jim@dungeonmans.com

Jun 222013
 

Here’s the link to the latest version of the Dungeonmans Summer Preview!

(Right click and save as!) http://www.dungeonmans.com/dungeonmans105b.zip

The build is Windows only and uses XNA. If you need the XNA binaries they are here!

 

This a pre-alpha preview of a game in active development! There will be bugs, missing assets, and incomplete features! But there will also be plenty of monsters to crush and loot to be scooped up by the handful.

Please take advantage of the in-game Feedback window and send in your thoughts, observations, bug reports, or other ideas. Development of the preview build will be ongoing for the next few weeks, check for updates often!

Latest updates and patch notes can be found here:Ā http://www.dungeonmans.com/?page_id=290

Jun 132013
 

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. Now I’ve been able to add more ability and creativity to both the monsters you fight as well as the items you loot.

Going Fast and Getting Rings

Take a look at the rings below. Magical gear can have lots of things attached to them. Usually it’s based on random rolls, like finding a [Prefix] [Gear], like Flaming Longsword or Frosty Hat. There’s plenty of room for unique items though, and these are two of them.

Rings are the wild card gear right now. Early tier rings may seem pretty tame, but near the end some of the more rare rings are quite powerful and can even go so far as to give your Dungeonmans new powers while wearing them. In fact, the Icy Graveshard power is normally reserved for monsters, and right now this is the only way to get it. Surely no one at the academy would teach a power so clearly outside of the curriculum, right?

You’ll notice the AP bonus on the Ring of Jungle Fighting. AP stands for Action Points, and as of right now Dungeonmans uses a pretty simple system for taking turns:

* Actions of any type take 100 AP.
* When you have less than 100 AP, you’re done acting.
* Once all active creatures are done acting, everyone gains 100 AP and the next round begins.

So if you gain an extra 40 AP per round, your math will look something like this:

1: Start with 100, spend 100, gain 140
2: Start with 140, spend 100, gain 140
3: Start with 180, spend 100, gain 140
4: Start with 220, spend 100, spend 100, gain 140

Which means you end up with an extra action every few rounds. Not bad!

Now, one of the questions I’ve heard is “But a dagger is much faster than a greatsword, why do they both take the same AP?” and that’s totally fair. I think that’s a great mechanic and lots of other roguelikes use it to their benefit. For Dungeonmans, I’m aiming to keep speed equal in almost every fight. Some enemies have haste buffs or slowing debuffs, and sometimes you’ll get an edge with speed, but speed getting out of hand often becomes the deciding factor in a lot of fights. I’m aiming to have positioning matter in Dungeonmans combat, and that matters much less if you can take three actions for each one action by the enemy.

A Battle!

Here a battle rages in the twisty tunnels of an underground cave! The Bandit Pyromancer (buffed by his Villain Cloud) is fooming with impunity upon poor our Dungeonmans. The Gelatinous Cylinder froze him in place, which means he can’t simply walk out of the tile. He can fight, use movement powers to break free, or just wait a few rounds until it ends. He really wants to close in on the Pyromancer, but that Orc Warrior next to him is going to keep up, landing Danger Shuffle when he can, which is an attack that switches places with the target.

That’s all I got for now, I need to get back to work!

One more week!

 

Jun 062013
 

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 Bursts Through The Ground And Punches You In The Produce traps

Creative stuff that was also useful and fun. So why are they cut?!

Excuses Ahoy!

Assets: 95% of the art from old Dungeonmans has been updated, recreated, or just straight tossed. Each of the traps would need new sprites that matched the bar of the rest of the game, and there wasn’t time for that. Especially the smoke clouds and rolling fire traps. It’s not impossible but time and resources are finite things.

Intelligent Placement: Traps were kind of random in how they were placed. Sometimes that’s ok, but a good trap is better when it’s placed in a way that makes players have to think about the next move. Take a shortcut but risk setting off something that can knock you backwards, guard a treasure chest with a series of traps, a superstrong monster that can knock you into a spiked wall. You’d want monster AI to have some basic knowledge of active traps, and the more clever ones would send players in that direction.

Fun Interactions *Besides* Setting Them Off: With the trap system as is, there were three options: jump over it, power through it, or attempt to disarm it. The disarm system was a straight dice roll that used your stats and your ranks in a thievery skill to determine success or failure. It was subpar. The thievery skill had one real use: traps, and that made it way less appealing than everything else. You could put your skill point in leaping across the room, launching a ray of frost, oooor a 10% boost to trap discovery and disarming.

Should a player be able to…

* Disarm traps and scavenge for parts? Recover poison darts or blades to toss?
* Detect traps with a spell? Disarm them with a spell?
* Place their own traps?

All of those things fit nicely into the Kitchen Sink that haunts every roguelike developer. “This game will have everything!” I had to consider where features like that landed when compared to others, especially through the lens of the fancy title, Dungeonmans: The Heroic Adventure Roguelike. Indiana Jones is a heroic adventurer, and he dealt with traps all the time! Of course, he never had to face down the atonal dissonance of Dread Purpleonians either. Protip: whip proficiency is a poor choice there.

Screens

Here’s a shot of a Field Battle, a random encounter while moving across the plains. This is still early on, the foes aren’t terribly strong but you certainly don’t want to be surrounded.

Battle on the Open Field!

 

Here, the Lady Wizardmans Bluebelle is taking on a Punk Roadblock. These hooligans think they can just run wild and own the only roads between towns? You’ll notice a few things in this shot: there’s burning terrain from the vials thrown by Gutter Chemists, and that fire will damage anything, including the wooden barricade. Near the top of the screen is the Droog Captain in charge of the operation. The red glow indicates he is a Champion, a dangerous foe far stronger than the regular variants.

Lady Dungeonmans, Tear Down This Wall!

Finally, here’s a shot of a dungeon tileset I haven’t shown off much. Here our heroine is holding to the doorway, trapped between an encroaching Puppy Mold and “fearsome” Scrobold Jabroni. Not really much to worry about here, honestly.

Puppy Mold Inbound!

That’s it for this week. Crazy Dungeonmans development crunch continues, with the exception of the 3-4 hours next week I will spend with a bowl of popcorn watching E3 streams!

 

 

May 302013
 

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. Here are some of the things that aren’t in the preview build that will be added over time:

– More gear slots (like hats)
– More classes containing their own masteries
– Desert and swamp environments
– Other playable races! Honest!
– Greater variety in towns and villages
– More art, more sound!
– More monsters to crush, and more treasures to loot
– Ironmans challenges and alternate endings

Before you read any further, get this playing in the background. This is the theme for the Dungeonmans Academy, the starting area for all new characters and one of the bright lights of civilization in a wild and untamed lands. I love this track.

Field Testing

I’ve been working on Dungeonmans, on and off, for a long time now. It wasn’t until fall of 2012 that I decided to make this my full time job and work toward making Dungeonmans a viable commercial release. Like any good dev, I’ve got a head full of crazy ideas and I’ve put plenty of money, sweat and time into it, but Dungeonmans won’t be near its best until it gets into the hands of players.

I need players to kick the tires, crush some monsters, see what works and what doesn’t. What’s fun, what isn’t, and everything in between. I want Dungeonmans to grow along with a community of players who love the genre as much as I do and want to see it expand.

It’s not an alpha, or a beta, or any one of those silly greek letters. Everyone will call it a beta and that’s fine, but there’s a difference. The game is far from being either content or feature complete; there are entire systems that won’t be in play for the preview. It’s a sample of the core gameplay: go adventure in the wild, build up the academy, try out new combinations of powers, crush monsters and get loots. I still have months of work planned for the game, but those months will be better and more productive with the feedback from players like you.

I’ve been working like mad to get to the point where I feel confident enough to say anything. June is the month! While I’m not ready to give an exact date, you can imagine it will be after E3, probably because I’ll spend plenty of that time just watching E3 streams like a little kid again.

Back To Work!

Hopefully this explains why recent Dev Updates have had less flash and screenshots than usual. I’ll continue to update the site weekly with development wrap ups, but I’ll also be posting on Facebook more frequently with little bits and pieces of update information. As always post here or on FB if you have any questions or thoughts; I genuinely enjoy the conversation.

May 232013
 

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 Value (AV) from the damage.
3) Whatever is left gets through.

At a quick glance, it seems like the best way to not get hurt is to Dodge all the attacks. In other words, stack DV to the ceiling and laugh at clumsy monsters. AV is great but the massive blows from an Orc Hosshammer still hurt if they connect, right? Who wants to deal with that?

Style and Substance

The problem I have with that is both mechanical and thematic. Mechanically, what’s the point of putting heavy armor in the game if nobody cares to wear it? There needs to be a choice there and it should matter. Thematically, there’s something awesome, one might even say metal about a hero covered head to toe in glistening plate mail, wading through the feeble attacks of the soon to be crushed and laughing the whole time. Go on and hit me, I’ll even let you swing first.

How to solve this!? Here’s some ideas that I’m implementing:

1) AV matters, it can stack pretty high and with the right gear and masteries, you can shrug off many attacks.
2) Some enemy special attacks have very high hit chances or don’t miss at all. These aren’t bread and butter attacks but they happen.
3) Heavy Armor won’t ruin your DV. It will reduce it, but not make enemy missing impossible.
4) AV will still protect against some magic attacks. Force based attacks (like your typical Magic Missile) are absorbed the same as regular blows.
5) Heavy Armor pieces are slightly more likely to have better magical bonuses on them

There’s concern that this might be swinging too far in the other direction, which I’ll have to keep an eye on. Balance balance balance. The ultimate goal is for players to have a choice and have multiple avenues to succeed. It’s true that there will be one mathematically superior build, above all others, my hope is that the other builds are close enough to not make it a big deal.

Pretty Pictures

Here’s some screenshots! First, my pass at in-dungeon mapping, I’ve had this look in my head for a while now and I’m happy to see it. Second, a Necromanser is caught in a Road Battle, bravely breaking up a barricade set by filthy punks who want to shake down poor travelers. Man, that dog is big.

But where are the secret doors?

But where are the secret doors?

 

It's not Arathi Basin, you can fight on the road.

It’s not Arathi Basin, you can fight on the road.

May 162013
 

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 šŸ™
  • 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. Most of them allow you to put in one point at 1st level, another at 3rd, and the final at 5th. For the first few levels at least, you’ll have to weave between masteries, but that will create a more well rounded character.

UI work isn’t my forte, and I’ve had trouble pinning down a contractor to help out with the interface. No excuses though: here’s a look at the Mastery UI in it’s current state. The little sword bounces– I’m very proud of that bounce. Less proud of the gradient for the Master’s Programs label. That’s gotta go.

I’ve been putting in some long hours over the last week, I’m really driven to hit my upcoming personal milestone. I can’t wait to share the results!

May 092013
 

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 Library working!

The Library is another room in the Academy that grows with a player’s effort. You’ll find plenty of books in the wild, which are designed to give you an increase in skills. If you read the book, you’ll gain one point in a skill based on the book, and then the book is gone. You can also sell the book, if you’re hard up for coin, OR you could bring them back to the Academy and donate them. Donating to the Library means you can’t use the book on your current hero, however there are benefits!

Future heroes can start with knowledge of scrolls, and will be able to identify some of them on sight. The more impressive the library, the higher power this will be able to reach. Dungeonmens who take advantage of a fully stocked library will have knowledge of nearly every scroll in the game, right at level 1.

Finally, there’s Dungeon Sense, a sort of sixth sense about dangerous items and situations. The more books in a library, the better your odds of getting a proper gut feeling about the world’s surprises. You have no way of knowing if the water in that pool is safe to drink, but something tells you it will be of great benefit. You may not have this new wand fully identified, but you just have this feeling that it is quite powerful and probably dangerous. Knowledge is power, and even the sword-swinginest Fightermans is better off knowing more about the dangerous mysteries of the world at large.

Finally, here’s a large image showing various stages of Library development. Check out that last one! Very fancy carpets. Alright, enough jibba jabba, back to work!

May 022013
 

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 is usually anathema to quality quests. An early build of Dungeonmans in 2010 used a simple questing system to give extra motivation to heroes heading down into the dungeon to crush monsters. I had thought a splash of humor would help, and since players were going to be killing scrobolds and bandits anyway, what’s the harm in giving them more coin when they return to the surface with a fistful of Scrobold Palps? The harm was: it’s boring. It didn’t add anything. Unless I was going to find a way to make procedural quests truly interesting, why have them? So they’re gone.

Not to say that roguelikes can’t have quests. Elona, for all its wackiness, has a quest system that encourages travel, crafting, and fighting small packs of monsters. ADOM is full of quests, though you can’t really call them procedural as they mainly focus on killing specific, named monsters that are the same each playthrough. However, even in those games, the quests become a sort of background noise, just a series of steps to take and hurdles that need jumping. The real fun seems to come from the crazy situations players end up in, the terrible foes they faced and their clever escapes– real roguelike magic.

A couple of screenshots ahead. The first is an early look at the Cave art style. I’m quite a fan of Bobby’s floors and walls, I think this is another great example. Caves in Dungeonmans contain large areas (one might say… cavernous!) connected by winding tunnels with forks and branches along the way. This particular one might be a little bare, but there’s always room for stalagmites!

 

 

This here is an early pass at mapping the overworld. There’s a great many locations generated by the game and I figured a map would need some sort of legend, generated based on the location you’re in. The legend will have more information eventually: whether or not a dungeon has been cleared, or specific interesting buildings in a given town. This is a good start.

 

That’s all for this week! I’d love to hear your thoughts on quests, procedural content, the screenshots, whatever! Conversations both here and on the Dungeonmans Facebook page are always a delight!

Apr 252013
 

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. Props, rocky grass, various items that litter the scrobold warrens of the world, and the start of a new environment: caves!

That’s it for this week. Now I’m off to stuff myself into an airplane seat for about seven hours of travel. Good thing I’ve packed some (pre-identified) sleeping potions to help the trip go by quickly! Next week I’ll have plenty more to talk about, but until then, enjoy some of Bobby’s work.



Apr 182013
 

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. The statement came to him mid drink, and as he put the glass down he let me have it. “Procedural, you see, is bullshit. It’s bullshit. It’s Anti-Design.”

He went on to sing the praises of solid, concrete design, a design that you test, tear down with critique and build up to be even stronger. Procedural becomes bland too quickly because you don’t have focused experiences, unique and interesting, tuned to fit the challenges of the game. “Too many people think they can get away with not having to do the hard work of design because ‘Oh, just let the computer make something fun!’ and what you end up with is terrible.”

Programmers, mostly. Always the problem, lazy engineers!

“What is a Dungeon? A miserable little pile of hallways!”

Anti-Design. I’ve thought about what he said quite often, and it especially comes to mind while planning the layouts of adventure areas. Surely one can’t dismiss all procedural work as uninteresting, or even lazy. There’s plenty of examples of procedural experiences being entertaining. Are those the exception to the rule?

If you’re a roguelike fan, you’ve seen Anti-Design first hand: too many dungeons that are compilations of rectangles and straight lines, salted with an assortment of creatures based on how deep in the Caves of Grim Darkdoom you’re in. Not to say that it can’t be fun, but there’s certainly an element of familiarity to it, which eventually becomes repetition.

Good design, however, comes in many forms. Even the most haphazard of dungeon layouts can still rest upon a well thought out system. Combat, powers, encounters, all of which are indeed tuned and usually iterated upon based on feedback from the community of gamers. Those things can make or break a game, but even at their best they still are weighted down with qualifiers if the adventuring setting is bland. “Well, it’s a typical dungeon crawl, but there’s some neat tricks to the combat.”

As the genre ages and evolves, we’ve seen far more variety and hand-tuned effort in layouts. DoomRL contains many levels that are static, but hand-tuned to provide a specific challenge. Brogue is laid out in aĀ semi-randomĀ fashion, with certain threads appearing throughout: chasms or pools in the center of the map, treasure rooms generally (but not always) near the edges of the map, and often guarded by complicated rooms full of traps. Crawl contains some areas that are built on specificĀ formulas, such as the Sewers. Even old dogs like ADOM have Tension Rooms and special layouts for places like the elemental temples.

Avoiding The Trap

I’m working hard in Dungeonmans to avoid a dulling similarity between areas. As described previously, layouts change based on the locale, and they’re built to provide different types of challenges in each. But there’s more than just Dungeons. Towns need to have intelligent layouts, as well as the grand overworld itself. That’s a really tough one. It’s a challenge to make a continent that doesn’t feel like a haphazard collection of locales, and honestly I haven’t nailed it down yet. Never give up!

More and more developers are putting together their own roguelikes and we continue to move farther away from the trap of Anti-Design. Many of us have dreamed of being able to write the perfect generationĀ algorithmĀ  and toiled for countless hours to create something that can generate an exciting and interesting battlefield with one command. Computing power grows and helps us along the way for sure, but for theĀ foreseeableĀ future at least, it’s going to take someone behind the wheel to guide the ship. Why does X feature go here, what makes Y interesting? Everyone has their own answers to these questions, and like a collection of chefs each making the same dish, the results are flavored with a personal touch.