If all goes according to plan, the Dungeonmans Preview Build will be available to you here next week. Knowing game development, that likely means 11:59 PM on the last day of the week, but I will strive to do better. So yes, work continues at a most unhealthy pace, but I can’t pretend that it isn’t exciting. Seeing all the good old Dungeonmans monsters back in action after a long hiatus is really motivating.

To get most of the new combat systems up and running, the way monsters stored information and calculated attacks had to change drastically. That meant that old monster data from 2010 Dungeonmans no longer worked. Once I got the systems working well enough to be able to fine tune them, I knew I’d get those old beasts back into shape...

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Dungeons have traps, right? They have monsters, treasures, and traps. Some metaphor goes in here, about a three legged table or a peanut butter and jelly and marshmallow sandwich. Dungeons have traps! Except for the ones in Dungeonmans, right now. They don’t.

In a much earlier version of Dungeonmans, I was fortunate enough to have my dear friend Patrick Lipo (who, it seems, hasn’t updated his blog in nearly 3 years, come on man step it up) work with me on creating a really fluid and interesting trap system. He designed most of the traps, and built trap code off the Dungeonmans codebase. There were tons of traps in that early system:

* Spike traps
* Explosion traps
* Short range teleport traps
* Moving blade traps that whirled across the floor
* LOS-blocking smoke traps
* A Green Fist Burst...

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That’s right! This June, a playable preview of Dungeonmans will be available for download right here, for you. Here’s the general idea:

- A fully playable adventure representing about 25% of the full game
- The Dungeonmans Academy which grows as your heroes recover improvements
- Freeform Class Creation- choose skills from over 15 masteries to suit your playstyle
- One secret unloackable class with its own unique masteries
- Dungeons to explore, villages and towns to visit, and tons of awesome loot
- Reach level 12 with as many Dungeonmens as you like
- Beautiful sprite work from a collection of excellent artists led by Bobby Frye.
- Sweeping, heroic music from Andrew Aversa.

There’s much more planned for Dungeonmans...

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Roguelike nerd talk incoming!

A great number of RPG combat systems, be they tabletop or video games, have two core defensive ideas in combat. When someone tries to hit you, you can A) Not get hit (Dodge) B) Take the hit and reduce the damage dealt (Armor). That’s a simplification but it applies quite well.

Here’s how combat math works in Dungeonmans:

1) Attacker rolls a d100 and adds Hit Value (AR)
2) Defender compares the AR against Dodge. If Dodge > AR, the attack is dodged.
3) Subtract Dodge from the AR
4) Defender compares the AR against Parry, if Parry > AR, the attack is parried
5) Subtract Parry from AR.
6) Defender compares Block yada yada etc

Basic attacks then have four results: Dodged, Parried, Blocked, Hit. If it is a hit,

1) Roll the damage.
2) Subtract the Defender’s Armor Va...

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Here’s what I’ve been up to this week:

• Building a better Mastery UI: the one that lets you spend your points on level up. This has taken most of my time!
• Polishing up Books as a consumable item.
• Building the Cartography and Advanced Delving masteries.
• Rebuilt starting class loadouts.
• Worked on the camera some more
• Started on a simple layout for overland encounters.
• Bugs bugs bugs

The starting majors (Fightermans, Rangermans, and Wizardmans) are arrangements of 5 mastery points, along with some simple starting gear. A player can also start without picking a major, you get 5 points to spend as you please to build whatever flavor of hero you like. You’re not pinned down to anything, you can put points all over the place!

Not all masteries can be completed right away...

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Hello! This week is pretty straightforward as I’ve been racing through tasks and don’t have too much time to blow hot air about my theories on Roguelikes. What’s been going on?

* Bartenders in towns can mark rumored new dungeons on your map that you have to seek out.
* Multiple town layouts.
* Town shops will pick from a wide list of specific shop tables. Find the greatest boot store in the land!
* Fixing some bugs with NPC chatter and idle movement that I introduced recently, whoops.
* Added some animation support for Containers like barrels, chests, bookstands, etc.
* Fixed some bugs blending background music between areas.
* Added fade in / fade out for area transitions.
* Added a new item shop UI
* SOUND EFFECTS zomg.
* Added a Soft-ID feature, will explain below.
* Got the Academy Lib...

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The Quest! Is there a more noble or traditional mark of heroism? The Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Sword in the Stone, Gilgamesh, Ponce de Leon: great stories of bold heroes setting out into the unknown to risk everything in pursuit of a distant goal. A great quest has been the bedrock beneath countless pieces of literature throughout human history.

Then, there’s quests in video games.

Most roleplaying games need structure. Go here, do this, execute steps A, B and C in order. The plan being that along the way you’ll learn something, find unique challenges, maybe even have a laugh or two. Tutorial quests, lore quests, epic endgame boss quests, there’s a pile of them everywhere. From themepark MMOs to sandboxes like Skyrim, you’ve got quests. So how about roguelikes?

Procedural content...

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Today is the last day of my break from Dungeonmans. I’m flying back home from Seattle after a truly special trip to an old comrade’s house to help him with his new project. I’ve seen so many of my friends go off on their own over the last 12 months, layoffs plagued the industry and they always spawn a crop of developers who feel that the time is right to set off on new adventure. There’s room enough for everyone who wants to provide something new, interesting, or just plain fun. Best of luck to all of us!

Keeping that in mind, there’s been no Dungeonmans development on my end, which would make this Development Update a bit hollow. Fortunately, Artistmans Bobby Frye has been cranking away on various pieces of the Dungeonmans world, and with his blessing I’ll share some of his work here...

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I’m traveling this week and the next, so development will be slower. For this Dev Update I’d like to share a story about some wisdom dispensed upon me over drinks, as so many wisdom-dispensing events are.

September of last year I was having a friendly and robust discussion with a friend of mine about game development. We’d worked together for a couple of years at Gearbox and get along rather well. He’s a salty developer from across the pond who has been making games for just about twenty years. We share similar opinions on a majority of development ideas, but not all of them, which made this discussion particularly interesting.

We were talking about the projects we were both interested in, and as I was discussing Dungeonmans I could tell he had something to say...

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Been pushing on two initiatives last week, one of which was reimagining the role of towns in the overworld. Early builds of Dungeonmans had towns built much in the same way as dungeons: mostly random layouts with winding paths between rooms.

These towns were unique without being unique. Sure you never knew exactly where or what shape the Inn was, but it didn’t matter, you’d find it and it would be the same as every other Inn. An Inn, a Shop, some houses with pleasant peasants and the occasional Town Mayor, a portly man who’d offer you a quest to go kill Scrobolds somewhere.

The end result of all that is that towns were boring, and that won’t cut it for the Dungeonmans of today...

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