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[Angle]

This is a game I'm working on creating.

This game is basically a chance to screw around with game mechanics. Its essentially the bastard child of Diablo II, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, and The Binding of Isaac, with a dash of Perplexicon. You're in a dungeon, divided up into rooms. Each room has various enemies, terrain, and items. You kill the enemies, navigate the terrain, and claim the items. You get XP for killing enemies and probably for some other stuff too (I'm not sure yet), which causes you to level up. When you level up, you get to put a character point in a node in your character wheel. Pretty much everything in the game is randomly generated, including the enemies, so each game you have to learn what your enemies do all over again.

Your character wheel will be randomly generated at the start of each game, and will have five trees on it, randomly chosen. These trees fall into three categories - Martial Styles, Magical Styles, and Professions. Martial and magical styles have all sorts of details, like what attributes they utilize, what kind of things they emphasize, etc. For example, one Martial style might be all about wearing armor and being tough as nails, while another might be about wielding swords with grace and agility, and dodging your foes attacks while you cu them to ribbons. Similarly, one magic style might require lot's of Mana and have have lots of flashy missile attacks based around fire and lightning, while another might be much more low key, and instead utilize debuffs and damage over time effects to control the battle and grind its enemies into paste. Professions are much simpler - they're pregenerated, and all that varies is what bonuses are where, not what the tree as a whole contains. Enchanting always includes bonuses to identify magic items and various abilities to manipulate them, but what bonuses are where on the tree can vary significantly.

Right now I have most of the basics programmed, including enemies, attacks, terrain, doors, rooms, equipment, etc, and am now working on the random generation for the enemies and the Items.

Here are a few screenshots:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Here's my latest demo. It doesn't have the work I've been doing on the inventory or on random generators for Items & such, but it should work to chow you the basics.

Anyway, what do you think? Anything you particularly want to see, or not see?

[Orange Wizard]

How the hell do you propose to randomly generate these things?

But I fully support randomised skill trees.

[Angle]

The enemies will be the hardest part, and they're fairly simple - mix and match the artwork to suit, with some recolouring, randomize the stats however I feel best, and slap some abilities and behavioural guides on there. Boom, easy.

[Pencil_Art]

Looks interesting. PTW - I want to see where this goes.

[Angle]

I do have a few things I'm uncertain about -

Should I have large base stats like Strength, Dexterity, Perception, etc. or should I keep all of the possible effects individual? I.E. You would have a stat for move speed and one for attack speed and another for dodge chance, and move speed might even be broken into parts, like acceleration, max speed, turning speed, etc.

Should I have character trees for things like Butchery, Mining, Crafting, etc? You'd get the ability to do the particular thing described as the first point on the tree, and the rest would just alter it in different ways.

Should I have classes and races that determine your starting stats, and some of the skill trees you start with? For example, the Fighter class might be guaranteed to start with a weapon skill tree and a stat skill tree, while the Scholar is guaranteed to start with some kind of knowledge or book related skill tree.

[Orange Wizard]

I think you should keep skills (butchery, mining, and so on) and stats (strength, dexterity...) as something everyone has, then the trees modify them (or have completely new effects). Some special things like, say, powerful magic, should only be available through the trees.
You could throw classes in there, to have a small element of predictability. For example, the Scholar is generally more likely to have knowledge related trees, rather than just a flat "you have one knowledge tree, the rest are a crapshoot".

But that's just my own sleep-deprived opinion, take it or leave it as you will.

[Angle]

Well, the reason I was wondering about that kind of thing is because I'm having this game be much more abstract then realistic, and I'm trying to keep it relatively simple, at least to play. Having your character be capable of half a dozen minor actions like butcher, mine, disassemble, craft, etc, seems kind of silly and unnecessary, unless that's supposed to be their thing.

[Angle]

I went ahead and put together a very minimal demo of what I've got so far. I'm not sure what to do next, though...

Edit: The controls are WASD for movement, move your mouse to the side of the screen to turn the character in that direction, click the mouse to attack with your weapon, press I to view your inventory, and press C to view your character tree. The character tree doesn't actually do anything yet, but you can put points in the nodes and all that. Also theres an Item on the ground you can pick up, though it doesn't do anything after that.

Edir edit: Whops. I forgot to include the native libraries for LWJGL and a .bat to run the project. My apologies. I'll get that next time I release a demo.

[Angle]

Alright, here's a proper demo, should work in both Windows and linux environments.

[IcyTea31]

PTW. This seems interesting.

[Parsely]

PTW

[Angle]

Alright, so my family needs money. I'm thinking of running a kickstarter, with this as goal, in order to raise that money. Do you guys think that sounds workable?

As for the game, I'm working on making doors work properly, and starting to work on the code to display sprites, instead of the lazy vector graphics I've been using until now. I'm not sure what resolution I want my sprites to be, I'll have to read up on how resolution works.

[FallacyofUrist]

Crikey this looks good.

[Angle]

Thank you. It's coming along quite well - I just implemented support for sprites and doors. Next I'm going to work on the random generators for Floors, Rooms, & Skill trees, and then I'll see about putting out another demo. If you have any questions go ahead and ask.

[FallacyofUrist]

One of my game ideas was a game where there was an AI which absolutely hates the player, and makes the game difficult by spending points in order to kill the player as best possible. At the same time there is a good AI who tries to thwart the bad AI's shenanigans. I don't suppose that's a possibility? The worst-case scenario would be an Evil AI that learns from the player's habits and analyzes the player's data, and uses that to force the player to adapt or die. The data persists between games up to a point. Gradually the AI would learn what creatures in what configurations would be best against the player for the best efficiency with points, and the player would adapt and figure out the tricks, then the AI adapts against the player...

However, a god-like Evil AI might not be a good idea, however a Randomly Generated Evil Final Boss that controls the dungeon might be a good idea in comparison. It cannot leave its boss room, but it can influence the level it rests on, but it doesn't know where the player is unless it receives reports from cameras or minions. There could be lesser bosses on each floor with a similar degree of control.