Let's build a Dungeon Crawler with Hollywood-MAL!

The place for any Hollywood tutorials
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Allanon
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Re: Let's build a Dungeon Crawler with Hollywood-MAL!

Post by Allanon »

Episode 3 is out!
:)
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Juan Carlos
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Re: Let's build a Dungeon Crawler with Hollywood-MAL!

Post by Juan Carlos »

Well, the two problems to make a rol game is firts choose the engine 2D or 3D and make all code and second also very complicated get the graphics and sounds a big job for only one programmer, the good you can make the game for all computer systems.
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airsoftsoftwair
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Re: Let's build a Dungeon Crawler with Hollywood-MAL!

Post by airsoftsoftwair »

jalih wrote: Mon Apr 01, 2019 10:45 am but have been thinking about fixing my old game framework for Hollywood
Yeah, please come back, we need more talented programmers like you :)
Bugala
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Re: Let's build a Dungeon Crawler with Hollywood-MAL!

Post by Bugala »

Interesting read again. However, at this point I think it is good to remind you about the only thing you ever need to worry about when making decisions regarding your game: "Is it fun?"

That is really the only question you ever need to worry about. I for example have thought multiple different leveling up systems for RPGs, but in the end I have come to conclusion that gain x amount of xp and gain next level is actually the most fun of them. Yes, it can lead to lot of unrealistic things like thief becomes expert at picking locks without actually ever picking a lock etc. But you just cant beat the fun of being in middle of battle almost dead and noticing you need only 10 more XP to next level, and then you beat one bastard from the screen, reach next level and have you HP full again. Realistic? no. Fun? Yeah!

However, fun can be achieved in many ways, one can be that exactly having everything realistic can be the reason something is fun. For example skeletons having defence against piercing and weakness against bluntness, that is basically actually a fun idea, however, you need to be careful with its execution. Mainly I am after that players dont usually like being confused, but they like to grasp all the things in game. So if there multiple similar things like that, and then they are just thrown there to the player, players dont usually like it since they dont feel like they have much control as they are just confused about everything. But, lets take the exact opposite. We have system where you have weapon making x damage, and enemy having y shield. Batlle is now simply x-y=damage, no other modifiers here. Is it fun? For a start yeah, but when you have played the game for a while, you would appreciate if there would be more, like piercing, blunt modifier. Solution? Learning curve.

You start the game by giving player only one type of weapon, and only one type of enemy. Then when he gets grasp of those things, then he starts getting piercing, blunt weapons, and piercing, blunt enemies. after a while, you can add the next thing, like water/fire resistance etc.

This way you can have game that is complex, and yet, player doesnt feel confused, which equals even more fun.

If you put all those systems to play right from beginning, then chances are player never bothers learning them and feels just confused. There is however exception to this rule. Some people specifically find so called Rogue kind of games fun, especially when they are not instructed about anything but have to find out everything themselves. Personally i often dislike this rogue approach, but I can easily see why it is fun for some people, because it is the fun of discovery there, you are bit like scientist finding out there that actually piercing weapon doesnt do much damage to skeleton and blunt ones do.

There is also one more thing to notice, especially in things like piercing/blunt thing. Some ideas can be both fun and not fun at all at same time. I will take example from Zelda breath of the wind. In this Zelda it keeps raining every now and then. It creates nice effect to world and gives some more realism etc. by otherwords, fun.

However, it also makes climbing mountains practically impossible when raining since they are slippery when raining. Now this can be lot of fun when you are running away from enemy thinking of getting up the mountain to safety, and then your way is cut out because it starts raining. This gives you panic etc. and makes you need to make a new plan. Which is mostly more excitement and lot of fun. However, there is another aspect to this. Often in this game I am traveling to some specific location which includes climbing these mountains, and then it starts raining. There is no danger any where which would make the situation turn exciting or anything, I am just simply standing beneath the mountain with no danger anywhere and it starts raining. What happens now is, that I will wait for 2 minutes still in front of TV, just waiting for that darned rain to stop. This is no fun at all. It is unfun enough that I might even turn off switch completely. So yes, that rain is fun when it happens to work as random factor in middle of exciting moment, making that moment even more exciting, or giving good mood to traveling around, but it is complete ruiner when it happens at point you are planning to climb up yet another mountain. There is no fun in standing still for 2 minutes without having anything to do but wait for rain to stop. They should have given Zelda a spell or something which you could use to get the rain away. Spell slow enough that you dont have time to use it on battles, but one that you can use when waiting to climb that mountain up with no danger in sight at all.

This blunt/piercing weapon idea basically sounds fun, but I can also see a potential problem there. For I would really hate if the game would change into a game where most of my time goes in chaging the weapon in use. That lets say there comes skeleton, ogre, skeleton, ogre, skeleton, ogre attack. Instead of having fun in fighting them, I would be spending most of my time changing from blunt weapon to piercing to blunt to piercing, no fun at all. Unless you are able to make changing the weapon fun of course. There are nowadays these shootemup games which are based upon this idea basically, that there comes red and blue enemies, and you have red and blue bullet weapons. Blue bullets work only to blue ones, and red ones to red. And this is fun, since whole mechanic is based upon this.

By the way, there is easy solution to this blunt/piercing weapon changing problem. If your party can have more than one hero, then one can have piercing, another blunt, and then it is fun again, since it is part of the fun in trying to figure out a strategy on how to get the piercing guy in front of skeletons and blunt guy in front of ogres. Sometimes it might happen that the piercing guy is surrounded and trapped by skeletons, and that is just part of the fun in trying to get the blunt guy there to free the piersing guy and get the piercing guy back to hitting ogres.
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Allanon
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Re: Let's build a Dungeon Crawler with Hollywood-MAL!

Post by Allanon »

Hi Bugala and thank you very much for partecipating in this discussion, it helps a lot all of us to grow in game development and game design which is a very important point and directly connected to the "fun factor" you are talking about. Great reading!

I understand perfectly what you say, I'm an old RPG player and I like Rogue-like games even if sometimes I'd like to crash everything around me because of a sudden death :D

What I'm trying to do is to write a flexible engine, flexible enough to tune the entire game to the desired level of difficulty. The most difficult thing, I think, will come when this parameters should be tuned to reach that said "fun factor". Items, weapons, armors, treasures, spells: all this stuff should be designed carefully and should made available in the game in time with the potential enemies wandering in the dungeons.

Enemies like skeletons are not totally immune to pierce damage, maybe they could have a 50% damage reduction from piercing damage: all is in how the variables are tuned whitin the engine.

:D
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lazi
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Re: Let's build a Dungeon Crawler with Hollywood-MAL!

Post by lazi »

Please consider action based experience system just like in Dungeon Master. It was a very good system which rise different skills by different actions. If you played it you know what I mean, anyway let me know if you need more info on that.
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Allanon
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Re: Let's build a Dungeon Crawler with Hollywood-MAL!

Post by Allanon »

Hi Lazi,
Years are passed and my memory is blurred :D

Using skills to improve them is on my list, I think you are referring to this :)
If you have detailed informations about DM exp system, I'd like to read how they implemented it, otherwise I'll do it in my own way ;)
Bugala
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Re: Let's build a Dungeon Crawler with Hollywood-MAL!

Post by Bugala »

If i correctly remember, in Dungeon master for example spells wortked so that there were 6 different spell characters, and by combining these characters right, you could right from beginning do any spell. Except in practice not since you also needed certain amount of experience to perform them. More you used the spell, the better you became doing it, so basically you could keep doing same spell continuously and get better. Bit similar to Faery Tale adventures keep hitting turtle on back to gain levels, but better.

It worked fine in Dungeon Master and especially with that spell system, but we are talking of real time RPG here, in your case you are talking of turn based RPG, so at least direct ripoff is unlikely to work very well.
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lazi
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Re: Let's build a Dungeon Crawler with Hollywood-MAL!

Post by lazi »

Here is a detailed documentation on the Dungeon Master experience system:
http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/692

To sum it shortly: every action generates some experience, not just killing foes. And even a fighter can cast spells with enough training.
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Allanon
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Re: Let's build a Dungeon Crawler with Hollywood-MAL!

Post by Allanon »

Well, the system I have in mind (the core engine) provides both the experience systems:
-> more usage = more power
-> power attached to one or more character's attributes.

It's up to the game designer to adjust these levels to reach the optimal point.

In my personal opinion it should be a balance of both, let's say a thief gets a book to learn the spell "fire ball", in the spell structure there are some requisites the character need to meets to learn the spell, for example let's say a minimum of 30 in "Intelligence". Our thief has 31 INT so he can learn the spell.
The spell is linked to the character's INT attribute and when INT increases the spell damage increases too, but a thief will put his bonus points in other attributes like Dexterity to enhance his thief abilities.

Now the thief can put all of his bonus point on INT but this way he will transform into an hybrid class (and I like very much this), so that the power of his spells increase.
Using that "fire ball" spell also make him more able in that specific spell allowing him to increase the damage he can do, but in may opinion the biggest damage increase would come from the linked character's attributes,

As I said, the most difficult part will be to balance all the game internal systems to make the game fun and challenging :)
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