[WIP] Racod's Lair - a coop dungeon crawler [Demo Released]

[Glocke]

Racod, scourge for mankind, escaped to its lair to regenerate for his next decade of terror.
You and your brave fellows are willed to find and defeat Racod.

Playable Demo available
via IndieDB
via GitHub (Source Available)

Genre: Coop Dungeon Crawler / Hack'n'Slash RPG

Target platforms: Windows, Linux

Core features:

• Procedurally generated dungeons, enemies and loot
• Cooperative gameplay via splitscreen and/or shared camera
• Mod-friendly through XML-based content and Lua-based AI scripting

What is used: C++11, SFML, Thor, Boost, Sol2

[Tex Killer]

Interesting!

Are you planning on releasing it? What about other platforms?

Anyway, congratulations on the project, seems nice so far.

[Glocke]

Are you planning on releasing it? What about other platforms?

Well, it's a pure hobby-based project. So, if it will be ready one day, I will release it for free. So I cannot state about possible platforms. But I'm thinking about versions for linux and windows (hopefully 32 and 64 bit). I don't have experiences in other platforms like MacOS or various mobile systems, yet.

Anyway, congratulations on the project, seems nice so far.

Thanks!

[AFS]

Looking good! (sorry for not having something more useful to say).

I'll keep an eye on this, it looks really interesting. Good luck with the project

[Glocke]

I implemented a first approach of reducing the field of view to a limited area. tiles out of this view are rendered dimmed by applying another sf::Color. Also objects are only rendered if they are within the area. So the entire scene gets more atmosphere.



The field of view isn't correct, yet - and the field is rendered very awkward, because I can only apply a color per tile. This might be changed later (a lot later, I guess) when introducing shaders .. one day ^^

[achpile]

Let me suggest you this: http://en.sfml-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=16201.0
 

[Cirrus Minor]

Hi Glocke,

looks good, and rogue games are very good to learn game dev !

Your dungeons look like the ones in NetHack. The LOS rules can be:
- corridors are in shadows, you've to wear torch to see far,
- rooms are lit, you can see the entire room when you've entered.

I can see 2 tiles wide corridors: you've to think about doors !

libtcod has useful tools for roguelike development.

Good luck with this project !

[Glocke]

http://en.sfml-dev.org/forums/index.php?topic=16201.0

Thanks, I'll keep this in mind for later UI improvements

Your dungeons look like the ones in NetHack. The LOS rules can be:
- corridors are in shadows, you've to wear torch to see far,
- rooms are lit, you can see the entire room when you've entered.

Sounds really interessting! Thx, I'll keep this in mind for the later gameplay implementation. Currently, my project is only a "tech demo" growing with additional features.

I can see 2 tiles wide corridors: you've to think about doors !

Actual, I made all (or at least most) corridors two-tiles-wide. Because I'm focusing on split-screen-coop, additional room is necessary for later gameplay.

libtcod has useful tools for roguelike development.

Well, because I'm in a process of learning, I want to implement everything myself (except SFML of course ^^).

Update

As mentioned, I changed some map generation parameters to achieve corridors which are 2 tiles wide. Also room sizes has been increased. Both should offer more space for later cooperative playing.

Also, I improved the FoV algorithm by using per-tile-raycast (which is currently implemented via recursion and adding visited tiles to a set - for avoiding double-visit).

Thirdly, I changed the graphics. To be honest, I don't know where the previous graphics came from. I just found them somewhere at my disk. To avoid future copyright problems, I'm now using CreativeCommons graphics from http://opengameart.org/.

(click to show/hide)

Goblin sprite: http://opengameart.org/content/lpc-goblin
Dungeon tiles: http://opengameart.org/content/fancy-dungeon-tileset
Fireblast sprite: http://opengameart.org/content/fire-blast

Here is another video introducting another feature: casting spells. Currently, only fireblasts are implemented as a prototype for bullet-like gameobjects (arrows, other spells etc.). Those objects kill all gameobjects they collide with - and finally vanish when hitting a wall.



By the way: To visualize collision handling for debug mode, I'm rendering all "locked tiles" (tiles where objects are currently located) colored red.

[Glocke]

Hi, some additional features has been implemented - including:

• animation handling
• simple rpg stats implementation (currently: health and mana)
• fireblasts cost mana and inflict damage to the target on collision
• own mana and health are displayed
• health of the currently focused object (by own face direction) is also shown
• additional gamepad support (using 2 axis and 1 button, yet ^^)
• splitscreen for two players

I'm looking forward for the next development steps. Those steps might be melee combat with some sort of simple animation (as UI indicator in the first place), an additional "bullet-like" attack (e.g. using archery) and attacking enemies. Just walking/standing isn't quite much, yet ^^

[Mörkö]

I think you should consider changing the mechanics for how the visible range is rendered. The choppy motion of the light field around the player is almost giving me a headache from watching those brief videos, and would certainly make me not play the game.

Here are a few considerations from the top of my head:

• Make a simple gradient consisting of 2-3 blocks, so that the contrast is not so strong.
• Make the nonvisible area lighter, so that the contrast is not so strong.
  
• Make the light area larger, so that the choppiness is not so much in focus.
• Look into using shaders to create a per pixel smooth gradient. I don't know how the current shadow system works because you did not post your source, but I dare guess you don't use shaders.

Anyway, good luck and keep going.

[Glocke]

I think you should consider changing the mechanics for how the visible range is rendered. The choppy motion of the light field around the player is almost giving me a headache from watching those brief videos, and would certainly make me not play the game.

Your absolutly right!

Look into using shaders to create a per pixel smooth gradient. I don't know how the current shadow system works because you did not post your source, but I dare guess you don't use shaders

Right: I'm not using shaders, yet. The field of view is generated recursive by raycasting into different directions and saving all visited positions to a set - until a given distance has been reached.

I amlost planned using shaders to solve this issue. Because it's a pure UI-related feature, I'll delay the shader-topic to be done before the first release - I don't have any experiences with shaders, yet. But reducing the contrast should work in the first place. So thanks for your feedback!

[Tex Killer]

If all you want to have is circular visibility, you can always make an image with a transparent circle in the middle, semi-transparent black color everywhere else, then draw that on top of everything. What is outside the circle should get darker. You can even get gradient shadows with that trick.

[Glocke]

If all you want to have is circular visibility, you can always make an image with a transparent circle in the middle, semi-transparent black color everywhere else, then draw that on top of everything. What is outside the circle should get darker. You can even get gradient shadows with that trick.

Well, I tried this but I didn't get away the "border" between semi- and fully transparent. So the scene would look like "through glasses with thick borders", which isn't what I really what.
Of course the current behavior isn't very different - but more "out of the box" ^^

[dabbertorres]

Did you try multiple circles that get less and less transparent to get the gradient effect?

[Glocke]

Did you try multiple circles that get less and less transparent to get the gradient effect?

Not yet, but I like this idea!

Update

Today, I was reworking nearly the whole event system by introducing an event-driven hud per player. So each event (e.g. onDamageReceived) is forwarded to an object's hud (if it has one). So the hud can e.g. count killed enemies and display it.

As mentioned, I reduced the contrast between tiles inside/outside the player's view. But I will focus on dabbertorres "circle-approach" next.

Here's a small video. It introduces splitscreen (as mentioned before), simple animations, an event-driven hud and a new sprite under CreativeCommons: the red imp

Have fun while' watching - I'm sorry for the still awkward field of view rendering