for something but I think it might be better to just work with the current limitations. I don't think the images will make or break the game. I think I need a compelling story and things to do.

[Methuselas]

Well, if you want more robots, let me know. My wife saw how excited I've been doing UI design, so she's been encouraging me. In fact, she's the one that helped me get fonts and loaned me a book on typeset to help out. She's insisting that I use "the Beast," which is her game box, as a render box. What once took me hours on my laptop to render, will now take minutes.

My Son takes a "Robotics/Coding" class at middle school. I know his teacher. I showed him BTBuilder and we talked about it a bit. They mostly code in Minecraft, but he said if BTBuilder was "more graphically elegant," he would interested in using it. That's what inspired me to go back to seeing what the problem with displaying the 3D map was. I don't think I would have cracked 1600x900 without his interest.

I reformatted an external 1 TB drive I had. I'm going to start rebuilding my Daz and iClone directories today. It will allow me to render between two machines, if I need to.

[dulsi]

Starting to wonder if I chose poorly. I've got three goblins but I need a review board, adventurer's guild, and healer. Maybe a shop too. I tried modifying Roscoe and Evil Monks. I'm not entirely satisfied with the results. The cave backgrounds come from the Ancient Beast game.



The basic storyline is that you are trying to make an avatar for your god. It is a winged ape. You need to catch the ape. Cut the wings off another creature. Perform a ritual to merge them together.

[Methuselas]

Adventurer's Guild (Goblin Camp).

I hope you don't mind it being outside. I'm not too familiar with TerraDome yet, so this is a preset background.

Can you give me a day to figure out what models I used for the goblins. I know I used 2 or 3, but they're old and not nearly as HD as the new ones will be.

[Methuselas]

Hobgoblin Healer

I had this already installed. This is the template for the Hobgoblin race. Sorry they're not similar. The previous slots were OLD models. These new ones are much higher quality.




LOL! Here's your Review Board. Again, sorry they're similar to the older models, but I had this installed.

Did you need anything else? I'm in the process of installing the first batch of models.

[Methuselas]

[Truncated. Accidental Quote]

[dulsi]

The only problem with doing it outside is the transition. You walk up to a blank square and suddenly you are in the Adventurer's guild. The door image in the forest looked kinda like a cave. I could just ignore it and say it opens up after the rocks. Thanks for the help.

[Methuselas]

I have the original tileset files. I can change Wilderness tileset door to that Guild image, but it won't look as good.

[dulsi]

I have the original tileset files. I can change Wilderness tileset door to that Guild image, but it won't look as good.

I'm find with what I've got. The plan was to not add new features to implement this game but I'm not sticking to that. I'm working on a way to add new key commands. I want to have a key that shows a quest log.

You can see the result: https://github.com/dulsi/btbuilder/blob ... ommand.xml

Key is the ascii value of the key press. Body is a special script. Now I can load my quest.xml which is:

Code: Select all

<screenset>
	<screen number="1">
		<line>Active Tasks</line>
		<can option="global.flags" value="0"><line>Talk to chieftain</line></can>
		<can option="global.flags" value="2"><line>Find dragon bone</line></can>
		<barrier></barrier>
		<choice keys="cC" screen="2" align="center">(COMPLETE TASKS)</choice>
		<choice keys="dD" action="exit" align="center">(DONE)</choice>
	</screen>
	<screen number="2">
		<line>Complete Tasks</line>
		<can option="global.flags" value="1"><line>Talk to chieftain</line></can>
		<can option="global.flags" value="3"><line>Find dragon bone</line></can>
		<barrier></barrier>
		<choice keys="aA" screen="1" align="center">(ACTIVE TASKS)</choice>
		<choice keys="dD" action="exit" align="center">(DONE)</choice>
	</screen>
</screenset>

What if you have too many to list without scrolling? I don't have a solution for that yet.

[Methuselas]

Wait. We're gonna have quests, instead of just hack and slash?


This is awesome! I was making quests by using Specials and Global tags.

[dulsi]

The global flags are what I used to make the quests. One flag indicates the quest and active. Once completed you clear that flag and set the second. Ideally you want more than the 16 characters to describe the quest. Maybe have a scrollable list and allow you to select an entry to get more details. But my initial implementation was as simple as I could get away with.

BTW If I added key commands that can be specified per map, you could setup Z to summon a stone elemental. Right now it would ask to choice the party but that could be fixed.

How did the game come out? Bad. It was too big and I didn't have enough time. I'll probably write up a postmortem soon. If you want to see the game:
https://dulsi.itch.io/goblins-rise-of-gurg

[Methuselas]

The global flags are what I used to make the quests. One flag indicates the quest and active. Once completed you clear that flag and set the second. Ideally you want more than the 16 characters to describe the quest. Maybe have a scrollable list and allow you to select an entry to get more details. But my initial implementation was as simple as I could get away with.

Make it it's own screen. Then, I can make the picture view the area for the current quests, you could scroll through. We can use the text area to describe the current, selected quest.

BTW If I added key commands that can be specified per map, you could setup Z to summon a stone elemental. Right now it would ask to choice the party but that could be fixed.

I like this idea. I need a way to "craft items" and "mix potions" using an ingredient list, in either text or xml format.

How did the game come out? Bad. It was too big and I didn't have enough time. I'll probably write up a postmortem soon. If you want to see the game:
https://dulsi.itch.io/goblins-rise-of-gurg

Already downloaded to check out. Wife wants to run to the Warhammer store today, so I probably won't look at it tonight.

I have about 95% of Monsters installed, organized by type, but I haven't updated the materials yet for the majority of them. The main, male directory is almost 95% installed and organized. Almost all of the materials are set for IRay, but I want to update to the new PBR materials. Females aren't done yet, but I planned on starting on them next week. Cloth dynamics and Hair dynamics are working. Visual Effects are not, but Daz has rather poor VFX plugins - in fact, there's only one and it's extremely limited. Since I can share cameras between iClone and Daz and I have PopcornFX for iClone, I'm probably going to do the VFX in iClone and then overlay the VFX on the animations, by hand in Photoshop. Unity FX are also another option I am contemplating, as I can use the same cameras there, as well.

No animations are done, but those will take virtually no time to transfer to the new skeleton. In fact, the animation conversions are the fastest thing to do, which is why they're last.

I'm going to try and make a new UI for 1600x900, next week and see if I can find that "sweet spot" for the 3DView. If I can, I'll release a new UI, sans the tilesets and new graphics, but it will have all the icons for status and spell effects. I'll stretch all the old slots to fit the new screen. If not, I'll downgrade it to 1280x960, since I have a working UI for that screen size.

[dulsi]

I wrote up a postmortem of the game.

The person running the jam did It Came from the Forest. It used a unity package to generate the 2D views. Look interesting but I don't really want to install unity to render images.