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Dungeon Crawler RPG

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amihartCreated:
I'm currently working on a dungeon crawler RPG. You will be able to have turn-based battles with three party members (although they join you later in the game, you start by yourself). You also unlock new abilities as you gain levels and different party members get unique abilities and generally have unique stats. You will also be able to explore dungeon and draw a map as you go on the touch screen (inspired by Etrian Odyssey). Between dungeons will be story. I may release a demo soon. The second dungeon is nearing completion, and the script for the second cut scene is written, and I will release the demo containing all that. I can be a pretty lazy developer so I'm not going to put out a timetable. I've been programming this from scratch. Anyways, what do you guys think? It's still a decent way off, I want to fix a lot of stuff flesh out the battle system and generally make it look nicer, maybe adding some more artwork. I'll need to contact my little-sister-artist. xD Some input would be nice.

Looks pretty solid to me. That dungeon perspective is kind of bland though. It wouldn't be too hard to color the walls in or something, would it?

That is awesome! I am excited to see the final product. I really like this style of game. A callback to a simpler time.

Looks pretty solid to me. That dungeon perspective is kind of bland though. It wouldn't be too hard to color the walls in or something, would it?
No it wouldn't, I'll get started on that right away. :P Thanks for the feedback!
That is awesome! I am excited to see the final product. I really like this style of game. A callback to a simpler time.
Haha, thanks! I'm a big fan of the Etrian Odyssey series which is where the gameplay gets a lot of its inspiration from.

This looks great, shows real promise! I'm a little surprised by the talk of having set party members with their own abilities, because I love the Etrian Odyssey series too and always liked creating my own characters and choosing classes, and then spending points on skill trees. But I understand that can be more complicated than designing specific characters with abilities just on level up, and ultimately you gotta make the game you want to make. :)

always liked creating my own characters and choosing classes, and then spending points on skill trees.
This so much.

This looks great, shows real promise! I'm a little surprised by the talk of having set party members with their own abilities, because I love the Etrian Odyssey series too and always liked creating my own characters and choosing classes, and then spending points on skill trees. But I understand that can be more complicated than designing specific characters with abilities just on level up, and ultimately you gotta make the game you want to make. :)
You aren't going to be able to design your own characters as the characters are specific to the story. I guess it's more akin to Etrian Odyssey Untold in that regard. Although I may consider implementing something like a skill tree in the future. Currently you just learn new skills automatically as you level up.

Maybe a Dungeon Crawler part 2 will include personalized party members? What about armor, and weapons? Do we get to buy/sell/customize our weaponry at all? It would be pretty spiffy to be able to add a +1 to strength with a sword. +1 to agility with lightened scale boots.

Maybe a Dungeon Crawler part 2 will include personalized party members?
Guh... I've been spending weeks on this, it will be weeks more. I don't want to think of a sequel right now. ><
What about armor, and weapons? Do we get to buy/sell/customize our weaponry at all? It would be pretty spiffy to be able to add a +1 to strength with a sword. +1 to agility with lightened scale boots.
Maybe? This isn't currently part of the game, although you have money and I haven't implemented any sort of shop yet, so I'm not sure what I'll add at the moment. --- Also, as per request, I've colored in the walls, and the walls will now be different colors depending on the dungeon you're in. I also made the buttons on the battle screen look a bit nicer.

Awesome!

I agree, that looks awesome! Those minor changes made a big visual impact. I didn't mean to suggest a sequel before you even release this one haha. Just merely throwing an idea out there if there does end up being a second one. Old school Final fantasy job classes meet etrian odyssey. A match made in heaven. I can't wait to get to the point where I could consider a project of this caliber.

Any new progress on the game?

Any new progress on the game?
Yes, I've added a few things.
  • The enemy name is not colored red anymore, it's colored based on its difficulty relative to you. So if it's red, you should run, if it's green, it should be no problem, and if it's yellow, it's your same level.
  • I got a few abilities working. Alis can learn "strengthen" to add attack buffs and Henry can learn "Waterheal" which heals the entire party and can revive fallen party members.
  • I have a working shop where you can buy new weapons and armor for your party.
  • I've been doing a lot of balancing as the game still doesn't feel balanced enough to me.
I will probably release a demo of the game once I can get the second piece of artwork. I also recently figured out that this game runs poorly on the original 3DS, since I use the n3DS. I'm going to work on adding some code to detect your model to try and fix most the problems but I don't know how I'm going to fix the issue with loading times. I don't know of an efficient way to draw an image to the screen. I transferred over the image file from my computer and I draw it to the screen just by reading pixel by pixel and drawing it to the screen using GPSET. It draws it fast enough on the n3DS but slowly on the original 3DS. It also requires loading the entire image before it can draw it, which makes the game require a loading screen, and on the old 3DS that loading screen takes quite a bit of time. There's probably a lot more efficient way to do this in SmileBASIC but I'm not too experienced with it, so if someone could inform me of it that would be most helpful.

Oh, I'm sorry! I hope someone can help you soon. You could ask on the Forums or in the Chat I suppose.

I haven't looked at your code for this, but have you thought about building the screen back to front, piece by piece? For example, look at these sections: Those two parts of the screen will either be "diagonal" like they are in that image, "straight" if there's empty corridor to the right or left of the player, or nothing at all if there's no wall there, revealing what would be behind those strips. Those chunks of the screen will always be in one of those three states. Same for the wall section that would be in the middle between them (in this image there's nothing there) and everything else beyond it. You could use the GRP/BG commands I told you about in the other thread you made on drawing techniques, and build the screen by checking individual map tiles within the player's view and drawing section by section as outlined above.

I haven't looked at your code for this, but have you thought about building the screen back to front, piece by piece? For example, look at these sections: -snip- Those two parts of the screen will either be "diagonal" like they are in that image, "straight" if there's empty corridor to the right or left of the player, or nothing at all if there's no wall there, revealing what would be behind those strips. Those chunks of the screen will always be in one of those three states. Same for the wall section that would be in the middle between them (in this image there's nothing there) and everything else beyond it. You could use the GRP/BG commands I told you about in the other thread you made on drawing techniques, and build the screen by checking individual map tiles within the player's view and drawing section by section as outlined above.
The screen already works by building the individual walls based on the map tiles in front of you. Here's an example of me looking down a corridor: Here's an example of me taking a step into the corridor: Here's an example of looking down a hallway with a path open directly to the right of me: Here's an example of a wall directly to the right of me and in front of me but a path directly to the left of me: Here's a path that goes up for one space but then turns: It draws the walls using lines and triangles.

Ah ok. From above it sounded like you were copying an image pixel by pixel to the screen, I assumed you had a different picture for every combination of corridors or something.

Ah ok. From above it sounded like you were copying an image pixel by pixel to the screen, I assumed you had a different picture for every combination of corridors or something.
No, the image I was copying is this one: Although now I've taken advice from the thread and converted the PPM file to an array using GSAVE and saved that to a file, so now I can easily load and display it nearly instantly using LOAD then GLOAD.