The hunt for the lost rainbow jewels

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#21

I feel very uncertain about the upperworld design. Should I go with a traditional “human” culture and design, or make something crystal-colorful looking? Since the game is about retrieving the lost rainbow jewels, a crystal-design upperworld would match the theme. But then, how does a place look in such a world where metalworks happen (to replace the blacksmith)? Or a general store?

It seems this project will need a long time with so many decisions to make …

Small news, but picking up items and dropping items works now. I’m working on graphics for “mines” style tunnels, but it might be above my head. I’ll see what I can do.

#22

I think it nice if the upperworld is kind of “ordinary”. Save the crystal levels for later in the game. Over all it´s nice to have a couple of different themed worlds/levels to mix it up, so if the upperworld is something that you return to a lot it´s nice to keep it a bit generic, RPG-esque. :slight_smile:

Btw, I´m really impressed with the speed you progress. You make it seem so simple with your almost daily updates. :slight_smile:

#23

Thanks for the feedback! Starting with a small town or settlement actually is easier, since I can draw from real settlements in design. So there will be the temple, and around it a small settlement with some merchants.

The coding is going fine currently, graphics design is time consuming but doable too, the actual game design feels like the hardest part.

I think once there is more “meat” in the project, like a combat and a magic system, coding will go much slower.

Honestly I have little more than the basics right now, a randomly generated map, and I’m currently working on some randomly distributed items and monsters to have a playground for further tests.

#24

I’ve decided to make the project open source, mostly in the hope that the option to include graphics and possible code from other open source projects will help the development. And finally I don’t expect to make money with this project anyways.

So the sources are now on Sourceforge, and I could also assemble a small demo, showcasing the current state of development:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhunt/files/r002/

I’m not sure what’s the best way to start a project which relies on native code on different systems, so I’ve only included a simple start.bat script which does the job for Windows. I expect that Unix/Mac OS need similar scripts, but particularly for Mac OS I have no idea at all.

PS: Comments on the item name prefixes and postfixes are welcome.
PPS: Other comments are welcome too ;D

#25

Mac is Unix based so you can get away with a .sh file for Mac. For Linux, you can usually go for a tarball.

#26

Making a start.sh should be doable. And somewhere I have a Linux VM to test it, too …

I’m slowly adding weapons, and work on a design for the starting settlement. Although I don’t like confined worlds, a fairly small world with the relevant places to adventure in seems to be the way to go. 7 jewels to find, that means 7 dungeons and similar to explore, and so much “world” to have locations for them. If possible I’d like to have several climates, greenland, sand/rock desert, snow/ice, swamp, jungle and maybe also undead/demonics places (catacombs, underworld).

It will take a while till I have all needed graphics even for the starting settlement.

I wonder if it’s alright to have an item called “Item transmogrification sphere”, which works similar to the horadric cube in Diablo II, or if I need to make up a new word for “transmogrification.” I actually like the word, and I couldn’t come up with good alternatives so far … seeing that “transmogrification” is a real English word, even an old one, I assume it should be fine to go for it. But on the other hand, Windows, Doors and Explorer have been trademarked and are even older words.

PS: “Transmogrification” isn’t in the Merriam-Webster thesaurus, but it pointed me to “transfiguration”, which has some nice synonyms, including transmutation and metamorphosis, which might be good starting points to make a cool item name for the sphere.

#27

Imagine …

Imagine if magic was very powerful, but also very dangerous. In most RPGs magic is dangerous only for the target, not the caster. But why? Imagine if an area blasted with a fireball of power remains glowing hot, or if stone even turns to lava there, making the area impassable for a while. If a frosted area will be so cold that your boots and gloves get stuck and four skin and flesh torn off if you touch anything there before it has warmed up again?

If a charged area is prone to random flashing arcs and lightnings for some time?

If a the caster needs elemental protection to be safe from the effects of their own spells?

Glowing terrain after some hits from fireballs:

735×528 124 KB

Do you think it will be interesting in a game to make magic really powerful but also dangerous in a game (a slower paced action RPG) or do you think it will be a bore?

… assuming enemies can’t use this sort of magic to instakill the player.

#28

Cannot say if it would be good or bad, but it would be at least something new and give more consequences to what the player does, so you should at least try it out!

#29

I think I will. I guess it can be quite a deathtrap though if monsters cast bad spell combinations at the player. But it might feel heroic to wade through bubbling lava, and acidic steam, fighting off hordes of baddies :smiley:

#30

That certainly sounds really cool!

I think you’d have to link each spell with complete visual cues to illustrate what’s going on (e.g changing the floor texture into a lava texture)

#31

Yes, for the big transitions (rock -> lava, water -> ice) there will have to be new textures. Some effects like glowing or frozen without a phase change, I guess it’s enough to color the texture. Lightnings will be difficult, but also interesting to make.

Currently I’m trying to set up a color scheme to indicate such conditions, also to color items in the inventory view according to their magic properties.

#32

Just want to say that this looks and feels like old school cRPGs such as Arcanum which I have made clear in other posts is one of my favorite games ever. I would love to help you on this, if you would like, in any way. shape. or form.

#33

Yes, I’ll appreciate any help very much. Since I made it open source it should be even easy, since we can use all the services that Sourceforge offers.

The areas which needs help most are game design ideas and graphics, particularly anything living and animated. While I have a rough outline of the world and the big quest arc, there will be a lot of small decisions to be made about locations, enemies and quests, and the past has shown that I’m not good at coming up with new ideas, so if you can help there, it will be great.

The only thing that I’m worried about, and which has made me abstain from asking for help yet, is my mental state. I’ve got a sort of OCD which can complicate things a lot, and anxiety related problems which at times make working together with other people very difficult. I really will enjoy to work with some people in a friendly cooperative group. I did so in the past, and it worked fine, then I had a serious breakdown from which I never really recovered. A sort of burn out/depression, real life accidents and losses, and being maltreated by people whom I had trusted.

I’ll try my best to be a good project partner, but maybe I can’t be the most reliable one.

Thank you for offering help. My own expertise is 15 years of professional Java development, almost 10 years of hobby C++ projects. I’ve got a good idea of object oriented program design, but usually I’m sloppy on methodologies and use whatever seems to the easiest way to solve a problem - the KISS principle. I used to overengineer solutions, then I made things too simple for a while and I hope that meanwhile I’m able to find good and easy solutions to many coding problems.

I have made an almost complete RPG in C++ before, if you want, you can take a look: http://sourceforge.net/projects/h-world/

To run it, you’ll need the “base” package and either the win32 or Linux exceutable package from here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/h-world/files/h-world/H-World%200.4.3.1/

All archives will unpack into a “h-world-demo” directory, and the files should end up in the right structure if you just unpack the archives.

Making this open source was the last thing I did before I quit software development for some years due to my bad health state during that time. My coding skills are about the same as back then, the graphics skills should be a bit better.

Before my breakdown I had been a team leader at work for some years, with a team of up to four people. I stepped down from this position on my own request, because my problems to stay in long meetings with other people made it impossible for me; seemingly I was able to hide my inner turmoil from customers and other people well till then though, and on good days I still can be quite professional. On bad days I’m just a moody, grumpy and at times whiny sort of person, and if I notice that and if I’m allowed I just stay away from people till it gets better again. Everything else but “hiding” or “running away” just ended with conflicts in the past, and I’m quite unbearable to others on such days I assume.

Oh well. As said, it will be fine to work together with some people on such a big project idea, and I can offer solid programming and solid graphics within some limits. My social skills are often hampered, as said. I’m a complicated person, but able to feel with others and take care of individual needs and situations, unless my own mental state is too bad again.

Additional problem: My mother is in a nursing home since some months, an ischemic stroke left her disabled and her left side paralyzed. It takes much of my time to take care of her, also much power.

#34

Quite a story. Understand that I am a student right now and really need to find a job :persecutioncomplex: so time is something that may be hard for me to catch. Right now my mother has stage 4 cancer which is very hard to deal with at times. She decided to get a medical marijuana license which is quite funny.

I have never done a group project before via internet only so this would be great for me.

I like the style in your game. It has a consistent art style and flow which is hard to come by. I can do some art although for this style prerender 3D seems like the best fit. Give me a list of sounds/music/art/code/story that needs attention.

Some ideas:
Magic could be very powerful but also rare in the world. Make it so when the play finds something magical (item, new spell, scroll or something) it is like discovering the holly grail. Spells can be strong but may require time to cast. I like the idea of a non class based system. Give more freedom.

Not sure if you are doing races but if so:
Elves. Every world has them be these all powerful beings. Gets old. maybe drop them completely or make them less God-like.
Dwarves are always nice. Maybe not playable but as the search goes deeper find say a City with additional quests, shops, and what not.
Halflings/gnomes/small people could again be non playable but make up some interesting NPCs.

I am not sure how you made your current assets but I am thinking of doing some wall/tiles right now and would like to know the right viewing angle you want.

#35

Oh shit. Sorry for the drastic words, but cancer is such a bane. My dad died to cancer, so I have a bit of an idea what you are going through. I hope the marijuana will make her time as bearable as possible.

Tomorrow I’ll try to figure out the right angle, at the moment I can only say that a rectangle must end up with 2:1 steps along the sides - for each two steps in x, a line moves up or down one step in y. This only applies to walls, though, the floors are automatically mapped via OpenGL, so any quadratic texture will do for a floor.

I’m using PovRay as my raytracing tool of choice. Blender sure can do the same and more, but I never got into Blender, despite trying seriously two times.

I’ve got some skills to adjust images from several sources to a uniform look, but there are cases when the differences are too big. In my very first public project I worked with many different artists who often only delivered one or two graphics so at some point streamlining graphics got one of the major tasks.

A few new walls will be fine, perfect if you can make a mine-like design with wooden bars to hold walls and ceiling, like these:

or these:

I like free-form character development schemes, too, so we can totally agree on that :slight_smile:

I’ve got some blurry ideas about magic, and having a magic system which makes magic rare and difficult to use is alright - with difficult I do not mean a 98% fail rate of spells, but side effects. Like if a mage invokes the heat of the sun, he is at danger to burn himself badly. He can choose a lower invoke which he an control well, but isn’t powerful, or a real strong invoke at the risk of being roasted alive - and he might want to prepare for that with having some sort of magical fire resistance first.

Somewhere in my archives I have a design for a magic system. Basically each spell had some words - first the power syllable, then the element, a shape and a target, and then finally a last modifier. The player will chose the syllables from a board, and each will take some power, and finally he can try the spell - if he used the highest power, controlling the spell will be very difficult, but even a beginner can try his luck this way.

I’ll try to be back to write more after catching some sleep.

Good luck with your job search and best of luck to your mom, too!

#36

Still working on an important element to item transformations - the mogrisphere. A magic device which is bigger on the inside than it appears from outside. In the hand of a skilled person in can be used to transform items into new items, adding magical and other properties. Or just to create genuinely new items from scrap.

Spent two days now on the design, and I’m still not satisfied with the result, but at least I have something to show now.

#37

Here is an idea on ow to to the Terrain. Not the walls but just the flat surface.

You said that you do not use the pre rendered isometric tiles. Instead render a plane in the right perspective and use multi-texturing on it. You could use a chunking system to keep everything nice and organized for large levels. This will allow for very great detail on the terrains. Pained them via a brush would be great.

I am trying to figure out some things in blender but the UI is not at all intuitive.

#38

Yes, indeed. Without the tutorials and just memorizing a lot of things blender is difficult to use. I beleive that some functions are only available by keyboard shortcuts. Maybe just too well hidden, though.

Multi-texturing the floor seesm to be the way to go. The walls are real tiles though, but with some tricks I can put overlays on them as well.

If my calculations are right, the camera is 30° above the ground, and 45° rotated.

#39

I have been following this guide

http://flarerpg.org/tutorials/isometric_tiles/

And it seems that true isometric is where the tiles are twice as wide as they are tall. I am playing with a few ideas but blender is really quite frustrating. I remember using 3ds max and having an easier time.

Example: I could not figure out how to exit the render preview. There are no buttons and you can endlessly keep splitting the screen into all sorts of views. Even google was little help. The blender guide was crap. I figured it out by doing the good old escape and bam, it exited render view. WHY IS IT SO CONVOLUTED? You click on the window in the top tool bar and it has 3 options. One is to split windows. I guess if you know all the shortcuts it is nice.

Here is some great place holder art. It is actually free but may not be the right angle. I have little experiance with 3d modeling and want to take this as a chance and motivator to learn. I am really good at UI though.

http://opengameart.org/content/cave-tileset :point: caves
http://opengameart.org/users/bleed?page=1 :point: quite a few nice buildings

#40

Thanks for the links, those are useful graphics :slight_smile:

I have no idea why Blender is made to be so difficult to learn. Once you have memorized all the hidden commands all the tricks and pitfalls, you can obviously work quite well with it, but for a beginner it is horrible. I must admit I never mastered the entrance hurdle, becuase I used it only seldom and from one try to the next I had forgotten most of what I had learned last time.

No rush. It will take some weeks to become productive in blender. I remember that there have been a few good tutorials, but I don’t seem to have the links anymore.

Please let me know which way you want to be credited for your work. There is a credits.txt file with pointers to the image sources, but I can also imagine to dedicate a place, item or something in the game to you. Maybe the rare potion “StumpyStrust’s healing mircale” :smiley: Just an idea.