Incline WORLD'S GREATEST GENERIC RPG BLOBBER ENGINE : "VAULT OF TERROR"

[rusty_shackleford]

I have a nervous condition where I shop for assets day and night with an eagle eye. You have to go through thousands of pages of junk artwork before you find the real gems AAA quality stuff here and there. I look on the Unity store, GameDevMarket, GameDevelopersStudio, Scirra, SuperGameArt, Itch.io, Craftpix and a bunch of other sites, some of them so obscure I almost end up with an exclusive license to the artwork because nobody else knows that site even exists (some in Japan). I have that addict's thrill when I spot some good stuff like women who buy shoes. When I saw those dinosaurs go up on the Unity Store I burnt a hole in my pocket paying for them with my credit card, I could see they were perfect for a Wizardry style "Lost World" game.

A bit off-topic, I hope you don't mind.

How do you organize all your assets? Do you dump them in folders immediately or tag them with a program or just crank your memory and zero down to the date and somehow find it then?

I ask because information management has really become popular in the last two years with Notion, Roam and others (Org-mode, Obsidian) implementing Zettelkasten and basic digital hierarchal note-taking. You obviously go through a lot of information, and I'm wondering if you might have a rule of thumb or some sort of maxim that you follow to keep everything manageable.

The way I'd organize assets is to keep them in named folders (just the genre of the assets) and then put it in hierarchal folders (Maybe something like "gameAssets/spaceBlobber/goodAssets/characters/by-occupation/astronaut"). I'd also preserve the modification / creation time.

Standard directory-based file systems are bad for organizing files based on intent.
What you're looking for is a Semantic file system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_file_system

Consider how you save a webpage bookmark and it asks you to categorize it. You might give it a couple categories based on the aspects of the page you're saving. That's effectively a semantic file system.
TMSU is a good option if you're on linux, I've yet to explore others but I mean to get around to it eventually.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The art is very nice? Curious did you hire a team of artists?

Cleve has never shied away about using asset store assets as they allow a single person(or small team) to get a lot more done than what would otherwise be possible.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

The art is very nice? Curious did you hire a team of artists?

Cleve has never shied away about using asset store assets as they allow a single person(or small team) to get a lot more done than what would otherwise be possible.

If I had paid for an artist to do this work as I did with Grimoire I'd be $50,000 into this game by now. As it stands with expenses for the assets I have probably spent less than $4,000 so far including all tools and Unity libraries.

As I get more efficient in reusing this engine, that cost is going to go down. POST-ATOMIC is likely going to cost less than $1,000 without counting my time and the following RPG after that will be less than $500 in asset costs.

 

[luj1]

What are some differences and similarities between Vault of Terror and Grimoire?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

What are some differences and similarities between Vault of Terror and Grimoire?

Vault of Terror is probably going to be loosely based on the game he originally released in 1986 under the same name for the Ahoy! Commodore 64 magazine Issue #34.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

What are some differences and similarities between Vault of Terror and Grimoire?

Both blobbers, both turn based and dungeon crawlers with similar mechanics of combat, lockpicking, forcing doors. Both with many shared character classes, spells and persistent effects.

There will be a character creator in Vault of Terror just as there is one in Grimoire.

I am thinking of calling these games "The Lemurian Saga" to distinguish them from Hyperborea and set them in an earlier era thousands of years before the events in Heralds of the Winged Exemplar.

I wish I could say there will be portability but I don't know yet..

 

[luj1]

But Vault of Terror less content, less features than Grimoire?

 

[Darth Canoli]

But Vault of Terror less content, less features than Grimoire?

I am only guesstimating but I say maybe 10 hours for a speed run, 40 hours for a normal playthrough.

So, only a third/fourth of Grimoire's content but released 20 times faster...

Spoiler

Or at least we hope it'll be...

 

[Catacombs]

Will Vault of Terror have the ability to Alt+Tab?

 

[luj1]

Thats like 1/10th of Grimoire

What about features?

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Will Vault of Terror have the ability to Alt+Tab?

With Unity a lot comes out of the box including basic fullscreen/windowed mode behaviour and there is also a natural API to Steam achievements and cloud storage.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Tasteful defeat screen for when the party has been slain ... must-have in all blobbers ...

... tried to run from undead sorcerer ... failed to flee and even Wilmer the pig was barbecued ...

... the pets are supposed to have different animal skull for death portrait but have not been able to come up with them yet ...

Pets cannot advance levels but should they be resurrected at the temple if dead less than 7 days?

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Been looking for a way to edit tiled maps for a blobber. My little demo map is ready to toss out and want to start work on real maps of the game. Not just for this game but for every other blobber I intend to make with it. Need something like original Grimoire editor - draw a line of walls, draw floors, drop objects and place features with a single click from palette. Old fashioned interface but very quick click and create once you know how it works. Random creation might be useful about 20% of the time to start the map off, then have to customize it.

1. Tried random generation. A long time to set up and although it is working it's just not what I was looking for.
2. Tried primitive grid clicker editor I got for free. Better but not very fluid workflow.
3. Tried crude block placer that is actually depreciated, no longer sold on asset store and very inefficient batching of blocks, starts to run slowly after map gets a little bigger.

I want to design the map with maximum speed, not spend hours clicking vertex locking for each and every panel. Needs to be set out on a grid and always same distance for blobber controller. Best would be a 2D topdown editor and then generate 3D automatically from simplified symbolic design and output map layout as prefab ready to be instantiated in game.

I bought Tileworld editor for Unity a couple years ago and immediately discovered it had a ton of bugs and did not batch geometry very well.

Just got the upgrade for this tool for $9 on Black Friday on Unity Store and already it is looking sweet. Made my first dungeon map in about 10 seconds. Not too shabby.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/tileworldcreator-3-199383

Can see this working well for the wastelands in POST-ATOMIC as well. Could probably make entire post-apoc desert with this in 20 minutes and be ready to roll. No more 25 year dev cycles for me, my sanity can't take it. I have collected a ton of blobber 3D modular architecture over the years and it just has to be added to the palette to make caves, ruins, graveyard, wilderness etc.

 

[Dorateen]

Pets cannot advance levels but should they be resurrected at the temple if dead less than 7 days?

To differentiate from the other party members, it might be interesting to make pets unable to be resurrected, and the player has to find a replacement. But if these animal friends die too easily, just as well make them able to be brought back.

 

[Caim]

Pets cannot advance levels but should they be resurrected at the temple if dead less than 7 days?

To differentiate from the other party members, it might be interesting to make pets unable to be resurrected, and the player has to find a replacement. But if these animal friends die too easily, just as well make them able to be brought back.

Or make pets easier to raise because they're not sapient.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Pets cannot advance levels but should they be resurrected at the temple if dead less than 7 days?

To differentiate from the other party members, it might be interesting to make pets unable to be resurrected, and the player has to find a replacement. But if these animal friends die too easily, just as well make them able to be brought back.

I thought of pets as semi-disposable. If you really want to keep them, move them to the back row and select DEFEND for their combat action each round. I was going to add a special modifier to make them able to dodge most attacks and even be excluded from row effects if they are in this mode. So they can be kept safe in combats for the most part but once killed, can be replaced by others by going to the stable in town and looking through their menagerie.

 

[Falkner]

Tell me about the character system. Attributes, skills, so on.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

I found an almost perfect tool. I have been working on the Mines of Merlin with it.

Since my prefabs have both ceilings and floors in most cases, it is literally possible to click a substantial map together in seconds.

If you ever want to work on a blobber and need the perfect tool in Unity, be sure to try this one :

https://www.fertilesoilproductions.com/mast

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Been looking for a way to edit tiled maps for a blobber. My little demo map is ready to toss out and want to start work on real maps of the game. Not just for this game but for every other blobber I intend to make with it. Need something like original Grimoire editor - draw a line of walls, draw floors, drop objects and place features with a single click from palette. Old fashioned interface but very quick click and create once you know how it works. Random creation might be useful about 20% of the time to start the map off, then have to customize it.

1. Tried random generation. A long time to set up and although it is working it's just not what I was looking for.
2. Tried primitive grid clicker editor I got for free. Better but not very fluid workflow.
3. Tried crude block placer that is actually depreciated, no longer sold on asset store and very inefficient batching of blocks, starts to run slowly after map gets a little bigger.

I want to design the map with maximum speed, not spend hours clicking vertex locking for each and every panel. Needs to be set out on a grid and always same distance for blobber controller. Best would be a 2D topdown editor and then generate 3D automatically from simplified symbolic design and output map layout as prefab ready to be instantiated in game.

I bought Tileworld editor for Unity a couple years ago and immediately discovered it had a ton of bugs and did not batch geometry very well.

Just got the upgrade for this tool for $9 on Black Friday on Unity Store and already it is looking sweet. Made my first dungeon map in about 10 seconds. Not too shabby.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/tileworldcreator-3-199383

Can see this working well for the wastelands in POST-ATOMIC as well. Could probably make entire post-apoc desert with this in 20 minutes and be ready to roll. No more 25 year dev cycles for me, my sanity can't take it. I have collected a ton of blobber 3D modular architecture over the years and it just has to be added to the palette to make caves, ruins, graveyard, wilderness etc.

Check out Grid Cartographer, it's a multi-purpose tool that includes general grid-based mapping. People use it for mapping out older games, pnp mapping, and video game development(has a variety of export formats)
https://gridcartographer.com/
There's a thread for it here:
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/grid-cartographer-best-tool-for-drawing-classic-rpg-maps.92853/

The devs of vaporum used it when designing their levels. You'd have to write an importer for it of course, but I'm sure you could figure it out.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

Tell me about the character system. Attributes, skills, so on.

It will be an almost carbon copy of Grimoire except with vast improvements to the math and probabilities. It will also work off the 7 point FUDGE system instead of 1-100 for attributes.

This sets up this data to be in the sluice as the bedrock for Grimoire II when it goes full 3D. I will be perfecting the engine math in this version which uses 2D sprites for the monsters.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Looks like the one on the bottom right is turning into a Lich...

Just got the upgrade for this tool for $9 on Black Friday on Unity Store and already it is looking sweet. Made my first dungeon map in about 10 seconds. Not too shabby.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/level-design/tileworldcreator-3-199383

This kind of ten seconds is how you end up developing a games for 20 years...

I was thinking about a RPG project i had yesterday, I think I'll call it Grimoire and ... how the hell did my beard reached the ground in a day?
Now I think of it, I feel a bit hungry...

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

I realized tonight that there is a way to make the entire resource database chunk an all-purpose Fudge RPG engine for all genres by adding "Enabled" flags to nearly every attribute, resistance, armor type, character class, race, condition ...

I had originally thought, the way to start a new genre game would be to copy the old database over and then adding things like the character classes, races, etc. to the new database.

Then I realized I could lump all needed properties and attributes into one gigantic engine database. For Post-Apocalyptic games, armor like Laser, Plasma would be checked as enabled, "Acid" and "System" enabled as shared with Fantasy RPGs and "Magic" turned off and "Psionics" on for Cyberpunk and Post-Apoc, Sci-fi etc. ... you'd have the "Wizard" class disabled and the "Hacker" class turned on in Cyberpunk ...

This would be a basic transmission of the Fudge All-Purpose ruleset into digital form, just like in the manual.

With the database changed to an AssetBundle, only the enabled data scripted objects would be loaded and the disabled elements left out of the final builds in both debug and deployment.

This is nearly ideal in terms of efficiency for a one-man development house. It literally could not get any better. I would never have understood how to do all this in a single engine when I started on Grimoire.

I can gravitate this same code into real 3D enemies and even semi-blobber navigation (like new Bard's Tale in certain areas) without changing a line of code. I can probably store both blobber movement and checkpoint movement in the same Player Object that moves around.

P.S. I am almost crapping in my pants with excitement because it occurred to me by including a bit field with every single property in the database listing the genres, I can make properties set themselves on and off just by consulting a master singleton value set to the genre. Some properties could have a bit set for Fantasy and Steampunk and simply by setting the master variable to "Steampunk" BOOM instant ruleset for that genre.

 

[Fluent]

Fantastic Cleveland Mark Blakemore ! Sounds like u really know exactly what you're doing. Can't wait to see the finished product man! Still going strong in Grimoire. About 40 solid hours in and at the waterway trying to perform the last funeral rite. Take care sir!! Much love!

 

[Nifft Batuff]

The graphics screams generic mobile game.

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

The graphics screams generic mobile game.

Good, it has to run on mobile and Nintendo Switch.