WiP - GAME OF THE YEAR EVERY YEAR (once it's released, in about 35 years)

[In Over My Head]

Hello,

I've been lurking in here for years and have managed to stay behind the safety net so far, but I've finally made the mistake of making an account in this shit hole.
Why? So I can dump random progress updates that nobody cares about the game I've started developing this year. It's ok, I'm calling it an RPG, that should get me a front row seat in the news.

• "What's the name?"

I have no idea, if/when I come up with one I'll let you know.

• "What is it and why should I care?"

You very likely shouldn't care, it's going to be crap and it's going to take a long time to get made, I'm only "just" beginning, but in case you're a contrarian and want to go on:
It's a:
-grid based
-turn based
-blobber
-with seamless action sequence

That's about it. To further expand a little on each of the things mentioned:
-grid based: each grid square (it's squares, it's (almost?) always squares, are there any blobbers that don't use squares?) can hold a set maximum size value of units (example: one ogre OR two humans OR four rats OR one human and two rats, etc...).

-turn based: in a grid based blobber? turn based > real time anytime. Especially since I'm planning on allowing the player to have.... a ridiculous number of "party members" (with quotes, more on this latter, stay tuned! If you can't handle the wait:

Spoiler

it's summons, you can summon shit, not literal shit though (maybe a poo elemental that diseases enemies, we'll see)

)

-blobber: you know what a blobber is. What makes this one special? Nothing yet, maybe the possible number of controlled "party members". I've drawn inspirations from M&M (old and new old and older, but not oldest, maybe I'll play the first two entries, but not yet...), Wizardry (mostly the party positioning thingy in Wiz8) and many other games all over the place.... like Dominions, Conquest of Elysium, Battle Brothers, etc...

-"with seamless action sequence": I'm proud of this, I just came up with this marketing mumbo jumbo right now, it just means that combat won't be a separate phase, you don't "enter combat". It'll be similar to M&M III for example, where enemies are in the world and you can see them you don't get "ambushed!".

• "I'm so excited please keep talking!" / "I need wake up early and only this poorly thought out semi-coherent rambling can help put me to sleep, keep talking!"

What should I add?

-It'll be class based, at least one of the classes is something I've never ever encountered in a RPG (and in games... only once), no details yet in case it turns out to be a stupid idea, I'll share more on it later when I have something more than just an idea of how it would work.
-There's no setting yet, but I'm working on the assumption that it'll be your standard-ish, run of the mill, fantasy game for the most part.
-There will be a story, it will be "bad". There will be dungeons to loot, rats to kill

Spoiler

(Maybe a special Ratt Barton - King of the rats)

, traps to avoid and puzzles to solve, that will be the main focus of the game.
-There will be an inventory, it won't be a list, it won't be a grid where all the items are 1x1, it'll be (it already is) a nice grid with different sized items (ala M&M VI-VIII).
-There will be (I hope, no promises on this yet, actually no promises on anything!) paper dolls to play dress up with your realistic-ish armour (very ish because while i hate WoW looking armours and weapons, i don't hate Sauron's in the LotR movies, I haven't decided how far i want to go with this....).
-There will be cool spells to cast.
-There will be cool weapons to wield (not just swords and axes but polaxes and spears).
-There will traps to disarm AND to place.
-There will be rudimentary physics puzzles (like placing stuff on a pressure plate, you know, the works).
-It will have extremely poor art because I'm terrible at it and I can't afford an artist.
-It will have a party positioning system (ala Wiz8) where weapon reach matters when targetting enemies, where you can use tougher party members to take the brunt of the fighting and where enemies can engage party members that are in front of them, possibly interrupting their actions, etc...
-It will be possible to have up to 20 "party members", 4 main player created party members + 16 extra slots within the party positioning system (4 per section, left - right - front - rear - middle)
-It will have many more things...

• Some videos and screenshots showcasing some stuff:

These things are functional and aren't just static images, the pathfinding works (it has obstacle avoidance, ranged ai stops within range, etc....), the items/inventory work (the items have stats, can be dropped - with physics enabled, picked up, thrown, take up space in the inventory, etc...), the party positions work (enemies only attack the adjacent party members, party members can only attack adjacent enemies in melee - unless their weapon has long reach, they can be interrupted, depending on variables such as weapon type, when attacking, etc...)

(Very very early - one of the first things I started working on: pathfinding, using A*. I was going to post a video of a patrol path and obstacle avoidance but I can't just directly upload videos so take this instead)

Spoiler

(very early HUD - an inventory with random items generated, the party positions, etc.... with many debug colours / lines / shapes present, ignore those)

Spoiler

I decided to try and create as much of the game by myself as I can without resorting to assets, frameworks, etc... some things are inevitable (I'm not going to create my own game engine for example, and I haven't touched the absolute disaster that's going to be 3D models which I can do but I can't really texture or draw well, etc...), but things like RPG Frameworks were out of the question for me and I've decided to create my own crappy version. For the curious the game engine is Godot.

 

[Lord of Riva]

Good luck, the lone dev road necessitates patience and frustration tolerance. Keep us up to date.

 

[Gandalf]

More dungeon crawlers being made? Heck yeah! Good luck, man.

 

[In Over My Head]

Hello once again,

I'm going to go into a little detail about how an attack is currently working in the game.

There's a few stages between an enemy (or you, but let's stick to an enemy's example for now) deciding to attack and one of your party members taking damage:

1. Choosing the attack;
2. Choosing the target;
3. Attacking.

Now the real meat of the it is in the "Attacking" phase:

1. Rolling for hit chance;
2. Rolling for targeted limb;
3. Rolling for base damage;
4. Rolling for critical hit;
5. Rolling for block change;
6. Applying DR & DT;
7. The damage is now calculated!

That's the short version of it, there's still a lot of things being worked out, but that's the gist of it. To go into more detail:

Choosing the attack
For now there are two enemy AI types, melee and ranged. The difference between them is that the ranged one in addition to anything that the melee one can do also has a ranged attack. So a melee enemy only has one attack and isn't really doing anything at this stage, the ranged enemy however has to decide between using the ranged attack or the melee one. For now the ranged attack is always picked as long as the target is within range & within LoS (and checking LoS is a flag that I can turn off/on, wouldn't it be fun to have enemies blasting you with mind spells from across walls? Probably not, but I can do it.), the ranged enemy will be forced to use a melee attack is he's "engaged", meaning you're right in his face, in melee range.
I have other plans for this stage like a more powerful melee attack / spell (for enemy spellcasters) / etc... but nothing implemented yet.

Choosing the target
To choose the target, the enemy checks where he's attacking from (compared to your party's positions, ala Wiz8), and can only target party members within range.
Example: if an enemy is attacking from the front, and you have one party member in the front section he will *always* be targeted. If you have one party member in the left, middle, right and rear section the party member in the rear section will *never* be targeted, the others ones are all fair game.

Attacking
Rolling for hit chance
You know what this is. No fancy things here, just compare the enemy's attack accuracy (which is different between ranged and melee, an enemy archer might be bad at melee for example) to the party member's evasion.

Rolling for targeted limb
If the enemy succeeds the hit change roll again! This time he has to decide which limb he's going to target, while your initial party members are all pretty much humanoid, you can summon things that might not even have limbs (like a slimy blob of limblessness). Either way, the enemy will roll and check the value against his target tables (which there is one for every creature type) and get the targeted limb.
Humanoids have 4 limbs, head, arms, chest and lower. Why lower and not legs? Because there are legless humanoids like genies, etc...
The target tables have default values for the enemies size (a rat should have a harder time biting your head than an ogre will have smashing it in), but can be overridden with custom value to, for example, create an special enemy called "ankle biter" who has an extremely high chance of biting your legs.

Rolling for base damage
Nothing special here either, the enemy checks his base damage range (for example 5-10), and rolls a number between the values.

Rolling for critical hit
First the enemy rolls for a critical hit, if he succeeds, he rolls again for a critical effect. Depending on how high the critical effect roll is the critical hit might be negligible or it might disintegrate you (who knows?), critical hits depend on the targeted limb as well, is it a real game if the leg critical hit doesn't cripple you? A successful critical hit will incur a damage modifier on the base damage and might apply status effects.

Rolling for block chance
I've seen shields being used simple as a AC (or evasion equivalent) stat booster, I'm not a fan... so if the party member *can block* (you need a shield for that, or maybe a weapon that can parry? Certainly not a dinky little dagger) the enemy has to roll against the party member's block rating (if it's a physical attack, other types of damage can't be blocked!), if the block is successful the party member adds his block value to against the attack as DT.

Applying DR & DT
You've heard of DR & DT before, they're nice I like them.
In case you haven't: DR (damage resistance) reduces incoming damage on a % basis. DT (damage threshold) reduces damage by an absolute value.
Of note is that there isn't just a global DR/DT value, it's location based for physical attacks. While a lightning bolt doesn't care if you have the latest steel helmet, that rusty sword will.
There's a global DR/DT value (for every type of damage) and a localized DR/DT value (for physical damage) coming mostly from armour.

A little example:
-a little goblin attacks your knight with his stone spear (physical), he targets the knight's chest;
-he rolls a damage value of 5;
-gets a big critical hit with a x5 dmg modifier, increases the damage to 25;
-however your knight has a shield..... oops! He fails to block, so it was useless this time;
-Still, your knight has a plate cuirass with a DR of 50% and a DT of 20;
-The final damage ends up being (25 - 20) / 50 = 3.
-Your knight loses 3 hp, feeling insulted that a goblin damaged him he chops off the goblin's head.


An image example:

Spoiler

An enemy with a 50-100 damage ranged attacks one of your party members.
He targets the arms,
rolls 84 base damage,
gets a critical hit with a x4 modifier (upping the damage to 336! and applying a status effects),
the party member blocks the attack adding the block value of 13 to the DT.
Since the attack targeted the arms the DR/DT values that will be used for the calculation will be the steel gauntlets' DR:49 and DT:13, resulting in a final damage value of 158!