2D Action-RPG, alpha-test

Hi all,

I've been working on this Action-RPG game for the past few months, in my spare time. The game is essentially an action rogue-like. The gameplay is inspired by various rouge-like titles, such as Diablo. The graphics are inspired by SketchFighter 4000 Alpha, most of them will be eventually reworked, but will remain simple. The controls are actually inspired by FPS games (wsad control scheme) for a more action-like feel.

You'll notice that the environments are rather bare, and uninteresting. That is because everything is randomly generated, and there just isn't much detail in my map generators, yet. Randomization will play big part in the game, the players will be able to travel to an infinite amount of random islands/worlds whenever they please, and continue developing their character.

Overall there are many shortcuts I've taken with this project, from the simple graphics to the view angle. I realized at the start of the project that the most important thing I can do is figure out what I'm actually capable of creating in terms of graphics, in realistic time, and design the game around that style. Setting such limits right away was very liberating, I can create new content very quickly, without slaving over 3D modeling, creating textures, texture mapping, and other things I'm not very good at. With these shortcuts I can realistically see myself completing this project all on my own. Moreover, I think the resulting style has some charm, where as any 3d modeling/texturing I'm capable of would look really wrong.

Currently the game is in its alpha stage, if even that. There is still much left to do, but it's quite playable already. I was going to keep it under-wraps for much longer, but a friend of mine recently told me that the rotating screen makes him a little noxious. So I'm concerned that others might feel the same, and it's better if I know this now rather than later in the development. If you have a moment to spare please try it out and give me your opinion on the controls, and let me know if the rotation makes you ill! Also, please try the game in no-rotation mode (press ~), and see if that's any better, I much prefer the rotation mode myself, that's how I envisioned the game. Any other comments/opinions are very welcome!

Unfortunately I don't have a Unity Pro license, so I only have an OSX Universal binary available.

As a final note, if you plan on playing in fullscreen make sure the resolution you choose has the same aspect ratio as your display so that the view doesn't get stretched too far in one direction, this looks really bad when the view starts rotating!

 

I like the colours in there, from the gray in the beginning to the green of the trees. Well, this generally is in a early stage but just a few words for the player control. The steering obviously needs rework as neither rotating the world nor the character is the way to go. The first produces headaches and the second costs too much time. As usual with these games you better might want to offer a tolerance area in which the player can move and if he leaves this scroll the world. You might want to add two keys with which the player is able to rotate the world additional to this which can come in handy according to certain areas and gaming situations.

Good luck!

 

taumel,

I'm disappointed that it makes you dizzy as well. I obviously have to think of something else. Although I think I will keep the current control scheme as an option, I just like it so much myself

I considered what you said about the no-rotation mode being too slow. I assume you mean it takes too long to turn around and move in the direction you want to move (it's actually the same speed as with rotating screen, but less visual feedback I guess). What do you think about rotation that accelerates the longer you hold down the turn keys? I can't just make the rotation faster over-all because I will need very gradual rotation later on when I add ranged attacks.

I really want to avoid heavy mouse use, because that always cripples laptop users.

 

I would do it as i've written above as it seems to me the best user experience for such a game but of course a mouse would be the best input device for it.

Question is how many people serisously do play games without a mouse at all. Even for text work it's nice connecting an usb2 mouse to your laptop so i don't think this would be such an issue. Anyway if you want you can also add a wasd steering to such controls as well but a mouse would be nicer of course as you can also use the distance to your player for travelling speed and so on.

[Didn't Morgan plan to develop a unity frontend to something like nethack/angband some time ago?]

 

That was awesome. I walked around the overworld for a bit killing slimes. Then I went into that cave network and got pretty much through the whole first floor, fighting slimes, giant slimes, gnome assassins, and *gulp* that Goliath guy! Then I left the caves to check out the town, but when I got there and pressed space, the game seemingly froze. I pressed escape and a menu came up. I chose Save from the menu and then that froze too. D:

 

taumel,

I get what you're saying with the tolerance level and scrolling, but doesn't that remind you too much of older games that could only page in so much of the world at a time and required the occasional scrolling/paging-in due to that limitation? Modern games of this type, ie Diablo, Dungeon Siege, Mythos, Titan Quest all feature constant and smooth scrolling, not scrolling once the player hits a boundary.

Moldorma,

I thought I squashed that town bug Can you see if starting a new character has the same result? Its too bad you couldn't get into town, there are quests to be gotten there! What system are you running on? A friend of mine experienced the same bug, but I haven't seen it on my PPC Mac Mini yet.

 

I love this. A combo of classic HnS RPGing and Alpha Sketch Fighter is a great, great combination. I've only played a few minutes with it and am LOVING it! Will report more later. Outstanding idea and great way of designing it.

Initial thoughts ... can you make the secondary palettes moveable? Or at least position them so they don't overlap, i.e., so that the player's inventory and character palettes are side by side and not at the same 0,0 position? It's difficult to navigate when on pops open on top of another and they have a transparency so you can see the one under the top one.

Also, use a neat font like the attached one instead of Arial in your GUI. Even at this stage of development.

Otherwise, I simply love this idea and can't wait to see it further developed.

PS. I don't mid the scrolling/moving one bit. That's just me though.

PPS. I hit the town bug too. Nothing but brown empty screen. Intel Core Duo iMac. 2GB RAM. X1600 256MB card. 10.5.1.

 

>>>
I get what you're saying with the tolerance level and scrolling, but doesn't that remind you too much of older games that could only page in so much of the world at a time and required the occasional scrolling/paging-in due to that limitation? Modern games of this type, ie Diablo, Dungeon Siege, Mythos, Titan Quest all feature constant and smooth scrolling, not scrolling once the player hits a boundary.
<<<

Nope in these games it also works this way. The steering gets way to hectic for a) the steering and b) for the eyes if you nail the character into the middle and scroll from this position only on. Therefore it needs this tolerance area in which a character can move without scrolling the world. This has nothing to do with page flipping.

For example you start to run towards one direction.
First only the character moves,
Then at a certain distance the world begins to scroll (and/orrotate according to your secondray movement input).
Then you stop and run back were you were coming from.
Again first the character moves and then after some time the world scrolling jumps in again.
Think of having a fight against some enemies for instance. You really don't want to scroll in such scene with each little step you make.

 

taumel,

I see, I'll give that a try, I'll see if I can make the camera chase the character around with a little lag.

DaveyJJ,

Thank you for the comments. You can move the different GUI windows around by dragging them by their title bars. The GUI system is temporary however. I will eventually re-skin it, and probably make it static. I like how Diablo and World of Warcraft does their GUI. It's static, can't be moved around, but very accessible and easy to use (not counting of course the endless GUI mods for WoW).

About the font, I'm actually using Fontin-Bold.ttf which I found online, do you not see it? Or does it just look too much like arial? I'm attaching it here. I do like the font you've attached, and I'll try it out, thanks for sharing it.

 

I love the idea of randomly generated terrain. However, the first landscape that was generated confined me to an island from which I could not escape! I had no idea what to do!

Also, although ~ is pronounced "tilda", it is actually spelled "tilde".

 

Jessy,

Yes, its possible to have invalid terrain generated that might trap/isolate you. I will fix this later, I just didn't bother yet. All I have to do is run a flood-fill algorithm then check if there are any isolated regions, if so, no problem, I'll just have the script toss the map away and make a new one until it creates a valid one. Thanks for trying it out. Did you have an problems with the rotating screen?

 

Not at all! I think that's a cool feature. However, I think it takes too long to turn around to beat stuff up, so I'd possibly just use this as an optional camera control. (To clarify, I am suggesting that you use this camera turn control along with a 4-way/analog movement scheme). People have been complaining about how bad the Tomb Raider/Resident Evil style controls are for years, so you may find this forward/backward/turn control style to be unpopular.

And if the screen turning does make people sick, I hear that eating ginger should help them out. A friend of mine did this to help him get back into FPS games, but after playing for a week, he was ok without ginger. Still, some people, especially with astigmatism, will be easily dizzied, no matter what. You can't please everyone.

 

My specs are really similar to DaveyJJ's

Intel Core Duo iMac. 1GB RAM. X1600 256MB card. 10.4.11

I don't have time right now to try it again, but I will tomorrow.

 

that's really cool so far - must have been quite a bit of scripting to get all that working.

the camera doesn't make me dizzy but the snap turning is a bit jarring - one thing you might try is to have a sort of smooth follow setup more like the default unity script but in 2d.

well done : )

 

Cute, very cute. I liked it quite a bit actually. I hit the town bug and that was a huge downer, but outside of that it was a solid gameplay experience and one of the last 2-3 projects that made me get off my ass and buy Indie

 

Glad you liked it! Stick around, there will be an update eventually. I'll also be looking for beta testers.

 

I wonder how long it will take till there will be a Katana+5 around. :O)

 

I'd like to reiterate all the previous kudos.

I was thinking that maybe adding a solid border around the screen or a thick bottom of the screen GUI element would lessen the dizzy factor. Just add a toggle for it in game and see if people have a preference.

I would also add some sound to combat ASAP, even if it's just placeholders. It really solidifies the playing experience. It gets the old reptile brain to say "Hey, this is real!"

-Carey

 

Well, I for one am not bothered by the the rotating world. Seems to be the best way to handle it. The game does seem oddly slow when turning if the world does not rotate. And faster in rotate mode would be problematical.

Are you left handed?

Your humanoid figure animations seem to attack only with their left hands.

I also have found that the current download <simplerpg_143.zip> does seem to have a bug trying to get into the city. Everytime I try it crashes the game, and if I do save and restart I'm stuck in a blank city square I can't get out of.

Speaking of which, I often get starting levels that have no city what so ever.

 

Haha, I am left handed. I didn't even realize my left-iness was translating into the game! I'll be reworking those animations eventually, especially to include more varieties of attacks.

Yes the town problem is a known bug in that version. I might have to post a new version sooner rather than later because a lot of people get quickly discouraged when they encounter that problem!

 

I just downloaded and tried it out. I simply love it. It reminds me of the old macintosh game Taskmaker. Although Taskmaker didn't have complex graphics, the game play was the best. I can't wait for this game to be finished. Also, when it's added to Unity, it would be fun to play this on the iPhone or iPod Touch. It seems the way the camera follows the player and the position of the visual perspective of the player would work great on the iPhone


Tomb of the Taskmaker (Taskmaker 2, 1998):

 

I agree, I like how the camera kind of rotates the world around the character. To me, it even adds just a bit more game play value and it visually looks nice.

 

Thank you GranitW. I'm glad you enjoyed it. The version in this thread is pretty old, I posted an update a while ago, be sure to check it out as well at:
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=9808

The next update will be even more interesting, some features that will appear in the next version are:
- Ranged weapons (bows/xbows)
- Two handed weapons
- Skill system, including spells
- Proper character attributes
- Proper AI (with pathfinding for the monsters)
- Loot with randomly generated attributes, for example you could find a Longsword, but you could also find a Knight's Longsword of Inferno which adds some attributes and fire damage to the weapon.
- Main dungeon with many levels (possibly infinite, currently 100), little supporting dungeons in the future.
- Healer in town, and player resurrection

In fact the next version will be almost feature complete, and after that I will be shifting gears towards creating more content, more monsters, more items, more skills. Once all that is done I'll have to do balancing.

Sorry for the rant, I'm a little excitable when it comes to talking about this project

 

What do you do when you die? Seems to me there should be a graveyard or something where you can resurrect if you die.. Also, I think a "You are now level x" message is a good thing to have. Very nice game, but the UI is rather lacking... Great job.