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!

 

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.

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. 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!

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!

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 a semi-random 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 specific 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 generation algorithm  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 the foreseeable 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.