dungenz-blog

[dungenz-blog]

Dungeon Hunter

Development

Development has continued on the game. We’ve started to design the dungeon. Starting off with a simple map designed within Photoshop, we will need to greyboxing it out within Unity 3D. 

It’s hard to know where to start with designing a dungeon. I admittedly have not done it before. When designing something, I always like to have a theme. My initial thought was to design the dungeon in the shape of a skull, and you might get a bit a sense of that from this draft map.

Dungeon Hunter 5

As I mentioned last week, it’s been a while since I’ve played much of a dungeon crawler, top down, hack n slash, action rpg. Probably the closest to this I’ve played a lot of in recent times is Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (which is awesome by the way).

So part of the development of this game, I’m “researching” this genre of games, including playing some games that come under this banner. The first I’ve started playing is the free to play mobile game, Dungeon Hunter 5.

For a mobile game of this style, it’s a good looking game. Not the best, but good enough for this genre. The mobile controls working well for an action game of this nature. I only occasionally found myself struggling with the controls. Relating to do the design of our game (which won’t be mobile), I noticed the camera zooms in and out depending on the scene. I believe the camera for our game won’t be this fancy, it will likely be static, which presents the challenge of finding the perfect angle, position and zoom level that will work with all scenes. Stylistically, Dungeon Hunter 5 is fairly generic fantasy. This is to be expected, and it is likely going to be a challenge for our game. Is there any way to escape the cliche’s of a genre? 

From a mobile game perspective, I find issue with the fact that the game has to be always connected. This would be argued being for the reason of multiplayer, but it kind of defeats the purpose of mobile. On my first play of the game, I was on the train, a common place for people to play mobile games, and as I travelled through a dead spot, the game cut out due to the loss of connection. Not only did this interrupt play, it also loss my progress, so I had to replay through the scene again. I am also skeptical as I’m waiting for the freemium side of the game to kick in at some point. You don’t get a game of this calibre for free. So at some point in the game, there will be pressure to pay up. Reading a bit online, it sounds like a paywall comes up later in the game. This is offputting to me. I don’t like the concept of my progress being determined by if I pay up or not. I prefer games to be “premium” and be upfront about their cost and then I don’t have in the back of my mind all the time, “when is the paywall going to pop up”.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully I’ll get some time to play some Diablo 3 for the next blog post and show some dungeon development progress.

[dungenz-blog]

Welcome Traveller...

 Welcome to the dev blog of a new indie top down dungeon crawler RPG game. Over the coming months you can follow the research and development of the prototype for this game. There is no name for this game yet, so for now I’m putting it under the title of ‘DunGenz’ for the sake of naming this blog. A temporary name of “Monster Hunter” has floated around on documentation but I will avoid using that term as it will confuse things with the popular Japanese RPG series of the same name, Monster Hunter.

The Tools

The game will be developed within Unity 5. Scripting will be a combination of C# and the visual scripting language plugin, Playmaker. This plugin has been used in games as successful as Hearthstone, so should be a great tool for getting development of this prototype rolling fast.

For any original 3D assets, it is likely they will be produced within Maya. Anything from the 2D side of things will likley be produced within Adobe Photoshop. I am unlikley to have much involvement in the art side, but these are the software packages likely to be used by others, if not me.

For audio, as I come from an audio background myself, if I am to produce any sounds or music for this game, it will likely be using Propellerheads Reason.

The platform target for the game at this stage is PC.

Research

Part of developing this game is of course researching the genre we are tackling. “Top Down Dungeon Crawler RPG” is the term we are being given to describe the game. This of course will get most gamers thinking of Blizzard’s iconic series, Diablo. 

Admittedly, while old enough to be around when the original Diablo’s came out, I have only played Diablo 3. I only got as far as the end of the first chapter though, until the person I was playing it co-op with gave up (which was frustrating as that person was the Diablo fan, not me). Seeing it’s been years since I’ve played Diablo 3 (originally released in 2012), to assist with the research of this game I’ve re-installed Diablo 3 and will report back once I’ve played a decent amount of the game. 

Of course Diablo is far from the only modern game from this genre. Another game I’ve downloaded is the free to play mobile game Dungeon Hunter 5. Yes that’s right, there’s been 5x Dungeon Hunter games released in a 4 year span vs the 12 year gap between Diablo 2 and 3. I’m yet to play it yet, and am interested to see how much the freemium model affects gameplay.

Another free to play title I might try out is Path of Exile on PC. 

I may also consider getting premium titles such as Torchlight (said to be a visual inspiration for our game) and Obsidian kickstarter hit, Pillars of Eternity. Coincidentally, prior to the development of this game I actually had just watched a documentary series of the development of Pillars of Eternity which you can watch free here:

So there’s many modern examples of this genre that can be tested out. I will be interested to see if there’s any major differences to them, as they almost all look very similar.

Development

So far we’ve started setting up the introduction of the game. We’ve created an island. You start on somewhat of a beach. In the near distance, is a castle, which will lead you to the dungeon. We’ve used the default Unity 3rd Person controller for the player character for now. That is pretty straight forward. 

Less straight forward was setting up the camera. It’s quite a fiddly process to get the camera in the right position, especially as it needs to follow the player. I’ve always liked the isometric top down style. It kind of reminds you tabletop games, like you’re looking down at these little miniatures. I have a feeling the camera will be continually tuned through out the development process until it feels just right. 

The castle is in plus some triggers for some early narrative text, and an “invisible wall” bounding box to stop the player going for a swim. Next week we will likely focus on the entry to the dungeon. This outdoor section is purely as an introduction sequence. This is a dungeon crawler after all...