Saturday, March 10, 2012

Dungeon (working title)

In this Dev-blog, we will share the progress of our first game.
This game can be described as a cooperative real-time roguelike with rts elements. It's yet to be decided how much "roguelike" the game will be, but it will definitely be some sort of dungeon crawler. Imagine BrĂ¼tal Legend meets Diablo.

The "team" currently consists of two people, moppele and myself. I will do all the coding and moppele will provide ideas for gameplay mechanics and help with problem solving. Due to the absence of a decent artist, I will also be responsible for all the textures and animations. Here is a screenshot, of what the game could look like:

Mockup of a dungeon

Random levels are one of the most important parts of a dungeon crawler, especially in terms of replayability. That's why I started to develop algorithms for random level generation. The first thing I tried was using an online algorithm based on room templates. This algorithm has several advantages. For one, it is very easy to code, extensible and having room templates allows for a lot of artistic freedom. It also allows to have dynamically changing difficulty and stuff like that. But there are also downsides. It is very hard to control the behaviour of the algorithm and having different types of connections between the rooms is also not an easy thing to do. You also have to provide lots of templates to keep the levels interesting and non-repetitive.
I uploaded a short video, so you can see the algorithm in action. I made it so that you can see the rooms popping into existence whenever the player sees a new room. This is just a very first test of random dungeon generation. There are other techniques that I want to try out to see which one works best.



And here is an image of the room templates that were used for this level:

Room templates that were used to generate the dungeon in the video

1 comment:

  1. I heard you haven ' t a decent artist

    So if you need help you can ask me hein ?

    Email me or PM me at Halosprite Forums .

    My username is Uxernome

    ReplyDelete