Blobber Development

[LarryTyphoid]

Blobbers seem like a popular genre to develop here, so I figured it'd be a good idea to have a dedicated thread.

One solid resource is this page on dungeoncrawlers.org, which includes free assets, tools for creating graphics and maps, and tutorials for first-person dungeon crawlers in multiple different popular gamedev engines.

There's also Gardens of Imagination, a dedicated book for first-person maze games published in the 90s. It can be ordered online for pretty cheap, but there aren't any PDF scans out there. The code used in the book is written for VGA DOS machines and so you can't go around copy and pasting code, but you can find maze-drawing algorithms and other bits of advice. Unfortunately, its resources for turn-based, 2D games is limited, because it starts going into raytracing and real-time 3D graphics rendering sometime after the third chapter.

Game Developers Magazine has multiple entries on turn-based 3D mazes, starting at issue 4. I haven't read through them all myself, but a lot of it does focus on VGA rendering which isn't going to help that much working with modern computers.

I'm sure there are better resources out there but these are the few I'm aware of. There are also threads on this very forum like this thread by Grauken, in which multiple devs give their insights on how to implement different maze layouts.

 

[Sunri]

This is great, thank you.

 

[Rincewind]

To create a good oldschool dungeon crawler these days, you need a good level designer and a good pixel artist. The rest is trivial, and the music (or the lack thereof) is unimportant. SFX and environmental sounds are easy to create.

 

[Sunri]

https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/5887541/artworks?p=1 very cool stuff from the resources, unlucky that you need black background for it to work

 

[Bester]

https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/5887541/artworks?p=1 very cool stuff from the resources, unlucky that you need black background for it to work

What is this? It can't be CC0, can it?

 

[LarryTyphoid]

The thing I'm struggling with right now relates to that "thin walls vs thick walls" discussion. Since thinking about it, I've figured that I need to tackle it now in order to start properly designing mazes, but in order to do so I'm going to need to make an easy way to create those mazes. If I'm using a two-dimensional array of structs, or two different two-dimensional arrays (as were two solutions to the issue mentioned in that thread), then I'll probably need a way to lay out the maze besides manually editing code. It'd probably be best to have maze layouts in easily editable text files, but then I still need a way to generate that output. It was recommended to me before, in the general gamedev thread, to make my own tile mapping utility; I was hoping to avoid this by using pre-existing software like Grid Cartographer, but GC outputs them in a way I really have no idea what to do with, so it looks like I'll have to take that advice after all.

Rincewind, as a developer of your own mapping utility, do you have any advice on how to make a rudimentary tool of my own solely for the purposes of my own game? I'm a complete rookie at that kind of thing.

 

[grimace]

Yes to blobbers.

No to anime art.

 

[Justinian]

If you're not an artist, you will use the art you have and not the art you want.

I think fantasy drawings/"realistic" anime is the way to go myself. The Elminage games really nailed character/monster design. I also think the character art in the later (6+) m&m games still holds up well.

A more "important" question, what does everyone think the optimal number of items you can equip is?

Right now I'm partial to:

Mandatory
Helmet
Back (coat, cloak, banner, more exotic shit like carrying the coffin of an ancient lich for a necromancer)
Armor (including legs and pauldrons, i think having item slots for the sake of having item slots is dumb and "I found the legendary pants king Arthur's crotch rubbed against" is silly)
Left/Right hand (1h weapons, 2h weapons, etc)
Alternate weapons. Or separate melee/ranged item slots.
Ring/Amulet slots: I think these items should be special and maybe provide some active abilities unique to them rather than just be more passive stat boosts.

Optional
Belt/sash
Boots
Gloves
Class specific item slots
I think 5 armor slots is a good number. Less is better unless you do something really cool with the additional slots. And nobody does anything cool with pants/pauldrons. Gloves/boots can be separate if they have unique uses (IE: unarmed effects for gloves, winged boots that let you levitate/fly, etc.)

 

[CryptRat]

The thing I'm struggling with right now relates to that "thin walls vs thick walls" discussion. Since thinking about it, I've figured that I need to tackle it now in order to start properly designing mazes, but in order to do so I'm going to need to make an easy way to create those mazes. If I'm using a two-dimensional array of structs, or two different two-dimensional arrays (as were two solutions to the issue mentioned in that thread), then I'll probably need a way to lay out the maze besides manually editing code. It'd probably be best to have maze layouts in easily editable text files, but then I still need a way to generate that output. It was recommended to me before, in the general gamedev thread, to make my own tile mapping utility; I was hoping to avoid this by using pre-existing software like Grid Cartographer, but GC outputs them in a way I really have no idea what to do with, so it looks like I'll have to take that advice after all.

Rincewind, as a developer of your own mapping utility, do you have any advice on how to make a rudimentary tool of my own solely for the purposes of my own game? I'm a complete rookie at that kind of thing.

If you're looking for the simplest possible editor, just reading and writing on simple text files looking like that :

BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW
BW IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC BW
BW IC BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB IC BW
BW IC BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB BB EN BB BB BB IC BW
BW IC BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB BB EN BB BB BB IC BW
BW IC BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB BB EN BB BB BB IC BW
BW IC BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB BB EN BB BB BB IC BW
BW IC BB BB EN EN EN EN BB BB EN BB BB BB EN BB BB BB IC BW
BW IC BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB BB EN BB BB BB IC BW
BW IC BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB BB BB BB BB BB IC BW
BW IC BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB EN BB BB BB EN BB BB BB IC BW
BW IC BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB BB IC BW
BW IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC IC BW
BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW BW

There's nothing else you can do with it, just loading/saving/drawing maps using this exact set of tiles.

Then here you go, I just made this : https://www.sendspace.com/file/xoet0y

The editor looks like this :

When you create a new map you need to type the width and length exactly this way width;length (with the semi-colon)
Also a file you want to load must be a .txt .

 

[LarryTyphoid]

There's nothing else you can do with it, just loading/saving/drawing maps using this exact set of tiles.

Then here you go, I just made this : https://www.sendspace.com/file/xoet0y

You got any tips on how you went about developing this?

 

[CryptRat]

Not really, with my very basic programming skills I'm probably doing that like it's prehistory, the displaying part especially.

Of game data I've got : An enum with the types of tile. Tile, with a type. A 2D array of tiles.
Of data specific to the editor also a type of tile for the current active type of tile (used to change).

Regarding displaying, inside a window I display images based on which tiles are in the array (just advance coordinates of a distance equal to the width/height of the image). Also when you click inside the window, the code checks the coordinates of the cursor and if they correspond to the inside of an image then it changes the type of the corresponding tile of the array (the displaying should completely update, you don't directly trigger the exact displaying change needed to be done). The other window is the same, give or take, just change the single active type of tile instead of modifying what's displayed there.

Now I know that's of about no help, you'll need to look for some tutorial (or even just some answer to some question on stackoverflow) about "parsing text files", "loading/saving files" and "displaying a window" at very least.

 

[Norfleet]

I propose making a blobber where the characters of the blob are actually just the individual bodyparts of the protagonist character, each of which may perform an action every turn of combat, like punching if you are an arm or kicking if you are a leg. If one of the arms or legs gets killed, you could replace them with a new hook or peg character.