Vapourware Codexian Game Development Thread

[20 Eyes]

Are you one of the Codexers determined to make the next big piece of vaporware? Use this thread to talk about your progress, what you're (not) working on, why your game is ruining your life, or whatever. If your game is so far along on its vaporware path that it already has its own thread, or even subforum, feel free to share progress/gripes/tips/whatever with the rest of us.

Personally, I'm working on an isometric turn-based strategy/RPG thing.

This is my title screen. I worked really hard on it. Everything is a placeholder, including the name (which doesn't even make sense because the stick figure is holding a sword and shield). But you can actually press Enter to start.

Pressing Enter takes you to the main gameplay screen. After some consideration, I just switched from a tilted top-down viewpoint to an isometric viewpoint. The game camera works and is currently bound to the arrow keys, but eventually will also work by moving the mouse to the edge of the side of the screen you want to scroll.

All the 'art' was done by me, but it's all just placeholders. The sprite actually has some very crude animations from a project I made to figure out how to do it, but they're not implemented in this. The actual sprites, when I get around to making them, probably won't be much more detailed than the placeholder. They'll just be a little nicer (I hope), and maybe a bit more realistically proportioned. The tiles will also be simple. Graphics are a low priority, but I would like to keep everything animated (even if just crudely). I'd like the game to look as good as an average SNES game.

Purple square is a test rectangle to track the mouse's movements to make sure the mouse and the camera were playing nice. The red triangle thing is just there because I was practicing making isometric lines.

The sprite is controllable with the mouse and with WSAD, but the keyboard controls are only temporary. Everything is being made in XNA.

Next few items on the agenda:

-Reimplementing collision
-Moving into and out of the awesome world map I drew
-pathfinding

I'll post an update after I do stuff if I don't abort the project before that happens.

 

[Haba]

Plx make me an engine with ready made tools, kthx.

I've done a few "proof of concepts*", but at this stage they are on hold because frankly spending that much time programming the engine and the framework. At this rate I have to buy an engine from someone, which is a sin really, since my requirements are not that huge. Would much rather spend it on art or prostitutes.

*) [1] Tile-based wargame w. mechs, [2] Squad-based top-down RPG

 

[Jasede]

I'm spending a lot of time thinking about making an RPG or action-adventure kind of game with an bizarre bend.
Thinking is the keyword here.

My placeholder is a book about SDL and a book about Direct 2D. Fuck Direct 2D.

 

[Derek Larp]

I've been working on an unnamed roguelike(-engine for now).

It already has the character class, item interaction, a few item classes, pathfinding, lighting (with shadow casting), day/night cycle, stealth and spotting, sound engine(well, that's not mine ), a basic AI(that will need a rewrite), a combat system(that I´m currently restructuring), and everything in the gameworld is neatly saved into a single file.

Anyways, it's still a fuckload of work till it's finished. I hope I can do it.

 

[shihonage]

SHELTER is my delayed NMA/Codex vaporware masterpiece, except its engine is almost completely functional in an alpha state. There's a frozen version on my hard drive with semi-non-linear chunk of gameplay on the opening map and several quests, during which you use dialogue, inventory, non-lethal and lethal combat, stats are checked, chests are lockpicked, things are examined, etc.

I am slowly working with an overseas artist to generate the minimal graphics necessary to abort reliance on Fallout: Tactics sprites and have people realize that it doesn't use fucking Tactics engine.


MONSTERLAND is my current short-term project, which will finally be released soon. It is a simple-looking top-down shooter that plays like Hexen with Doom weapons and Half-Life narrative, and has 2-player LAN coop (or Internet coop if you live real close). Only 16 years in the making.



CTU is my future project. It's a quite racist city crime management simulator. For now its been abandoned and is pending a design restart.

All the 'art' was done by me, but it's all just placeholders. The sprite actually has some very crude animations from a project I made to figure out how to do it, but they're not implemented in this. The actual sprites, when I get around to making them, probably won't be much more detailed than the placeholder. They'll just be a little nicer (I hope), and maybe a bit more realistically proportioned. The tiles will also be simple. Graphics are a low priority, but I would like to keep everything animated (even if just crudely). I'd like the game to look as good as an average SNES game.

Google "Reiner's Tilesets". He has isometric sprite animations that may work better than yours and save some time.

 

[Zed]

I'm working on some quite ambitious vaporware that I'm actually quite excited about cuz it's a game I'd love to play myself.

6 character party dungeon crawler with isometric/roguelike'ish (plan to mix random generated floors with hand-made ones) exploration screen. For combat I plan to do something quite... controversial (on these boards I guess).
Basically I plan to have a final fantasy-like "initiative meter" for everybody in the battle, except it pauses when it reaches someone's turn. This meter's speed can be improved by some stat or something I dunno. It gives a visual feedback on how initiative builds up. I think it can work quite well.

As for character creation... I plan to change it quite significantly (from what's seen in screenshots atm). Instead of classes, you'll have free character creation with skills ranging from Detect Traps to improving different Magic schools.

The game plays on very low resolution, but that's how I like it because I draw everything for hand, pixel by pixel (portraits aren't fully iterated on yet).
Portraits have 3 parts. 1 background depending on what environment your characters are in. 1 face you choose. 1 shoulder/armor part depending on armor equipped.

Screenshots here: http://imgur.com/a/8ZN4C

 

[villain of the story]

I see you have embraced black and gold from DXHR. But it looks really good, except for the in-game shot with crappy gray borders.

 

[Crooked Bee]

For combat I plan to do something quite... controversial (on these boards I guess). Basically I plan to have a final fantasy-like "initiative meter" for everybody in the battle, except it pauses when it reaches someone's turn. This meter's speed can be improved by some stat or something I dunno. It gives a visual feedback on how initiative builds up. I think it can work quite well.

It sure can. Case in point: Labyrinth of Touhou. It's a really hardcore PC dungeon crawler with inane anime looks that uses the (upgradeable) Speed attribute to determine how fast initiative builds up, which it uses to great effect (made much more complex and management-heavy thanks to LoT's character switching mechanics and a large variety of characters you can use/develop).

 

[Forgotten Friend]

Kind of like JA 2 in space. All artwork is a placeholder. I'll probably try to get a better artist once the game is absolutely complete.

 

[Destroid]

A friend and I started making a dwarf fortress mod. It took us about 3 weeks to make a playable version, now we mostly need to add more varied content as we are stalled on features implementation until the new dwarf fortress version some time this month. The worst thing that has happened so far is a fairly talented pixel artist backed out of making tiles for us and no-one posted in my thread on the codex. And that we massively overestimated how well known Necromunda is, most people have no idea, even Warhammer 40k fans.

 

[Zed]

I see you have embraced black and gold from DXHR. But it looks really good, except for the in-game shot with crappy gray borders.

oops accidentally brofisted instead of replied!
Yeah UI is not so done yet, I plan to fill it with detail and shit (skulls, ornaments, shit)
edit: actually keep that brofist, it was great you pointed it out cuz I'm working on it now.

It sure can. Case in point: Labyrinth of Touhou. :p It's a really hardcore PC dungeon crawler with inane anime looks that uses the (upgradeable) Speed attribute to determine how fast initiative builds up, which it uses to great effect (made much more complex and management-heavy thanks to LoT's character switching mechanics and a large variety of characters you can use/develop).

Nice to hear it works.. somewhere (I might check it out even considering the inane anime look). I was thinking of giving each character 10 "AP" or something for each turn, with the weapon determining the AP cost of an attack. So a knife wielder would probably get off 3 attacks per turn, whereas a person with a big weapon may only pull off one attack.

 

[DakaSha]

Have done a fucking lot of concept shit. Right now I'm trying to rewrite my old dungeon generator.. If I manage that I will start working on a sci fi roguelike

 

[villain of the story]

I hope you don't turn it into gay ass shit, Zed.

And AP per weapon; annoying.

 

[Zed]

I hope you don't turn it into gay ass shit, Zed.

And AP per weapon; annoying.

yeah I'll go with one action per turn.
alternating between working on the exploration screen UI and reworking the character system. just made a portrait for dead characters too. woo.

 

[Crooked Bee]

I might check it out even considering the inane anime look

The game itself is *highly* frustrating, and rapes you hard. It's also pretty flexible and varied as far as dungeon crawlers go. Check out the LP at least: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3430082 (especially the videos of the higher floors' boss fights to see the initiative & character switching mechanics in action).

EDIT. Also, is this the thread where MMXI finally tells us what kind of cRPG he's working on? Is it Wizardry 9? Grimoire? RockPaperShotgun: An RPG? Oh the suspense, the intrigue!

 

[MMXI]

EDIT. Also, is this the thread where MMXI finally tells us what kind of cRPG he's working on? :p Is it Wizardry 9? Grimoire? RockPaperShotgun: An RPG? Oh the suspense, the intrigue!

I've had so many set backs. One mistake I made, other than spending nearly a year trying to code a simple and flexible 3D graphics engine and ending up wanting it to do everything that OGRE does, was trying to integrate the world editor into the actual game engine. It's a reasonable idea if your game is based on relatively small zones that you can store entirely in memory. But when your game involves a huge open world without loading screens (making it necessary to stream data in and out as you move around), you realise just how much of a nightmare it is. You end up trying to use the same data structures to represent world building and game playing. Fuck that.

So I've switched my immediate task to making a proper editor (using Qt). Things have gone much more smoothly than I thought it would. I've also gone about making a few simplifications to the way walls are represented (the RPG is in an urban setting), which should speed up things like path finding immensely, as well as reduce memory requirements and the code complexity.

So about the game itself. Well, it's 3D but with an orthographic yet rotatable camera, so it should look authentically old-school. It's open world but focusing on urban environments such as cities. The game is a turn-based/phase-based hybrid and is also grid-based, meaning that at any particular turn each character is firmly on a square. Hopefully the combat will be tactical, and I plan on making it party-based. NPC schedules are a feature, though eventually (perhaps for a sequel) I want to replace them with proper AI. The game is very free-form without any strict ordering. It's Falloutish in many ways, but I'm aiming for the environment to be as interactive as the Ultima games (at least in terms of my engine supporting that). Oh, and buildings are multi-storey without transitions/loading screens between them.

So yeah. Open world, urban, isometric/orthographic, 3D, Falloutish, Ultimaish and hopefully Jagged Alliance 2ish. Oh and with an editor too.

Ambitious? Fuck yeah!

 

[Crooked Bee]

MMXI
Interesting, thanks for sharing that!

Given the tactical party-based combat you aim for, I wonder if you're developing your own, unique combat mechanics, character development rules, and the like. That sure would be one hell of a task.

 

[MMXI]

Given the tactical party-based combat you aim for, I wonder if you're developing your own, unique combat mechanics, character development rules, and the like. That sure would be one hell of a task.

I basically want to create my own deep and thorough RPG rule system for this game. I don't want a shitty modern day "click button in tree to gain ability" system. I want numbers. Lots of them. Numbers that form the multiple layers that define a character. Numbers that affect each other as well as the surrounding world. I want everything you do in the game to be affected by them.

How about statistics for the senses of your character? You can reduce them during character generation to gain more points for attributes. How about negative statistics like phobias from The Dark Eye? Throw them in too! Make them work together perhaps. If you're scared of spiders but have really poor eyesight then you can't see them well enough to be scared of them.

Combat should be pretty interesting in that I want to make use of typically non-combat options in combat. Locking doors to trap enemies in rooms, pushing furniture about to block paths, sneaking a second character through a building to find the security room in order to activate the defence turrets to fight for you etc. The trick is to not have a static world and to make time matter. If enemies sit there waiting for you to stumble into range then you can just reload and prepare for the encounter. This is why I want all characters to have a schedule and for the game to have a day/night cycle. In fact, this is what influenced my decision to have a sort of phase-base system outside of combat. Characters only move when you move. If your characters are stationary then the whole world is stationary.

With the scope of the world being as huge as I hope it'll be, I'm pretty sure I can make the player do interesting things in combat.

And that's another thing I've just remember about the game. There are no enemies. There are no always-hostile creatures. You can attack anyone and anyone can attack you. It just depends on who you've made your enemy and who you've made your friend.

 

[Crooked Bee]

MMXI
Oh wow, that almost sounds too good to be true. Looking forward to the 2022 release.

 

[shihonage]

In fact, this is what influenced my decision to have a sort of phase-base system outside of combat. Characters only move when you move. If your characters are stationary then the whole world is stationary.

In other news, your non-combat system is my combat system

 

[MMXI]

In fact, this is what influenced my decision to have a sort of phase-base system outside of combat. Characters only move when you move. If your characters are stationary then the whole world is stationary.

In other news, your non-combat system is my combat system

Yeah, I've always wanted a single system for combat and non-combat gameplay, without resorting to a real-time-with-pause system. Obviously a pure turn-based system is out because it sucks outside of combat. A sort of simultaneous-turns/phase-based system works well out of combat (think Ultima), and is as comfortable as real-time, but I'm not convinced I can make it work well in combat with full party control and a grid-based game world. Hopefully I can do some testing soon once I can build a place holder game world in my editor.

 

[Forgotten Friend]

Given the tactical party-based combat you aim for, I wonder if you're developing your own, unique combat mechanics, character development rules, and the like. That sure would be one hell of a task.

I basically want to create my own deep and thorough RPG rule system for this game. I don't want a shitty modern day "click button in tree to gain ability" system. I want numbers. Lots of them. Numbers that form the multiple layers that define a character. Numbers that affect each other as well as the surrounding world. I want everything you do in the game to be affected by them.

How about statistics for the senses of your character? You can reduce them during character generation to gain more points for attributes. How about negative statistics like phobias from The Dark Eye? Throw them in too! Make them work together perhaps. If you're scared of spiders but have really poor eyesight then you can't see them well enough to be scared of them.

Combat should be pretty interesting in that I want to make use of typically non-combat options in combat. Locking doors to trap enemies in rooms, pushing furniture about to block paths, sneaking a second character through a building to find the security room in order to activate the defence turrets to fight for you etc. The trick is to not have a static world and to make time matter. If enemies sit there waiting for you to stumble into range then you can just reload and prepare for the encounter. This is why I want all characters to have a schedule and for the game to have a day/night cycle. In fact, this is what influenced my decision to have a sort of phase-base system outside of combat. Characters only move when you move. If your characters are stationary then the whole world is stationary.

With the scope of the world being as huge as I hope it'll be, I'm pretty sure I can make the player do interesting things in combat.

And that's another thing I've just remember about the game. There are no enemies. There are no always-hostile creatures. You can attack anyone and anyone can attack you. It just depends on who you've made your enemy and who you've made your friend.

Would brofist if I could.

Here is where every person on the codex comes and says what a stupid asshole I am as it has every time I've ever given any coding advice, but since I have had a fully working and full-featured if not quite complete game a long time now, I will throw my two cents in anyway.

You aren't going to get too far making a 3D engine on your own and your own world editor in addition to editor for game data and code for all your game rules. You just aren't. It would be easy to spend ten years on a 3D engine, and even if you make a bone simple one that looks like crap it is a lot of work on the maintenance side.

If you use Ogre it's almost no better. If you use an engine that interfaces through scripting you are never going to complete a task like this. I ended up trying all those options before finally moving to C4 game engine, and it's been the best bang for the buck of any money I've ever spent. Unlike most engines it also works extremely well.

Until I came back and realized how much of assholes everyone on the planet is again I'd been planning to release a lot of my code for stuff like pathfinding and AI and modding tools to give people a basic start on the engine but then I came to my senses since I realized everyone would just piss on my face anyway, even if they used it.

TLDR; c'mon, try new1000ad.com. It's free to play!

 

[Kosmonaut]

Until I came back and realized how much of assholes everyone on the planet is again I'd been planning to release a lot of my code for stuff like pathfinding and AI and modding tools to give people a basic start on the engine but then I came to my senses since I realized everyone would just piss on my face anyway, even if they used it.

This is like the tenth time that you wrote that shit. Yes, we get it. Why don't you go and troll Vince about AoD? At least that was funny.

 

[20 Eyes]

I decided to go back to regular squares as opposed to the more isometric looking diamonds because I don't want to waste time building a level editor with everything I need when I can just use Tiled. The game will still be drawn in isometric perspective (when I get around to making a new tileset), the only difference is the tiles will be cut into squares instead of diamonds. The ground/floor will be one layer, and walls/roofs/whathaveyou will be another. At least that is how I'm envisioning it right now.

Anyway, I ran into a huge roadblock when I discovered pathfinding is a bit beyond my novice programming abilities. After reading half a dozen blogs and half a dozen examples of A*, I sorta managed to get it going:

Red highlighted tiles to show where collision should occur:

The purple smiley faces represent the pathfinding grid. Getting the walls to trigger as 'no go' was a huge learning experience (the seemingly invisible wall in the corner was just a test rectangle). Now I just need to apply it to the character's movement and not just test run it to the lower right corner...

After that:
Interface
Map transitions
NPC's and restructuring

And I should probably throw together a new tileset to get a sense of the perspective I want. Things should go more smoothly once I clean everything up. I don't think I'll have too much of an issue with anything until I start working on the AI.

All the 'art' was done by me, but it's all just placeholders. The sprite actually has some very crude animations from a project I made to figure out how to do it, but they're not implemented in this. The actual sprites, when I get around to making them, probably won't be much more detailed than the placeholder. They'll just be a little nicer (I hope), and maybe a bit more realistically proportioned. The tiles will also be simple. Graphics are a low priority, but I would like to keep everything animated (even if just crudely). I'd like the game to look as good as an average SNES game.

Google "Reiner's Tilesets". He has isometric sprite animations that may work better than yours and save some time.

His stuff definitely looks better than my placeholders, but part of the fun for me is every time I run my game everything I see was made by me. I know that using other people's art for placeholders is really common, but I'd rather see rectangles of alternating color to placehold a walking animation as long as I made it.

Plus, I need the practice.

 

[Zed]

I've been doing some stuff on my project.
My game now has statistics, and no pre-defined classes. You start with 23 attribute points to spend over 5 base attributes (each with a base cap of 10). These attributes are Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, Stamina. Str affects attacking with weapons (any weapon) and a skill that for now is called "clear debris". You'll also require Str for armor. 4 for leather armor, 6 chain, 10 plate. Dexterity affects initiative (how fast you get your turn in combat), attacking with weapon (half of what Str gives), and two skills: detect traps and pick lock. Intelligence affects what type of offensive spells are available (probably in combination with character level) and two skills: dispel (removes magical barriers) and lore (ability to gain extra information and exp from stuff in the game). Wisdom determines what supportive spells like healing is available. Stamina determines your HP gain per level (currently +2hp/sta per level).
What I mean with "affect" different skills is that the attribute sets the limit of how many skill points you can allocate in that skill. Detect Traps might have 20 ranks, and require 1 Dex per ever 2 skill point. So Detect Traps rank 6 would require 3 Dex.
I'll probably remove and add skills. I would like to have some skills that aren't based on any attribute, maybe some social skills. Clear debris, Pick lock, and Dispel are all "get past obstacles" type of skills - one for each archetype (except healer [wisdom]).
Here's how a 4 character party could look with the new system:

I'm not sure whether or not I should stick with 6 characters or actually reduce it to 4. 4 makes a little more sense at this point.

Skills points would be gained and spent on levels. That way you can sort of allocate skills as needed if you want to. Powerful equipment might add bonus attribute points but I'm not sure about that.
Other than that I've mostly been redrawing stuff. Will soon do another iteration on portraits (especially the part of the body visible in portraits - something that will change depending on what armor you wear).
I also changed the font into a bitmap font so I can be sure it looks the same on every computer.

As for setting, story and that stuff, I haven't really decided anything other than it being medieval'ish. Just trying to get systems in place first. I've been looking at doing some sort of Hollywoodian take on Scandinavian folklore though. Enemies would be Nordic type of wildlife and folklore monsters like (yes I would use the swedish names :D): Vitorm, Bergsrå, Skogsrå, Sjörå, Gruvrå, different types of Troll, different types of specters, maybe gnomes and elves as well (not Tolkien ones ).
That's what I've got for now.