2nd Post, wherein the Drawing Board is revisited

Jason Reid — 2007-02-11T17:24:24+00:00

So way back when I started working with TGB, I had my heart set on writing a game based on the sport of Kendo (Japanese fencing). After working on that for awhile, I realized that I was having difficulty getting it beyond a certain threshold of fun. Part of it, I'm convinced, was a technology limitation (trying to represent what is very much a 3D sport in 2D). Most of it is that my own game development "tradeskill", if you will, hasn't been levelled up enough yet to where I can do that game the justice it deserves. I did pull off a few neat technical feats which I hope to package up and make available sometime soon, but that's for the future.

So I switched gears a few months ago and started working on a new game, and now that I have a few of the core gameplay elements working, I wanted to share the concept. Partly inspired by the excellent FastCrawl and by Blizzard classics "The Lost Vikings" and "Diablo" (as well as countless other titles, I'm sure), Dungeon Duos will be an action-filled casual dungeon romp with a twist...instead of leading one adventurer into the depths of darkness, the player must guide two adventurers safely through randomly-generated dungeons (and maybe a few carefully designed ones as well). Twice the firepower, but twice the responsibility.

I've got some screenshots to help you understand the concept better. I'm not really spending any time on the art yet....I've just been doing the bare minimum to get the game playable. Plus, I'm not all that much of an artist anyway. But I'll get there.

The game's interface has to be as dead simple as possible. Controlling two characters at once in realtime isn't any kind of easy, so the characters have to be "simpler" than they might be in a standard RPG.

Here's the current character creation screen. Each character has a name, and can choose two "abilities". The currently implemented ones are Circle of Protection, Circle of Destruction, Drain Life, Entangle, Fireball, Heal, Lightning, and Teleport. I want the final list to be somewhere around 20-25 abilities to choose from (though many would have to be unlocked).

Once you create both characters, assigning 2 powers to each, the game prototype jumps right into a random dungeon. Right now, I just have tiles for floor and walls, and the only enemies are some goblins. The characters are all just rendered Biped skeletons for now...I'm using the TGB Adventure Kit's method for displaying characters. Here's a screen of the two characters, and a few goblins.

This is the last time I'm gonna ask you all to forgive the art :) I'm definitely building in the capabilities to make the dungeons more beautiful.

The red character is the first "player", and the blue one is the second. On the bottom is a bit of a status display...two life bars, and the listing of the players powers along with the keys used to activate them. The whole game is controlled through the A, S, D, and F keys, as well as the two mouse buttons (Mac users will probably use the spacebar instead of a right mouse click). The ASDF keys all activate powers...A activates char 1's first power, S activates his second, D is char 2's first, and F is char 2's second power. Clicking the left mouse button moves character 1 to the target location, and clicking the right button moves character 2. That's the game's entire interface, and it never requires the player to move their hands around the keyboard.

Here's a shot of the random dungeon, zoomed out, just so you can see what I currently have going.

Here's a bit of gameplay:

In this shot character 1 is fighting a goblin while character two is teleporting into a new position. Hand to hand combat is handled automatically when your characters get in range of their enemies, though I would like to do a H-to-H "minigame" when they encounter bosses or somesuch.

Now, character 1 has dealt with his goblin, but another has jumped character 2.

Note the position of the camera, as well as the position of the camera in the next shot, where the two characters are both walking with a purpose.

Getting a camera to work for 2 on screen characters is tricky. You can just keep the camera centered on the point that lies exactly between them, but that focuses too much screen real estate on places that the characters have "already been", and not enough on new threats that might be coming from ahead of them. Instead, I cast a line out from each character in the direction they're facing, and I find the midpoint of the end of those lines. That way, more screen estate is dedicated to whatever the characters are both looking at.

In the following shot, character 2 is in combat with a goblin, while character 1 casts Drain Life on the goblin. The FX of that spell cause a faded image of the enemy to fly toward the caster, taking life from the enemy, and giving it to the caster when it reaches him.

Character 1 continues to "help" by tossing a fireball, though it's going to land too close to character 2. Friendly fire is ON for this game, though I suppose that could be configurable.

Note the little goblin life bar that appears when the mouse hovers over it, and it may be hard to see but there's a translucent white box surrounding the goblin when the mouse is over it. I had to change some fo the TGB source code to get that to work right, though I can't remember why at the moment. Don't worry, I'm sure it's in my Subversion comments.

Final shot. Character 1 has adjusted his aim and tossed a second fireball. This one hits its mark, and puts the goblin down, while keeping character 2 alive. Too bad nobody has "Heal" right now.

Code What You Know

Jason Reid — 2006-10-28T04:08:28+00:00

Looking over my account history, I just realized that it's been over 5 months since I first found and bought the TGE, and over 2 months since I bought TGB. I don't have anything to show for it yet, but I figured it was about time to introduce myself and let you know what I've been doing with these fine tools anyway.

I'm a programmer by trade, and a decent one at that, but I've never done any game development before. Oh, I've lurked around gamedev.net and read all the beginner's articles. I've probably installed PyGame on 3 different computers. And the first time I ever compiled ANYTHING was as a newly-minted Wizard on a MUD back in my college days (I declared a CompSci major shortly thereafter). But honest-to-goodness, start-to-finish, pretty-graphics and many-frames-per-second game development? Never.

But I always WANTED to, of course (and who doesn't?!?). So when I left NJ to move in with my girlfriend (now wife) in NYC, I suddenly found myself with fewer social obligations than I'd had in years and loads of free time to spend. So I decided to take another crack at it.

I don't even remember how I found Torque, but at the time I was happy that I did. The choice at the time was obviously between TGB, TGE, and TSE. As a complete novice to the world of beautiful, computer-generated things, I figured that TSE would be jumping into the deep end too quickly. And TGB...2D only? That seemed like the opposite. It didn't even come with the source code (at the price I was willing to pay)! So I decided to purchase TGE.

I knew going in that I had keep my expectations low for my first game. This was "3D programming"...scary stuff involving Linear Algebra and lots of other classes that I either loathed or didn't take back in the day. So my first game design was going to have a minimum of trickiness to it...standard "between you and the evil wizard's castle stand 1000 of his twisted minions...and they know you're coming" type fare.

Unfortunately, my 3D modelling skills left much to be desired. While I found the programming environment of Torque to be quite pleasant, I found that modelling was really serving as a bottleneck for me. Having never participated in any mod communities before, I was completely new to tools like Milkshape and Quark. I know that I could have gone with a content pack or two to help get me started, but I just felt that I needed to learn all of the ins-and-outs if I was going to be successful. But since it was so slow-going, I was losing motivation.

Wow, this is getting long. I'll try to speed it up.

Enter TGB. This thing is amazing. I'm no Picasso, but I actually to put pen to paper and draw from time to time, so working with 2D graphics is _so_ much easier for me. Everything in my current project still looks like programmer art, but I'm fine using that as a placeholder because I know that when it comes time, I already have the skills to improve it. And the programming? Well, TorqueScript has its idiosyncracies, to be sure, but it gets the job done well. I'm certainly not wishing that I was working in another language at this poing.

If you've stayed with me this far, you deserve the bit of wisdom that I alluded to in the Subject Line..."Code What You Know". It's a little twist on the advice that's often given to budding writers. For my first TGB game, I looked to my own life for inspiration...I've practiced Kendo (Japanese Fencing) for about 3 years now, and while I'm definitely still a beginner, I still feel inspired to build a game based on it. It certainly won't be as intricate or as beautiful as the real thing, but it will still (hopefully!) be fun.

Anyway, as I've said many times...I'm a total game-development white belt, so definitely take my advice with a bag of rock salt. But "coding what I know" has had two tangible benefits, thus far: it lets me combine two things that I'm already passionate about, and I _always_ know what I have to do next :)

I don't write very often, so it may be awhile before you hear from me again. Maybe there'll be screenshots! But happy creating, all.

Blog for Jason Reid at GarageGames.com

2nd Post, wherein the Drawing Board is revisited

Code What You Know