Building a World

It puts the treasure in the dungeon

2010-06-23T09:08:00.001-07:00

Rewards require several things before they are actually rewarding. They are required to increase something, somewhere - be it your score and sense of self value, your stats, or simply a counter saying 'treasure collected'. They also need to have some sort of challenge to attain them. This challenge can range from the simple 'wait ten seconds to claim treasure' or 'overcome this specific challenge'. The quality of the reward is usually matched to the difficulty of the challenge. Make it too rewarding and the reward feels cheapened, make it too challenging and the reward feels lacking.

Overcome a challenge, get a matching reward. It's a simple formula, and in a game you're planning out ahead of time it's a simple matter of putting the challenge in between the player's starting location and the treasure.

In a procedural game, it's a lot more complex than that. You don't know where the treasure is going to be located, and you don't know what the map is going to be. You can't assume anything.

Currently, there are three types of treasures, ground, monster, and trap. ground is pure reward, and monster and trap are both challenges. Logically, I'd be most likely to create a good challenge to reward ratio. But it's not just as simple as choosing a floor, piling treasure on it and moving on. I have to keep track of when the floors don't connect all the way, or when there are multiple branches. The monsters won't be in the way, if they're in the shallow dungeon to the left, and the treasure is in the deep dungeon to the right.

I have no current plan for how to deal with this, but I'll let you all know when I do.

Loot!

2010-06-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

The goal of every game, on some level, is to collect stuff. In herocrawler, that goal is no different, and in fact the primary goal of the little delvers in the world, to collect all the treasure.

The laws to do so are fairly simple. Every hero has a number of types of treasure they want to look for. Delvers look for loose treasure, monster hunters look for monsters, thieves look for traps. They generally ignore one another's goals, but the goals don't always ignore them, though I'll get to that in a moment.

Beyond a 'type' each treasure has two numbers. How valuable it is, and how much it weighs. Each delver can only carry so much treasure at a time (why you may need all eight heroes), and when they hit their top load, they climb out of the dungeon and move on. The more a treasure weighs, obviously, the few other treasures the character can carry at once, and the more it's worth.

The three different primary types of treasure so far all haev different rules regarding how they act when players move past them. Ground type treasure, which is picked up by delvers, is ignored by the other types of heroes. Traps have difficulties and dangers and while thieves are immune to them, non-thieves have a chance to trigger the trap and take damage based on their stats. The higher the stats, the less chance they have of tripping it, and the less damage they'd take if they did. Monsters are similar to traps that always trigger. I'm planning on, but haven't implemented yet, an equipment system that allows the characters to wear armor and equip weapons that will allow them to boost their 'do damage' and 'dont take damage' stats.

The next question falls to where in the dungeon does the treasure get placed, and I'm still working on that. I'll post up my thoughts on it later.

Crawler Dungeons

2010-06-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

While I'd like to start with the character and player classes, I'm going to start instead by talking about what's already done. Basic dungeon generation.

I've actually already worked out a lot of the kinks in the system, so I'll talk about the problems as I'd seen them.

Firstly, I know the top floor of the dungeon is going to be the ground. I'm going to be adding above ground 'building' dungeons too, but they're not ready yet. Anyways, the top floor is the ground, and there are three types of tiles. Floor tiles the character can walk on, wall tiles the character cannot walk on, and ladder tiles the character can walk across, and also climb up and down. Simple.

Really, what this is is a conditional type of simple maze. When a hero looks for a treasure, they calculate all the paths based on moving left and right or up and down, then they go to it. there's less need for the algorythm I wrote now then there originally was, but for the moment it's still in there. I might make the dungeons more complex again, though they look far better when simplified.

Pathfinding aside, the first way I generated random floors was to pick between one and five floors at random, and fill in the entire floor as walkable space. Once all teh floors were filled in, for each floor I picked another floor to connect with a ladder. It was a little complex, and it made it possible to have disjointed underground sections. Also, it made it possible to overwrite floors that already existed with ladders as the ladders came afterwards. Sometimes, there were just huge bricks of space with one ladder next to another and it was hell on the pathfinding, as well as looking ugly.

The first improvement I made was changing how I picked the floors. Rather than picking two to five floors at random, every floor is now picked to be one to three levels below the last randomly chosen floor, counting the ground. That allowed for potentially more floors, and no longer were there floors regularly all pressed up against one another.

The next major improvement I made is the ladder creation. Ladders had been previously started after all the floors were made. They would randomly connect from one floor to any other random floor in the dungeon. So, it was possible with six floors for all the ladders to cut through all the floors above it to reach the ground level, which looked terrible. So, I changed the ladder code. The ladders now pick a random X location on the current floor (as they did before) and they go upwards until they hit any other walkable space. This solved both the problems of having disjoined space (no longer can the ladders pick to go to a space below them), but also with the mess of ladders cutting through multiple floors. If that were to happen, it would just result in one floor acting as a junction between the next, and a sort of staircase effect. Overall, elegant I think.

But, it was still boring. Everything was flat, the dungeon floors always spanned every space on a particular level. So, the most recent change to dungeon generation I made was that floors now span a random number of spaces, from three to two less than the map is wide. They're placed randomly across the map, and with natural random staggering it creates a really nice, burrow-look. Some places have a large deep room with several smaller ones below it and a single separate hole off to the side, some are zig-zagging holes where the characters have to walk the whole length of the dungeon to go down a floor. It's really nice looking.

But what good is a dungeon without treasure? I'll get to treasure, it's mechanics and difficulties next time.

HeroCrawler

2010-06-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

Okay, I said I was working on a new project, this is it. HeroCrawler. Hero Crawler. Hero Crawler: Adventuring Agency.

The name is not totally nailed down, just close. But, that's not the point here, really.

HeroCrawler is a game with a simple premise. You have a group of heroes under your control, you have a (not randomly, but) procedurally generated map, and you set loose your heroes to collect as much treasure as they can carry from within.

The idea came from, interestingly, raindrops in a game I talked about a while back, Paradise Island. The raindrops fell from the sky, hit the ground, and randomly moved left or right each time they struck, until they enter the sea, or a pool.

So, in a similar style, the heroes arrive, and descend, but unlike the raindrops they both know where they're going and then come back up afterwards.

Unlike Tinyworld, this game has a defined ending. As you collect all the treasure from dungeons across the world map, your party gets stronger, eventually strong enough to conquor a super dungeon. The specific goal of that dungeon is still in the air, but there are three sub-goals, one of which is defined as most important at the start of the game. There's collecting an artifact, conquoring all the map, and... probably amassing a certain wealth. Once those are done, you get legendary hero characters related to those quests. The most important one of them actually unlocks the final dungeon, and when you beat that dungeon you win. Probably there's a specific evil monster at the bottom of the dungeon - though that goal isn't decided yet either.

I've got a good chunk for the game ready already - I'll be talking about that as I get even more on it done. Sounds awesome.

Desktop dungeons

2010-06-08T12:50:00.000-07:00

I played another almost-procedural game today, Desktop Dungeon. It's a little game, very pared back to it's basics. You are an adventurer with a race and a class in a dungeon, you start at level 1 and your goal is to beat the level 10 monster.

I haven't managed to beat it yet, but it's a fairly simple little ditty I should be able to, the biggest problem is that I haven't beaten it yet.

Now, some would say that it increases the difficulty factor if you know you're not going to win all the time. But in this game it's not 'not winning all the time' it is 'you only win one in ten games' more-less. It's all at the whim of the RNG, because of the locations of the monsters and the mechanics of the game, there are hundreds of ways to generate impossible scenarios, and only a few winnable scenarios - even then you have to know what you're doing.

The map is linear, literally. You start off iwth a solid 2d space, and start drawing straight lines through it. When you wind up with no wall thicker than one space, you go to monsters.

Monsters are roughly one for every four open spaces in the dungeon, or maybe every five or so. There's a lot of them, and with most of the space linear corridors, that means you have to fight through one monster after another to explore. Okay idea, but where the problem comes in is monster levels. Each monster is assigned a level from 1 to ten, with only one monster being level 10, and more of each level the lower it gets. But just because there are lots of level 1 monsters doesn't mean they're based near you. Or even after you beat them all you'll have enough EXP to fight the level 10 monster. Some games, you'll start trapped in a hallway with no exit but to fight a level 6 monster. There's no fun there.

I think the game is good, but not great. There are lots of things that could be improved upon, especially regarding the dungeon generating. if the monster's strength was based on where it started relative to you, you automatically drop out most of the unwinnable scenarios, only leaving those where there's not EXP to be had on the map.

More on this later though, I just wanted to give you guys something to read.

Coolest cave design method ever,

2010-06-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Cellular_Automata_Method_for_Generating_Random_Cave-Like_Levels

Whoever said the game of life was just a game, huh? It's a frigging life-based random level generator.

Blog? What Blog?

2010-06-03T05:50:00.000-07:00

OKay, okay, I've fallen behind in posting. I know.

Recently, I've come to the realization that tinyworld is a good idea, but without having planned things out in advanced, the code is becoming more and more, well, dangerous. I love the progress I've made, but I think I'll leave it as it is, a super simple dungeon generator with a little dude to run around. If I ever want to build it again, which I'm sure I will, I will absolutely have to plan things out better in the future.

But, that's not the end of game projects from me. I'm still working slowly on Ronar, I've also been working on a choose-your-own-campaign The Genesis Gauntlet. It takes a few weeks for each adventure, then there's testing and playing, and finally release. Release, you say? Well, it's going to be run for Comminuty Supporters over on a website I'm part of, www.dndonlinegames.com

I've got another procedural game in the works, and I'll start talking about that shortly too. More pressing though, I'm starting up a Pathfinder Campaign.

I love what pathfinder's done to the OGL d20 system, and while the existance of the super-bard orginization reeks of product placement, the system is otherwise polished to a near mirror finish. Which is awesome. You'll be hearing more from me on that, too.

More dungeons in the sky

2010-05-25T05:45:00.000-07:00

Great Dungeon in the sky is a lot of fun, and a really well made game. But that won't stop me from picking it apart - that's fun too.

The first thing worth noting is the balance of the weapons. In GDIS every character has zero to three weapons, and every time any weapon is used, you get a delay until you can use any other weapon again. So, if you fire off your super spell, you have to wait ten seconds before you can hit something with your staff, but if you use your staff, you only have to wait one before you can use your staff again. There are four broad types of weapons, melee weapons, ranged weapons, spells, and other stuff.

Melee weapons recharge relatively quickly, and generally hit whatever is in front of you for a small amount of damage. There are a few exceptions, charge for instance has a really long recharge time but also knocks someone back. And peck has no recharge time at all, but never does more than 1 damage. As enemies typically have 25 health, that means you have to be really fast with your fingers to make it effective, but it can be.

Ranged weapons are slower than melee weapons, but have the distinct advantage that you aren't right next to what you're attempting to kill. As every attack in the game acts a little differently, you'll have to understand how your attack is going to move before you rely on it. Bows usually fire in arcs, bullets fire right ahead, and rays shoot based on how you're moving, and bounce off walls.

Spells are more varied than other things, but follow the same sort of rules. They can fire off multiple projectiles, restore your health, paralzye an enemy, summon a monster, go invisible, change your shape or a lot more. Typically though, all spells have a long recharge time, five to ten seconds. I'll get into why this is a problem in a moment.

other stuff is exactly as you might guess. Things like putting up a rope, dropping a bomb, super jump and, er, making toast. They rarely do damage on their own, but are useful in other ways. there are areas you can only access by super jump or flying, though. their recharge rates vary, but are typically fairly long.

After playing the game for a long while, I've decided that the best thing to use is melee weapons, as the recharge rate is the lowest. enemies will attack fairly slowly, so if you're quick with your fingers, you can kill things before they have a chance to hit you, and you can hit multiple things in one swing to boot. the best melee weapon is the staff, as it hits for 8 damage, twice, and only has about one second of recharge. The best ranged weapon is shock, because it seems to do the same amount of damage as every other ranged attack, but recharges slightly faster. It's a ray too, so it bounces off walls and you can aim it downwards to shoot at monsters below you. The best spell is healing, which isn't much of a contest because it's only got a five second recharge time, and nearly all other spells don't do half enough damage as to be worth their weight in salt. ten seconds to wait after shooting three 8 damage rays (two of which are into the air - where no enemies stay), when i can do twice as much damage in one second with a staff? I don't think so. The best other ability is... well, I haven't found one. Then again, now that I've found someone with flying and a staff, I hardly need to be able to jump extra high.

That brings me to the other factor in the characters you select, their attribute. Most characters don't have any, but some do. They include fast, slow, flying, strong to fire, and no combat. While the other options make for a more challenging game, you need flight to actually unlock a bunch of the content - so there's no real point in picking any attrubute other than that until after you've unlocked everything. Especially, because that means you no longer have to worry about all the tricky platforming bits. Okay, sure they're fun, but as I've said there are something like a hundred levels, and missing the same jump thirty times flight is glad to have - it's just being able to jump even when you're in the air.

the best character I've found is the birdman tribe leader. He flies, has a staff, and a three-ray spell. there are a lot of other good options, all depending on your play style, but strength wise it's birdman tribe leader, all the way.

I’d also like to put props to the music in the game. I normally play games without music, as I play most of my games in a room with other people and they get annoyed, but the music and sfx in the game are wonderful. There are a half-dozen tracks that shuffle so you never listen to the same one twice in a row, and it both fits in with the game wonderfully and loops perfectly. I’m thoroughly impressed.

Great Dungeon in the sky

2010-05-21T08:08:00.000-07:00

Hey guys, I haven't dissapeared, I swear. I'm working on some other projects, but until I actually get a goal figured out, I want to keep it quiet on here.

For now, I'll just talk about another more-less procedural game, the great dungeon in the sky. It's an online flash-based game, too. Which is awesome.

GDIS, put into one sentance is a platforming game where you select one of... oh, about two hundred characters each with around three of... about five hundred abilities and run through... about a randomly generated hundred levels. That's a lot of content!

What makes the game so fun is not that you have so much selection, but in fact how that selection is unlocked. In order to play as a particular character other than the starting ten, you have to defeat him in one of the maps. Not so hard, until you consider that with three hundred characters that's a lot of guys to look for.

There are a handful of map types, each with a particular pattern. There is a small cave to the bottom left, a series of collums to the top right, and so on. each map is different and difficult in it's own way, some moreso than others.

Each map also has a number of spawns, each of which can spawn one of a certain number of creatures. For instance, in one map you start off facing against an animal over a hole in the ground. This animal is randomly selected from the twenty or so in the game (every one with a unique sprite, too), and that's what you see. Then you drop down to a random selection of orcs, then you fight your way through several mages, climb the stairs to fight a ghost, and the level is done.

No single level is too long, you can run through a level in three minutes, but each of those encounters can be fatal if you're not careful. One of those orcs might be a shaman, who can paralyze you - and then the warriors can take their time cutting you to bite-sized bits. The ghost might happen to be a strage cube of redness, and transform you into a red cube. It's different every time, but the strategy is always much the same. Get to the end, watch for ambushes, and win. Also, every type of map has different types of enemies in it - one is always full of various soldiers for instance, so not only do you have to survive, you have to fight everything to unlock them.

There are also a few more-secret type areas that are harder to get to, with a more powerful selection of monsters. If you climb up those pillars to the right, you'll reach a small plateau with a powerful monster. If you delve into the cave to the bottom right you can fight a powerful elemental. (okay, fine, except for the citrus elemental.)

But then there are a few even *more* secret areas that can only be accessed by the small group of characters with super-jumping or flight abilities. these characters are more special characters to run across, like the green knight or the baby boy - just fun and challenging to collect them all.

While there could be a lot more to the game - some sort of random map generator would add a little more variety to the game, but I wonder if that'd even be nessicarry. there are enough maps to add variety but few enough to breed familiarity with them, so you never know quite what to expect, but neither are you totally surprised. A good balance as it is.

I'm quite enjoying the game, and you should look into it too.

Rescue: The Beagles

2010-05-17T11:22:00.000-07:00

'Rescue: the beagles' is another randomly generated game passing under the guise of procedural. I should go into more detail at some point about the difference between the two of them, but for now, onto the game.

Rescue is a platformer at it's heart, wrapped around a kernel of advertising the inhumane treatment of animals. You know the type, like that game where you clear forests in south africa to grow burgers for mccdonalds and such. The thinly veiled criticism of society as a whole linked arbitarily to a fun little game.

In Rescue, you are given three paths to traverse, one at a time, and your goal is to collect all the beagles. Fairly simple, press up to jump, down to drop through to the next layer, and left and right to move approprately. Space shoots owls at marketing executives for points, too.

The three paths move randomly up and down relative to one another, within certain perameters. The top path is always between one height or another, as are the bottom, and middle restricted in the same way, they never touch. Beagles, enemies, and powerups - ropes, parachutes, and owls, all appear randomly on the right of the screen and move forever to the left. Miss a beagle, it's game over.

Really, the gameplay is simple, and while it's mostly fun there is one real problem. Some of the jumps are higher than your character can survive, but there's no real way of telling which ones short of memorizing the distance you can move. Coupled with the fact that you can move side to side at ludicrous speeds compared to falling, you really have to know exactly how to control your character to actually get a good score.

There are two big improvements that need to be made to this game to make it more than just another advergame. The first would be to remove the auto-scrolling. This would change the dynamic of the game a lot, but mostly it would make it so you're able to actually pay attention to what's on screen at a given time. Frankly, all I know at the rate the game currently moves is avoid big white spots, touch everything else. There's no strategy. The other change is make the differences between the layers more pronounced. When the fall would be lethal, make the ground rocky or something, it's not that hard. It'd stop players from rage-quitting when they;re just abou to collect the last beagle and move to the next randomly generated map.

Self Destruct

2010-05-10T09:45:00.000-07:00

Heck shooters, amongst not having a real consistant name within their own genre of top-down ship-based shooters are proably one of the best genres for procedural generation.

Self Destruct takes these two styles and marries them nicely together, creating a nice heck shooter. I've never been good at heck shooters, and they're not terribly common so for those of you who don't know what it is, I'll explain.

Top-down ship-based shooters are ultimately descended from Galaga, where you have a single ship at the bottom of the screen, and waves of various types of enemies descend from the top, whereupon you shoot at one another until one of you is dead. Heck shooters take that formula, and kick it up a notch, where enemies don't fire occasionaly, they fire constantly, and from all directions. Typically, you can regognize a heck shooter by the number of bullets on the screen at once, if there are more than there are ships, that's a probably a heck shooter.

In Self Destruct, you're given simple controls, and a simple goal. Reach wave 250. The good news is that most waves only last three seconds. The bad news is that's because the enemies are shooting down the screen so fast that you need to apply every reflex you've honed over the years to avoid being blown to smithereens in the first few seconds.

Unlike Probability Zero, Self Destruct is procedural rather than random. The guiding distinction? Pregeneration. Ships don't just randomly shoot from the top of the screen, they come in particular waves and combinations of waves. Sometimes you'll see a wave of fodder ships protecting a wave of attackers, sometimes it's a wave of explosives. Sometimes, the fodder ships will be in the shape of a V, other times an X, and sometimes there's just a huge thick line of them. The waves and their contents are randomly generated, but not the specific waves themselves. That's procedural.

Now, the look of the enemy ships were dfferent each time you loaded the game, that'd be awesome.

Probability Zero

2010-05-07T08:16:00.000-07:00

You might have guessed, but I've gone on a bit of a procedural game downloading binge lately. The lastest is probability Zero, a prodcedurally generated falling game from a game design competion some time ago.

The idea is as simple as any; you start at the top, and climb down a procedurally generated maze of blocks and foes until you lose, then you get a highscore, rinse, and repeat.

But, at it's heart lies it's true form - procedural generation. One that reveals under closer speculation that it's not procedural at all, but merely random. Which is unfortunate, because the game is fairly fun if not for the few issues that plague it, revealing the crunchy random center that tries to pass itself off as Procedural.

You see, a procedural falling game would base what randomly appears next on what the character's curren abilities are. The enemies that shoot out from under things would wait until you've unlocked the horizontal attack, longer drops would generate more often when you buy the increased falling distance upgrade and so on. But it's not the case. The game doesn't (seem to) care whether you can fall X distance wthout taking damage before it adds it to the map. It doesn't care if it generates two equally likely looking paths, and then seals one off beyond your ability to jump out of the scrolling screen.

Okay, the last one is probably a bug that would crop up in a truly procedurally generated game of the same type, but only because the screen scrolls. Still, there are too many times you simply have to give up and wait to be crushed because the path you chose is one tile too high to jump out of, and has been revealed as sealed off on the bottom of the screen.

The one thing that would reveal the game as procedurally generated instead of random would be the existance of pre-planned jumps. Your character can always move within a certain parameter of speed and height, and while it might change as you improve it's not like it goes outside certain boundries. Pre-programmed jumps are blocks that are in an exact relative location to one another such that a player can jump between them using their expected abilities. Maybe it's one space up and two over, maybe it's three over and two down, these are jumps the player can make if they know how to jump, but they're not impossible, ever. Probability zero has no such set of jumps, it's not designed for the player to fel like they're playing a scrolling game aginst the clock, running an endless gauntlet until you mess up, instead it feels like you're playing against a computer hoping it doesn't generate a too high jump for you to make without getting stunned by the fall then shot off a cliff by a nearby enemy.

So, it's not really procedural, it just pretends to be. Sure, that's good enough for most people who don't know the difference, but maybe that's why it didn't win the contest.

The only other question to ask is, 'is it fun?' to which the answer is 'once you get the hang of it, absolutey'

Paradise Fort

2010-05-05T08:35:00.001-07:00

Paradise fort is a small downloadable game with much the same concept as the name implies. You build a random island using the generate button, and then you build a fort on it.

The game is a side-viewed 2d platformer type game, and despite it's unintuitive controls (cancel outside of a menu is confirm in a menu, and vice versa) is a fun little procedurally generated game. You start off with only an island, a guy and a pickaxe and you have to defend yourself as long as you can from seagulls, the military, and forces of nature.

Frankly, the seagulls are the worst danger.

The island itself is about twenty tiles wide by ten tall, though it varies, and and the center of it is usually hollow. The ground of the island is made of varying parts of trees, rocks, gold and... coal? These three resources, plus fish you can kill are all you have at your disposal to build a fortress that will defend you for as long as you can survive. It's harder than it sounds.

You use your limited resources to build a few cannons, floors and ladders. Then the milirary arrives, intent on blowing you up. I've never seen such angry balloons or helicopters. Each only takes a half-dozen shots, but they have a variety of weapons at their own disposal as opposed to your fixed 45 degree peashooters. You've got to plan your defences carefully, because if an enemy arrives from the side of the screen you're not expecting, they could knock down your entire fort before you know what hit you.

The contents of the game is procedural, and as you get more resources from blowing stuff up, the stronger type of enemies are more likely to appear, and you're more likely to take more damage.

There are other challenges, like meteors that you can't shoot down and are as bad as bombs, the rain that can flood your fortress and drown you if you're not careful, and the birds that can damage you, knock you about, and your automatic guns totally ignore, you have to kill them by hitting them with a thrown rock. Since the ground is water, they knock you in and you're not paying attention, you're toast.

Dwarf Fortress Builds

2010-05-03T10:07:00.001-07:00

Eventually, you set out with your dwarves. You'll jump right into play with a wagon sitting there on the ground, and your seven dwarves milling about aimlessly.

Typically, you drill into the side of a wall, start hollowing out bedrooms, dining halls, workshops and such. Sometimes you have to drill straight downwards because you're on flat ground. On rare occasions, you'll be forced to build upwards because of wet ground, but the concept is much the same.

But I'm not really going to cover the gameplay much here, more the procedural stuff.

Depending on where you settled down, you might get goblins or other monsters wandering your map on a random regular basis. They're not such a problem, before long your fortress will attract attention not from enemies, but from other dwarves. Depending on how much you send off as trade with the caravans that pass by, the game will start to calculate migrants to show up at your doorstep. You can't say no, you can't send them away again, you just get more dwarves. They each have a random selection of starting skills, typically a few conversation peices to let them interact and one or two related skills of note.

They might not be useful skills, like sope-makers who are trained in something that's not actually implemented yet, but they will have skills, and they'll start work if there's anything to do. Otherwise, it'd be better to assign them to the army.

The army is nessicarry, because once you get about eighty migrants, you run quickly into other things taking notice of you. You'll fall under attack from some of the neighboring groups, often goblins, elves and humans but perhaps even giants, dragons, or zombies. They surround your fortress and simply wait for an opening to attack.

Seiges add an important and interesting aspect to the gameplay, because they forcve you to think of a lot more than just profit when building a fortress. Doors, traps, defendability. They're not too simple, either. Depnding on the type of enemy you're fighting they might come with archers, or be able to smash down doors, or if you're lucky they'll be too heavy for your drawbridge. Once the seiges start, then they keep on showing up regularly until you've been wiped off the map. Sounds fun, huh?

There's another aspect of the game outside of gameplay worth mentioning, dwarven economy. Once you hit a hundred dwarves, dwarven nobles will start showing up, and dwarves will stop acting as an anarchic community and more like a proper city. They'll need to be paid, they'll want to buy things, they'll have mandated items to make/not make and so on. It adds a whole new dynamic to the game when you stop mining new rooms and your miners suddenly can't afford to pay for their rooms and are forced to sleep on the floor.

Dwarf Fortress Settles Down

2010-04-28T09:48:00.001-07:00

Once a world exists in Dwarf Fortress, you can then start the game. Obviously, but it's not so simple as click start and go.

First, you need to pick where, in this vast vast world you want to begin the game. Do you want to start in the arctic, in the desert, the mountains, the forest? Each has different resources available and thus different challenges for the player.

There's lots of different options between those few generic choices, too. Do you want there to be sand to make glass? How about coal? How plentiful and near the surface is the magma? Do you want a lot of plant life nearby? How about animal life for hunting? What races do you want as close neighbors? How about soil to grow crops? Each of these has a strategy and costs and rewards associated with.

Most of these things will make your game easier if chosen right. Lots of coal, great - you have easy metalsmithing. Lots of sand, glass is really valuable! Lots of plants outside? Wood, and food. A lot of people choose deliberately harder starting areas to have more fun while playing, because as DF is still 'in alpha' that means there is no real goal. Much like simcity, actually. You have to make your own goals, the biggest of which is to pace your city's growth so as to avoid having other civilizations become jealous and attack you before you're ready.

But this isn't about gameplay yet. This is bout picking a location for your fortress. Ultimately, I prefer to choose a maps with a river, lots of rock, and some trees. But, there have to be balancing acts there too. If there's rock that water can seep through, your fortress is quickly going to flood. If there are no trees, you'll have a hard time buildng beds (sleep on a rock? silly man). It' really interestng, but as everything else in DF it's probably a lot more complex than i really needs to be. Certainly far more complex than I need for tinygame.

Dwarf Fortress Builds a world

2010-04-27T10:46:00.000-07:00

The best place to start with dwarf fortress would be the same place the game does. Generating a world.

I don't pretend to udnerstand everything that goes on behind the scenes in the game, it's incredibly detailed and complex, but this is what I understand.

First, one of several types of maps is selected to generate. This could be a pangeta, several continents, or a land-based world, where the oceans are less common and more intersperced. From that, it builds a randomly shaped landmass of a few thousand grid spaces to a side. Each space is randomly selected to be from a biome (that is, the type of rocks in that section of the world map) based on it's Y location in the world, and closeness to water.

Then, it shakes things up,and adds elevation to the areas, which has the effect of creating seas, mountains, and valleys and such. Then, it adds the temperature. Towards the ends of the map are ice caps, towards the middle it's much hotter. This will effect the creatures and plants found in that area.

Next, it adds rivers, by selecting coastlines, and basically blasting inwards randomly, creating very river-like rivers. They sway all over the map, and it's pretty cool. Then, it does lakes. I'm pretty sure all lakes are tied to rivers, but like I said, I don't know everyting.

After it does that, it actually generates the specific content of those tiles. It determines the exact stone, plants, wildlife and so on in each area of the world. It decides if an area is full of predators, or calm. If the area is evil or good, and if evil whether or not it's a full-undead map.

Then, it creates civilizations, and megabeasts like dragons. And if that's not enough, it simulates a thousand (by default) game years of cities rising, falling, killing and being killed by beasts. Heroes rise and fall, gods fight demons and demons eat civilians. The races war it out and make peace. And it writes it all down so that you can look t it later, and your dwarves can talk and write about it in the game. They do a lot of writing.

I don't think Tinygame would need this level of detail, but a good degree of it can't hurt, eh?

Smells like dwarf fotress

2010-04-26T05:57:00.000-07:00

I'm sure you're asking - what's happeed to you, Ronars? You had been just getting back into the swing of things, ad then you disssapeared!

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

Dwarf Fortress happened, is what. I thought I was clean, I swear. Then a new, major update was released, and I was like 'oh, one fortres won't hurt'... I've only put maybe a dozen hours ino it, but those hours are almost exclusively from time I should have been working on tinygame, so I'm a bad person.

But at least I can blog about it, as Dwarf Fortress is probably the single biggest procdurally generated game out there. Even bigger than Diablo, though less mainstream. I'm hoping I an tear myself away from the game long enough this week to actually blog about it. Wish me luck.

More Dungeons

2010-04-09T12:15:00.001-07:00

So, I was talking about tinygame a while back, and it was pointed out to me that when I'm talking about procedural dungeons, I'm the one writing the specific, and in this case short, procedure. There aren't a infiite number of dungeons that can be generated, there are a finite () number of them, all in one specific style.

It's undoubtedly better than spagetti dungeons, but it's still not exactly what I want. Close, but no cigar as it were.

So, for now, I'm adding in another few types of dungeons as I work my way towards code that will generate a huge, sprawling dungeon. The first is a massive, single floor room. Not the best dungeon, and something that would have made sense to work on first, but it was easy enough to implement. One big room, boring. I'll probably remove this before I'm even done.

Next, I made a change to something that had been bothering me. Towers used the same random generation code a the rest of the dungeons. Which means that the first floor could be a tiny, 5x5 hut, and the second a massive 30x20 labarynth, suspended inexplicably off the ground. I've changed it, though it's still not perfect. The bottom floor generates normally, but as the floors increase, the tower remains a simple shape, and gets narrower and narrower.

Small progress, I know, but progress nonetheless.

Exploring the world

2010-04-06T07:39:00.000-07:00

Tinyworld is coming along well. I managed to fix all the issues with items displaying in the game world, all the issues with multiple floors, and all the issues with things drawing off the edge of the map. Great!

However, this brings me to an unfortunate point, one I knew would come (because I'm not the most efficient coder). The game is slowing down the more content I add in. The effect is certainly not as large as when things were drawing wrongly, or on the wrong maps, but it is there. The game is just a hair slower now than it used to be, and I've only got two dozen small maps.

Which means, as much as I didn't want to, I have to turn off the bulk process of every tile in the world, every clock tick. I really want the world to be living, so I'll have to come up with a more general way to handle this, perhaps running through each map the player isn't on one at a time (and thus much less frequently), or perhaps finding a more generalized way of handling them. Regardless, I have to make other maps static for now.

There's been a tiny bit of progress in working on the world, though. I know there are a few things I need to get building before I'm fully into an alpha though - towns, roads, more than the one type of dungeon, and so on.

Roads, is what I started with. They're the easiest. Of course, they're not randomly generating yet, but what I have working is that a map is chosen, and then a width, and weather the road runs horizontally or vertically. It then recursively calls each adjacent map and draws a road in the same position, direction, but one width smaller. And so, you can follow roads to their sources - which will eventually be towns. There's another thing I'll need to add, a source direction. This way, when you're on a map, you'll be able to tell which direction the road on it came from, and you won't need to guess. It'll be handy for dungeons and such, too. Put a big crosshair on each dungeon so you know when you're walking near them.

Globetrotting - Debugging part 2

2010-03-31T10:45:00.000-07:00

So, I think I've tracked down the true source of the chug, and it's pretty funny.

You see, the way my drawing code works is that I check to see if the player is on the current floor, and if it is, then draw everything within so many tiles of him. If not, then just skip the entire drawing section. Sounds like a great idea, right?

There's one major problem, and that's that the objects I draw have no place to be until I actually go onto their floor, because their location is based on the draw code. Which means they'll all appear to be on square 0,0 - but won't really be.

The other problem is that while I'm not drawing any of the procdural art for these foors, I am still loading all the movieclips for them. And they don't go invisible until I've left the floor they're on. Which means, if I change the code for things to go invisible as soon as they're loaded, we should lose all the things showing in the top left corner of the map, and thusly the chug with is confirmed to only be associated with them being on the screen.

EDIT: Yep, this solved it. I can now have all the dungeons I want... well, almost. Items are still being annoying, but I figure the majority of the same fix will work for that problem, too.

EDIT2: turns out it was a different problem for the items, though the walls soltion dropped down the chugging by another sizable amount. Every frame something is handled, everything that is being told to calculate what it's doing goes invisible. Every time it's told to draw itself, it becomes visible. Thus, if something is told to draw itself, but then never toldto do anything - it will stay visible forever.

Which brings me to the issue with the items. Items are being held on tiles. Tiles tell the creature on them to calculate what they're doing. The did not, until a moment ago, tell *items* on them to calculate what they're doing. As such, the moment an item appeared on sceen (which before was when it loaded, and now is only when the player walks onto it's map) it stayed there forever, as it didn't get a 'calculate what you're doing' command until someone picked it up.

Now, items are told to figure out what they're doing, even if all that means is that they go invisible - that's what I really wanted them to do anyways...

A funny debugging story

2010-03-28T07:17:00.000-07:00

As I'm debugging, something funny popped into my head that happened at work a while back, which prompted me to test something different than I usually do.

At work, two years or so ago, we were starting to see slowdown in one of our games, and we simply couldn't figure it out. The particular game was less complex than our other games, but it was running so much slower that it was starting to become unplayable.

Then, one day, I noticed this tiny little line at the very top of the screen. It must have only been one pixel. I hovered over it, and I got the text cursor. I thought 'huh, that's odd'. So, I clicked, then hit ctrl+A, and ctrl+C. Went over to notepad and hit ctrl+V. You know what I found?

The transcript for war and peace was printing on every line!

Nah, I jest about that - but the amount of debugging text that was being printed to the screen in a place it couldn't be seen but was still required to process was of a similar size (text takes up a lot of space in a vector engine, it's about the only thing that's more efficient to do raster-based, AFAIK)

So, here we are, wondering why everything is slowing down, and I go into the code, toggle off 'display debug', and run it. *BAM* it's running so fast we have to go in and decrease the framerate. It's funny how that worked.

I say this because my previous blog I realize - hey, what if my slowdown is coming from all the traces I'm putting in, whenever I run the game I'm running it in debug mode.

The answer: Makes no difference. Good to know, though.

Globetrotting - debugging 1

2010-03-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

So, I've been working on fixing the extra walls showing up in tinyworld, and I've made a lot of progress.

The first thing I did was I added a clause in the 'draw a room' function. You see, when a dungeon gets built, it only actually calculates the size of the first room - everything off of that is recursive (well, kinda). It just says 'based on the size and position of the first room, draw a room over there'. Which means if a 20 space wide map generates a 10 space wide room, and it wants to have a ten space-wide room on either side of it - those would have run off the edge of the map before. Now, they just look ugly. >.> Which is an improvement, running wise, but I need to come up with a more eloquent way of keeping that from happening.

Actually, that makes me think of another thing I need to add to the program - a recursive dungeon generator. What I have is highly random, but not perfectly so. There's only a few dozen possible combinations. Something to add to the random, but stay away from that spaghetti dungeon feel would be great...

Anyways, keeping rooms from generating off the edge of the maps made a noticable difference in the number of 'null location walls' that were drawing at world 0,0. That's a great thing. But it didn't fix all of them, only a few less than half. I soon realized, that's because every time I drew a wall, I just threw away whatever was on that space beforehand. Okay, that's fine - except that I draw rooms adjacent to one another, I redraw the walls, because the code doesn't care what walls are external. So, for a 5x5 room with a 5x5 room adjacent, I'm creating adn then losing track of five walls. With six rooms (often closer to 10x10) across five floors times five dungeons, that means probably 200 (or 500 with less conservative numbers) walls being created, told to keep track of themselves, and then dropped.

So, I make it clear off a square properly before adding a wall on it. Instant speed increase. But it still doesn't get them all, and I think - well, it's probably the same problem but slightly different.

The answer is staring me in the face - doorways. I draw doorways after I draw walls, and that involves deleting the wall there. I was right, I wasn't removing them properly. I don't see a speed increase here, but that's okay - it's only really affecting twenty squares to the previous change's 200.

Still, there's one square left that's eating away at me, and I can't figure it out. I'm almost positive it's related to the stairs, and it dissapears once I reach the top floor. Weird.

I've got other debugging and optimizing still to do, but the change is enormous.

Previous time taken to take one step: minimum ten seconds. Now? One and a half. Still unnacceptable, but there are a bucketload of things I'm doing wrong somewhere, and that last null-location wall is going to fall some day.

Globetrotting - part 1

2010-03-20T11:15:00.000-07:00

Tinyworld currently is just that. Tiny. If it were the real world, there would be the space for about two football fields side by side, and that's it.

But, the world is more than one map large, and more than one map tall. It is, effectively, a three dimensional world. Good for it. I've recycled my stairs code to connect one map to another side to side and top to bottom, and like all good fantasy worlds, it loops.

But some old bugs have come back to plague me, and I fear I won't be able to continue working on the world until I sort them out, and I hate debugging. Even when it's my own stuff. Especially when it's my own stuff.

So, every tile contains a number of items, two of which can have art associated with them - the variable names for these onMe, and the holding. onMe is anything that fills the space. A player, a creature, a tree, a wall, things like that. Things will run into and interact with these things. holding are anything that can be picked up. swords, shields, eventually gold.

When something is off screen, it's supposed to not draw at all. But that doesn't work. When a holding item is on another map, it still draws, and that takes up a lot of memory. Furthermore, if a building ever hits the end of the map, it will attempt to draw an item in a square that doesn't exist, and those will also always draw.

Which is where we come to the problem. Drawing stuff takes insanely longer than simply calculating it. My testing environment was a 5x5 world containing 10x10 maps. That's 2500 tiles to calculate. Without dungeons, no issue. With one dungeon, mild slowdown (okay, each dungeon increases the number of tiles by 500 or so, but see below). with two, it's chugging. Three or more and it's unplayable.

But I know it's not the tiles. I've tested this by increasing the number of maps to 20x20, and the size of the maps to the same amount, that becomes 160,000 tiles. Not a chug in site.

So, I have to stop and debug. First, the obvious problems - when a dungeon gets too big and draws outside of it's boundaries. Ironically, I could avert this by having huge maps, but that's a little counterproductive, because I want to make the dungeons bigger than they are, too. So, fix overflowing dungeons. Then fix overdrawing stuff. Then, back to the top, and see if we can have dungeons in the world...

Plans for the TinyFuture

2010-03-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about tinygame lately. Most of the programming I've been doing has been to simply get the game to work, with all of those darn 'make the game fun to play' problems being put on the 'do it later' shelf.

I've still got a few impotant things in the single dungeon area, which is arguably going to become the bread and butter of the game, but once I finish those few things I've got to start thinking ahead for the future of the project.

The next step, of course, will be to get a world (and a world map, damn, there's another new thing). Then towns. Then NPCs, then come up with a better way to generate and handle all the equipment and monster data in the game...

It's going to be a big projct, I just wish I didn't get distracte from it so easily.

The players see a plot device

2010-03-18T09:55:00.000-07:00

For any of you who don't know, Paizo's been holding their annual RPG Superstar competion over the past month and a bit, and the've gotten into the finals where the competitors each have to produce a full adventure proposal, the same sort you'd normally submit if you were a professional wrter.

Anyways, the idea is for the community to vote on them, based on the judges comments.

Now, I respect the judges of this competition a lot, they're industry pros, game designers, and generally awesome people. But there's one peeve of mine that cropped up a lot in the adventue proposals - 'and so the players '. Sometimes it's as simple as 'and so the players see the shadow flicker'. In fact, I'll use that exact example.

One adventure states 'the players see shadow suddenly whoosh away outside. While chasing it...' But, the players have no idea that they should chase the shadow. It could be a trick of the light, it could be a trap, and at this point, they probably don't even know that the person they're speaking to is an imposter. In fact, without knowing that fact, it seems like the shadow is more of an alarm to summon help, rather than anything else. I don't think I know anyone who, while interrogating a theif, if they saw the theif's shadow run away would follow it. Mos of them would stay there and interrogate the theif as to why, which would lose this thing.

Anything that assumes the players will act in one specific way, especially when it's an important aspect of the story (in this case it's crucial for the players to continue), is a bad idea. And I'm really surprised nobody called them on it. In the previous challenge, the judges marked down entries for saying so much as 'the cold is uncomfortable' because there might be players immune to cold effects - and here none of them notice that some of their most lauded entries use this not just once or twice, but several times each.

Perhaps I'm just picky, I mean they did have to come up with something entirely from scratch in only a week or so, but I feel they could have done a lot better in that regard, seeing how good these people all are.

Marketing Bananzi

2010-03-11T11:03:00.000-08:00

Last post, I was talking about starting adventures, stories, games, movies, whatever. I was talking about the little peices of information you have to get whe you start something to determine whether or not it will be interesting to you. But really, there's more than that. There's even things you get before you have access to the product that might determine whether you'll like it or not.

It's called marketing.

Before you even turn on your console, before you even open the first page of a book you see it in the stores. Most of the time, your first impression will be the size, color, cover image, and title of a product. You have to form your initial impression before you even touch it. Many people will know the difference in what they like between 'The flowers of Jehusbeth' and 'war of the death-tyrants', but what abou 'Mr. Smith'? It could be anything, and while it's most likely to be a biography or something similar, it doesn't provide enough information.

Now, we get to the image they pick for the cover. Most of the time, the images you'll see on any advertisements are artist representations of some of the content. Sometimes it'll be totally accurate to the content, sometime it won't. Terra in the final fantasy series is a good example. In the games, she has yellow hair. You can see it right there. In all the advertisments, she has bright green hair. Needless to say, people were confused at the time, but not much. Fast forward a few years, and Final Fantasy Dissidia comes out, using the advertisment art as the basis of the characters, instad of the in-game art. Now people are totally confused, because Terra looks totally different. These characters were based off a character based off her character.

Still, the images are really the selling points on most products. You probably would buy a air freshener with flowers on it. You might by an air freshener that was in a solid red container. You probably wouldn't buy an air freshener if it featured the picture of a fire hydrant. Who wants their house to smell like fire hydrants and dog-pee?

The problem here arises because you're most often going to see a dozen of these things at once. Artists have to pick either one of the most dramatic scenes of the book to illustrate or someone looking at the cover will choose the dragn breathing fire on a princess over the guy with a cloak in a hallway.

Ah, for the simple call of 'hey guys, let's play some DnD'

Starting an Adventure is Always the Hardest

2010-03-10T09:46:00.000-08:00

Every world has to have a jumping off point. A first line you read in a story, the first image you see in an atlas, a first decription your dungeon master reads you. The question is, as always, what do you want this to be?

This first snippet of information can be the basis of your audience's entire perception of the world, and it had better be good or you might lose them. In today's market, people need to be hooked in seconds or hey might never delve deeper. But I can get into the ADD of marketing another time.

In an adventure in dungeons and dragons, the starting point is where the players meet. Oftentimes, the players will meet in a tavern, and get roped into doing something they had no real initiative to begin. Others are more creative, driving all the players to a common location by means of a threat, or even having the players be captured by some now-common foe that they must escape. But, even the best adventre hook can feel estranged when the characters don't have any motivation to be there.

One thing I try and do when creating a campaign, is give a notice to the players about things they need to involve in their backstory. 'You need to be broke, and willing to work for money' 'You belong to a theives guild' 'You must be searching for a specific holy maguffin' are all examples of requirements I've given players in the past. It's like building in a handle for your adventure hook, and it makes campaign planning much easier, because you don't have to design a hook for any imaginable subset of characters, but for any characters that might fall into a particular category. If every one of the characters seeks the same maguffin, they have a very strong reason to keep working together once they find themselves out of whatever trouble they found themselves in.

Of course, you can't expect this connection to the first hook to continue to be the hook for every adventure, or the players will start to feel dragged along by the nose. Higher level and follow-up advenures still have to be tailored to a general group of just about anyone.

This hook/handle concept is something that other dungeon masters should consider, to make their own lives easier, and the players feel more connected.

Response Ready

2010-03-09T15:28:00.000-08:00

As you know, I work as a game developer, and while I do take pride in that position the projects often take a long time, and since they're educational games, they're a little dry for taste here in this blog.

But, even dry content is better than no content, right?

In between the other projects at work, Ive been working on refurbishing one of our oldest games, Response Ready. This game won all sorts of awards, got all sorts of attention, and is still in the news today, simply by virtue of still being in the news. I've never been party to old news re-hashes before, but I've seen it now.

Anyways, Response Ready is, at it's core, the child of a hidden object game and a choose your own adventure, with a time limit and a resource management game thrown in. You're given a scene, and are tasked with identifying the dangers in the area. For example, the gas pumps might spill, or the train running nearby might derail, or someone at the furniture shop might knock over a shelf of wood-treating chemicals. Then, you rank them as you find them based on how dangerous they are and how likely they are to happen, and you get a procedure out - for instance 'clean up spill'.

Then, you go into the timed choose your own adventure, and immediately something goes wrong. From the list of procedures based on the dangers you found, you have to respond, and get your people moving to solve the problems. But it's not just that simple, as you're working the emergency continues to worsten, so you have to be both proactive and watchful.

It is a good game, and a brilliant idea, but it's really old. And the art is only a handsbreadth above 80s cartoons (admittedly, it was styled that way on purpose). Really, the game needs a makeover. I'm porting it to a new system, then we're going to add new levels, and if I can find someone we'll redo the art for it. But, that's in the future.

Going Underground

2010-02-28T12:39:00.000-08:00

You know what difference is between a building on the ground and a building underground? A front door.

I've been working on tweaking spawn points, item generation, and a number of other little adjustments to tinygame, none of which would make good blog posts, really, but one thing I did accomplish that's worth talking about is the creation of underground dungeons.

Now, before this point, there were staircases randomly generated on a map that would link to a staircase randomly generated on a different map. Good for them, that part had my brain wrapped around it like a small slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. Now that I have staircases working, the next step is to get them working predictably.

The first item of business was to have the staircases generated only inside the buildings. So, after randomly generating a spot inside a random room (tweaked of course by my code which now almost always works for getting items inside rooms). So the staircase on the ground floor where I had the building now appeared inside. Unless the building was really small, then it occasionally appeared inside the walls instead. Like I said, not quite perfect.

Now that we had it appearing in the building on one floor, we needed it to appear inside on the next floor down (down being my decided direction for this first generation to go). But all I had was code to generate a randomly colored ground with a building with a nice front door. Obviously, both of those had to go.

I added new ground tiles to represent being underground, (and ones to represent sky, though they're not in use yet), and added a new algorythm to generate a building without a door, for use on non-ground floors.

And, now we have actual floors underground! My next planned step is to properly tie the spawn points to rooms in the dungeon - so you no longer see the monsters all wandering around underground, outside the dungeon!

Unlikely Candidate

2010-02-26T05:59:00.000-08:00

I don't just play games cause they're fun. I play them for science. The case in point, is noticing procedural content in one game that I certainly never expected to be talking about.

Animal Crossing.

You might ask what about animal crossing is procedural, and that's the obvious question, because everyhing *seems* the same each time you play, right?

It's not, not quite. There are a few dozen characters you can ecounter in the game, many of whom are the same, but some of whom are random. I don't know what, if anything, the generated characters are based on, but simply having a random assortment of pre-generated characters who will react to you in a somewhat random way makes the game procedurally generated. They can move out, and more characters move in and so on - to some interesting results, though as a downside, there's a lot of the game you cannot get unless you have a group of friends playing the game at the same time.

There are other aspects of the game that are procedural too. Weeds grow randomly around town, fish and insects appear randomly based on the time of day and the season, amongst other things.

I suppose some of this could be considered 'random' instead of 'procedural', but I like to think this sort of programming is making it's way into a wider spectrum than just RPG games ad the occasional shooter.

Back!

2010-02-24T08:54:00.000-08:00

I've just returned from my recent vacaton, an it was good. But, this blog's not about my personal life, it's about gaming, really.

While I was on vacation, I started playing a DS game called Eterian Odessey. It's not procedurally generated, per-say, but it acts like it, which I find really interesting.

Basically, it's an isometric rpg where you go around and fight monsters, level up and your goal is to get to the bottom of the dungeon, exactly like the type of procedural game I'm working on now - except that in EO you've got a 3d view of the map in addition to the isometric view, except it doesn't do much other than give some nice extra visuals.

I find it particularly interesting as the game itself is the sort of thing I would want tinyworld to create. Ambitious sure, but not as much as it might be - I'm already generating dungeons as nice as sections of the map, I just need to make them more than a dozen rooms.

How much is too much?

2010-02-12T10:41:00.000-08:00

One question that always comes up when working on a game is how much information to store. Do you store everything that's running in the game at once? Do you only store some minimal information about the game, like accomplishments?

In tinygame, I'm attempting, at first, to store and run *all* content on all maps simultaniously. I've only got a half-dozen maps running right now, and they're not even connected in the complex way I want them to be eventually connected, but I'm running all the content on all the floors and calculating everything at once.

Which means I have to be very careful how many monsters I let spawn on each map, the size of maps and so on.

I've touched on the game recently (no, really, I do work on this thing!) and I've decided that about eight monsters per spawn point is a good starting value. Eight monsters per flor, plus the player, and... well, it can get a little processor intensive.

One way I've premtively attempted to divert some of the processor chug is to break the game down into running at different frames per different things. Things like the player run a few times per second, most spawn points run once every three seconds, monsters act every one or two seconds. This has a umber of immediate effects. First, the player has the advantage over all monsters that he can act several times faster than them. They'll still chase him, but he can outrun them, he can outfght them, and so on. A clever player could fight a powerful monster and win without damage by moving at the right times. Secondly, it means not everythinbg in the world needs to be calculated at the same time. If there are ten thousand monsters, they migt be broken up between a hundred cycles of processor, which is a hundred monsters a cycle, and while it might become slow is still a huge advantage over ten thousand in the same time frame - and only a very minor change in the game play.

What do you all think? Anyone who'se out there?

Historical Architecture - Part 6

2010-02-11T10:26:00.000-08:00

The flying castle

In the age of magic, gravity was no longer a law. For, with near limitless power at one's fingertips, it became possible to fly, or even to levitate a small building. Such was the power trapped forever within the weapons of the elements.

One of the weapons of the elements harnessed the power of the air, and it was a bow. Hundreds of years later, a shadowkin got his hands on it, and the power drove him to the heights of shadowkin culture. His name was Marshal Hian.

He harnessed the near limitless power of the elemental weapon to create a massive fortress bound instead of to the ground, to the sky. It became, over the years Marshal Hian was alive, one of the most powerful and influential cities in the world, though like all good things, it came to an end one night when Marshal Hian passed away in his sleep. The castle carshed to the ground in the jungles of Grittlanni, killing everyone inside and destroying all the great art and culture that had been built around this nigh-utopian society.

Today, still people make it their quests to locate and delve into the ruins, if not in search of treasure, in search of the elemental weapon of the air - for since from that day, it has been lost to the pages of history.

Historical Architecture - Part 5

2010-02-04T12:02:00.000-08:00

Altar of the third god

In Ronar, Geisfarl was the first to gain awareness, and he created the second god, Garsog. Third, the world was created, and then the six goddesses. The altar of the third god is a location confused in it's purpose but signifigant nonetheless.

The altar of the third go was actually created by the Fallen Angel, the Reality Master who began the conflict of the universe for mortals to worship himself. He apeared to mortals in their dreams to cause them to seek it out and venerate it, though they do not know why.

Though it serves no true divine purpose, the altar is a menangere of goddess worshipers, faithless who serve no gods, and those who worship natural powers as if they were gods themselves. It has become a hub of those who are unsure of their own destinies, unsure of their place in the world, and a place where soothsayers travel to tell the future to them.

Historical Architecture - Par 4

2010-02-02T12:28:00.000-08:00

The Temple of Pain

Ner, the goddess of pain and suffering, has always been an active force within the world since the day she was created by Garsog and Geisfarl. Before the Age of The Faithless began, however, she was particularly active, even to the point of travelling to Ronar to aggrivate the dragon wars to cause more strife between the races, and even the dragons themselves.

On one of the southeast banks of Maxitone stands a large temple structure, now long destroyed by time, and by repeated attempted ressurections and seiges. When it was new, it was the size of a small city, with a wall of obsidian around the perimiter, and a central structure of the same black stone. The stone holds no true signifigance, but Ner likes black, for the only reason that it makes most mortals feel more uncomfotable - as is the case for most things Ner likes at all.

For centuries following, the structure was one of Ner's only places of worship, and doubtlessly the most impressive. The central structure was dedicated to three purposes, worship of Ner in the central altar, and the holding and torture of prisoners. Out of deference to their god, Ner's clerics ate, slept and performed all other duties away from the main structure. In the event that triggered the age of the faithless - where great heroes struck down an avatar of Ner's for the torture and destruction it and she were causing - the avatar's bones were fused to the central altar as it's energy exploded from it's body when it was struck down.

It was, for a long time, a place of mixed powers. Heroes and Villians alike would search out the temple to try and gain power from Ner's avatar's remains, as did the heroes who first struck it down. Some of them ascended into godhood from it's presence, it is said. And so, those seeking godhood, or to worship Ner, or those who fought against them, travelled to the temple again and again, each year bringing about more damage to the temple until it collapsed and was eventually left to rest. Some still say there is power hidden within the bones of the temple structure.

Historical Architecture - Part 3

2010-01-28T12:09:00.000-08:00

Angel Temple

The continent of Grittlanni is a freign place to the civilized races, even to many of the shadowkin who call it their home and homeland. Few such places are more mysterious than the angel temple, a building built in a unique style of uniqu materials, and inhabited (ocasionally) by unique creatures.

The building is built atop a large stone pyramid, built of stone blocks each wider than the one above it - and the largest one at the base nearly a quarter mile in both width and length of flawless sone, though only a foot tall. The block above it is fifteen inches less from all sides, and it repeats until the top, each block flawless in all ways. The building itself is also square, and appears to be carved from a similarly flawless single peice of stone. The ceiling is a hemisphere of thick, impenitrible glass, and all the walls, inside and out are fit with ensconced torches that burn without fuel inside golden-lined archways to illuminate the building constantly, even in the darkest of nights. It is, in fact, this light that most often leads explorers to this building.

Outside of the strangeness of how the building is built, there is the strangeness of when it was built. Each of the gods in turn will deny having built it, yet the power it contains insist it was done so by magic, yet it's earliest sighting places it well beyond the first day of the year of recording, and centuries before magic was granted to the land by the gods.

The truth of the structure is in what lies beyond the gods, and in the true nature of the multiverse. From another reality came creatures never created upon Ronar, and never intended to be seen there. These creatures are the angels, the creautres that occasionally visit this magical world, and tap into it's powers.

Visitors to this site often find simply it's incredible architecture. Occasionally, if one is lucky, they may see one of the angels that visit, and if they are even luckier, be granted he opportunity to learn from them.

Ronarian Locations - Part 1

2010-01-27T11:16:00.000-08:00

While there is no place in the world without history, some places have less exciting histories, and many have shorter histories.

The city of Arianna is a present-day callback to the ideals of the age of magic, and while it is part of the kingdom of Wetisa, and the current throne of it's Queen Mysti, it is a magocracy in all other ways - even the queen has some magical powers.

For those of you who don't know, a magocracy is a city whose ruling class is formed of, and decided by the members of the city who can use magic, and in a standard fantasy setting, that means arcane magic, instead of divine. I'm sure divine magic has some sway in magocracies, but that's the basic definition of them. But, back to the city.

Arianna is smilar in many ways to the cities built during the age of magic, in that rather than building structures on archetectural stability, they are built on magical supports, leading to Nine almost spindle-thin towers dozens of floors high. Their open construction allows the high updrafts to whip through the large windows (because hey, who'se going to fire an arrow through a window twenty stories up?) making the entire city a place aways literally humming and whistling. Most days the inhbitants agree that the sounds are soothing and pleasant, but there are rare days where the sound obviously becomes grating, forcing the people to use ear protection against the sounds.

The centralmost tower is the castle, and at over fifty floors tall and containing nearly a thousand rooms, is easily the largest tower on Ronar outside of the tower-city of Mer. Like the other towers, the walls are white plaster and rather than supporting them with beams and stone blocks like oter cities, or even other buildings in the city, the floors and walls are all supported by extremely thin and magically strong threads of metal - or even just walls of force. Some people in the city worry that a particularly clever sabateur could knock out an entire section of the city by toppling the towers, but the mages in charge of maintaining them assure them that the wards are strong enough to endure anything but the strongest of magical assaults. They survived the reign of Astra, the age of souls, and a seventeen year long inheritance war, after all.

The city itself is circular in nature,even to the point that the buildings have curved fronts facing the castle, and backs facing the outer walls. Almost exclusively, they are one tory tall, and built from brick, fronted with white plaster, giving the red-paved streets city a clean, serene feeling.

Historical Architecture - Part 2

2010-01-22T12:37:00.000-08:00

Haiga's Clock

Along the western coast of Maxitone, the oldest settled continent is the vast forest of Wedra, stretching thousands of miles along the coast. This forest is the homeland of the Torin, where they were placed by the gods with the command to guard the forests of the world. Many Torin have since moved on, but most of them remain here.

Less than a hundred years after Torin were created, there was a Torin named Haiga born into one of the families who had taken it upon themselves to organize the people, these families were th nobles of the Torin folk, and while not quite he same as the noble of the humans they sufficed. Haiga was a passionate torin, and his first great passion was a toy brought from far away human lands, a small clockwork statue that would walk about, and a true marvel of engineering at the time. He spent many years obsessing over the way the gears meshed together seamlessly, and even after he was banished from his homeland (which is another story althogether) he retained the passion for the smooth and seamless workings. In fact, in common history, he is heralded as the father of clockworks, although it is obvious to those with more informaton that it is impossible, it is agreed that it was the torin who brought clockworks into the hands of the common man.

Haiga built over the years a number of creations, each grander than the last (although none of them quite as delicate or precise as the toy he admired as a child). Eventually, he found himself needing to know the time of the day it was precisely, for being immortal (which is really a story for another day) the times and days belended together into a great blur. And so, Haiga returned to one of the sites where he had battled dragons along heroes of the past, heroes who had all moved on to other lives, or ascended into a more complete existance, and asides the town he began to build a massive structure, four stories tall, and stradding a small river.

This structure contained a waterwheel at it's base, and a mill for the local villagers, but the wheel would power his most impressive structure yet - which he named 'A Clock'. This tower had four great glass faces, each one revealing the exact time of day to the distance and could be seen for miles around. Haiga's Clock, as it is know today is the first precise timepeice on Ronar, and it's inner workings have been sealed off from others to examine - all people know is that the clock continued to count exact times of day even during the droughts when there were no water, and during the floods, while the wheel was spinning furiously. The building itself is rather delapidated now, but so far the clock has been respected by wariors, and passed over by weather. Perhaps the immortal still visits and maintains it, for he has not been seen in many years, perhaps he lives inside.

Origin of the races

2010-01-19T08:06:00.000-08:00

Fantasy worlds have long-since been defined by JRR Tolkien's lord of the rings books and his take on the fantasy creatures out of classic faerie tales. Elves, classically, and dwarves are very similar. They're tiny creatures that live in the earth and go about playing tricks on people. So are gnomes, so are faries, and goblins. They're all very similar creatures - in earth mythos.

But Tolkien took these creatures and made a series of distinct races from them. Drawves live in mountains, elves live in forests, and the two don't get along. Hobbits are flighty, Orcs are brutish, and so on. Dungeons and Dragons took these types and ran with them, and thus he generic fatasy world is born.

I started Ronar as a generic fantasy world, with elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and so on - but I gradully felt that it wasn't my world doing that. Everyone who thought of elves in that world made them the same as elves in other worlds. It wasn't what I wanted, when building a new, distinct world. The idea to make my own races came when was playing final fantasy. They stopped using elves and dwarves long ago, they created Vierra, and Moogles, and Bangaa, and a dozen other races in their recent games to populate the world in their place. Some of the races, Vierra and Bangaa, make clear lines to more generic races, elves and dwarves respectively but they were still new and exciting. A race made entirely of sexy bunny-girls who wear lingere? A little unrealistic, but certainly fun.

And so, I cast about to create my new races. Torin were the easiest, cat-people. You can probably see where the insiration came from already, but such is life. You need to be inspired from somewhere. Unofotine were next, a race of bear-like mole people. Cyclops were next, although their histry has been changed and re-written more times than I care to remember. Hopefully they're in a more steady place now. Last came Shadowkin, and I will admit they were someone else's creation that was looking for a home - only to find one in my world.

Historical Architecture - part 1

2010-01-13T10:40:00.000-08:00

In any world the size of Earth (which Ronar is, near enough) there is a lot of world to exist. You might think a city is a big place to learn, or you might think a country is a hard place to move about, imagine the number of things across an entire planet! In starting my epic campaign on Ronar, I've been inspired to work on some of the landmarks across the world.

Alladora's Orphanage

Alladora is the goddess of fertility, and of children. As such, it only makes sense that her followers will be devoted to the health and wellbeing of children. Many of them run orphanages for both the protection of children and the access to the magical energies they draw from their godess by virtue of the children being present.

The most prominent orphanage is Alladora's Orphanage, named after the goddess herself, rather than the founder as is traditional. It was founded Circa 339, after the first dragon wars and during the age of the faithless, to take in many of the children whose parents had died during the wars. Despite the absence of their goddess, the faithful of Alladora followed her tennents to build the structure at the base of Mount Fejj (currently mount Silen, the home of the gods)

In current Ronar, the main structure of Alladora's orphanage is four stories tall, and at least twice as wide and deep as it is tall. Atop it's roof, since it's founding, are smaller additions, raising the building's height another two stories. It has the capacity to hold over a thousand people, mostly children in large common rooms and bunk beds. Still, for it's age, at nearly 1,200 years old it is one of the oldest buildings on Ronar, thanks in part to it's being a temple in such an actively religious city, and part of it being constructed with the aid of powerful magics that prevent it from decaying or suffering from any of the natural wear and tear a busy building would normally suffer. It usually houses about 500 orphans from across Maxitone (currently many from the inheritance wars between Barakaan and Arianna), although the number has increased steadily over the years as the number of people in the world has done likewise.

Looking ahead

2010-01-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

Once you have a procedurally generated world of any kind, you have to ask yourself how it's going to be used. Sure, we know in my case it's going to be used for a rogue-like roleplaying game, but beyond that I mean how the player is going to play through it.

Once a dungeon is built and the player delves into it, clears out all the monsyers and grabs all the treasure laying around; what happens to it? Should the dungeon fade away to be replaced by another one later? Should the dungeon get refilled with more random monsters and treasure? If so, how long should it take? Instantly, so the player never needs to go looking for a new place? After a predetemined, or even random length of in-game time forcing the player to go back to town? After a year so only after the player has cleared a hundred other dungeons can they come back?

A solution on another blog I read inspired me to the solution I offer. Every map has two states of information - who currently 'owns' the map, an who is supposed to own the map. Thus, a map within orcish territory is supposed to be owned by the orcs, although it could be actually owned by the humans, or the elves, or even nobody if the player just ran through and killed everything. That part's simple.

Next, each map knows who is currently owning the maps adjacent to it, and for simplicity's sake we'll say there are four of those, one in each compass direction. So, each map has six crucial peices of information to be used in the next step - spawning.

Every map is constantly (if slowly) spawning creatues based on those four peices of information. Each group represented in the six areas (supposed to own, actually own, and owns north, owns east, owns south, owns west) spawns slowly into the map - probably at an even rate, with the group supposed to own the map highest of all. Obviously, this will probably lead to a conflict in who actually owns the map, if more than one group is represented, but that's fine - conflict is what makes the engine easy. You see, if humans own a square, and strong human units spawn into the adjacent square, eventually they will take over that adjacent square, having lots of spare units there, though they will constantly be under attack. Then,a single strong orc unit could spawn into it, and then the map would be quickly owned by orcs again - changing the power balance.

This way, the player could pass through a village one day (which normally only spawns peasants) and two days later pass through to find it overrun by orcs. The player kills them all, goes away, and comes back later to find the town once again filled by peasants, respawned once there were no orcs to kill them.

Dynamic background information makes the player feel a lot stronger about their influence in the world, but also that it doesn't seem like the world is totally at their control. A player who kills everyone in a town then comes back three weeks later to see everyone still laying in the street knows that nothing will happen they don't control. A player who walks into a town they like and finds they have to save it from monsters feels like they make a difference, and that the world is more real. Which,of course, is something we really want.

Unreal Holidays

2010-01-03T06:29:00.000-08:00

Happy Holidays, everyone.

Holidays are interesting things, all full of stress and family and gifts and so on. They've been comercialized, and only the most base idea of what the holiday was continues on in tradition. Christmas, for instance, was adapted from a pagan ritual to banish away the darkness. Now, it's a holiday celebrating the birth of the son of god, where everyone is expected to give to everyone else and spend time with family. I *totally* see that connection.

I've recently created a calendar on Ronar, and with it some holidays. I needed it because I realized I needed to give important events in Ronar actual dates and timelines beyond what era they happened in.

The first step was to decide how the calendar was set up. How many days in a year. In my case, the world was created by the gods, and a simple, even number works best. Three hundred days. The calandar was made by man - and so ten months makes a beautifully symmetrical calendar. That puts thirty days in a month, which doesn't divide by the classical week value of seven. That's fine, Earth calendar months don't divide by seven, right? But I'm making a well-balanced, symmetrical calendar.

What I finally decided, four weeks in a month is 28 days, then two days of rest, one every second week. It fits a classical religious feel with the days of rest, which don't fit nicely into the regular calendar already. These days are often holidays - though not always - and represent time for people to relax from their normal routines and spend time with their families and such. Like Christmas.

Then, we have to come up with names for the months, and there are generally two schools for doing that. The first school is similar to the japanese language where every month is simple named after which month it was numerically. Onemonth, Twomonth, and so on. A little plain, but certainly effective. The other school is to name months after what they represent. A friend of mine called the first month of his year 'yeardeath' to represent the end of the old year, which is an oddly morbid look at things - most people look for the positives in the end of things, but that's his world, ne?

The ten months of the Ronarian Calendar are as follows: Newyear, Winterbreak, Journey, Downpour, Kingsith, Scorching, Queensith, Harvest, Greybark, and Barren. Good names for months, but what do they represent? I'll tell you my friend. I will tell you.

The month of Newyear is the first month of the year. It is cold, and snowy, and much of the month is spent preparing what can for the year ahead. Craftsmen are fond of this month for the extra time they are able to spend crafting. Most craftsmen will produce their best works in this time.

Newyear 4 is the Day of the Divine, marking the first day the gods made themselves known to Ronar, circa 103. This holiday is typically celebrated only by clergy and strongly religious folk, and is used as a day to reinforce the presence of the gods in everyday life.

The month of Winterbreak is when the winter finally turns to spring. Typically begins the coldest, but ends with little to no slow. Farmers will spend this time getting their fields ready for planting, merchants will get ready for travel, and laborers start work in earnest.

The month of Journey is when everyone who has holed up for the winter gets out to start working again. Typically, this means most merchant caravans which slowed or stopped over the winter months finally get up and running again, bringing a surplus of trade to all the cities, for most places have an excess of crafted goods of a high quality from a long winter. Typically, most crops are planted during the middle to end of this month, as the weather becomes particularly pleasant outside. Also importantly, most humans are born during the month of journey as with the festival of fertility and the nine month gestation period of humans, most children are born around this time.

Journey 15th is The day of beginnings. Not only is this one of the most common birthdays on Ronar, but as the month of Journey represents the new travels, new caravans, new crops, and new life. This day is a large celebration, and often merchants will hold large sales on this day and the week preceding it to celebrate the beginning of the trade year - making the day of beginnings a day where most people will receive and give many gifts.

The month of Downpour is the end of spring, and where there is the most rain. Worhippers of Malladine are busy this month, for this is the most important month in the years harvest. Clerics of Malladine will often hold month-long celebrations to please the goddess.

Downpour 30th is the Festival of fertility, celebrating life, and harvest. This day, above all others, love and lust is in the air, and the temples to Malladine, Sanfra, Alldora are packed with worshipers and revellers. Malladine has been known to occasionally reward farmers who pay her particularly strong homage with divine aid on this day, so they may rest and relax - all the more reason for them to celebrate.

The month of Kingsith is named through the arrogance of King Sirra, as the month in which he was born. Originally named Kings month, the name was later shortened to Kingsith. This is also the month where spring changes to summer.

Kingsith 6th is the King's day, originally King Sirra's birthday, it has become a day where everyone celebrates their lords, ladies, kings and other nobles. The ruling classes will hold lavish parties, and while most people don't get to attend, entertainers commonly put on shows about the lives the lords and ladies of the lands to entertain.

The current month of Scorching was originally Queensith for King Sirra's wife's birthday, Scorching is a warm month, and the month where harvests are reaped but not yet stored for the coming winter. Often, this month is a month of relaxing for that reason.

The month of Queensith, Like Kingsith, was called Queens month after King Sirra's wife. It was swapped with the seventh month from the sixth by Queen Mellichai, King Sirra's daughter, in year 93 to mark the day of her mother's death, rather than the day or her birth. This month was originally Scorching, and is the hottest month of the year.

The month of Harvest is exactly as it sounds. As the fall approaches and the temprature starts to fall, farmers and craftsmen alike harvest what they can to prepare for the coming winter. Typically, by the end of this month, there are few crops still in the ground.

The month of Greybark was named as such by King Sirra after an unusual tree he had in his possession that as it's leaves turned from green to red for the fall, it's bark also turned from brown to grey. The first cold month.

Greybark 15 is Reverence. As the world slows down for the winter, the gods require that everyone take at least a single day to go and worship and pay homage to the gods that created them, and are the source of power in the world. Almost exclusively, this day is spent in temples to one's patron deity, and the greatest sacrifices of the year are made on this day.

The month of Barren is when the trees have lost all their leaves. This month often ends with snow, and is one of the slowest months of the year. It is a month for gathering the last of provisions for the winter, wood and water, supplies, and the month where only the slowest and bravest caravans are still on the roads.

The first Weapon of Legend

2009-12-22T10:04:00.000-08:00

Miraud and his armies disbanded, the great heroes by his side during the battle travelled home, or out for their own goals. Miraud, still, was not done. The dragon's soul was captured in a crystal, it could not be remade without the crystal, and that was too much of a concern. So, Miraud deigned to find a way to stop the crystal from being used.

He decided to focus the power of the dragon's soul into making a weapon, one that could be used against the other dragons. For forty days and forty nights, he toiled away at a forge with the crystal and the tools to forge a mighty weapon. At the end, he was left with a heavy warhammer, adn the crystal was whittled down to a nub smaller than a man's finger, and encased within the hammer, merged into it as one. This was the first great weapon of the elements, the first great weapon forged by men in the age of magic. It had the power to move mountains, and amplified and channeled the raw power of whomever carried it. Miraud was exhausted, he laid down the hammer and slept.

The moment he did, though, alone and unprotected but for his weapon, the other dragons swooped in to end him. While with the hammer of earth Miraud was more powerful than any one dragon, he was no match for the combined might of all five. Still, he was not slain outright, and managed to protect the hammer from their greedy clutches. But, he was mortally wounded, and passed away shortly after. The people, the armies, and the heroes that had known him decided his last sacrifice not be in vain, and buried Miraud in the earth along with the hammer so that the dragons would not be able to collect it, the weapon's power preventing the massive beasts from tunneling through the ground, and all manner of traps and chained demons to prevent anyone from entering and stealing it for their own uses. The thought of the dragons weilding the weapon was impossible for people to comprehend, and so they hid it away.

More split-level madness

2009-12-19T14:41:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I didn't get maps working across levels, I realized I needed to improve the code that handles rooms before I could do that - last time I touched that items kept appearing outside of the rooms, and more importantly, inside of walls, replacing them.

So, I was looking at the code, and it got boring, so I added a spawn point to my map. And then I added code so I didn't have to hard-code in every spawn point, after all, this game is supposed to be about procedurally generated content, right?

Now the spawn points work, and as I work my way through five maps to get to my spawn point, I notice that there are a lot of monsters appearing on screen - they don't notice me because they're on a different map, but they're appearing on screen. I arrive on the new floor and get clobbered - I have to remember to spawn some items before I spawn those monsters next time, ouch.

I go in, and write two new pieces of code. The first makes monsters that are not on a map that is being drawn, do not draw (this saves on processor power, too). Then, I make it so spawn points that are not on a map the player is currently on, are not pumping out monsters, and even when the player is there, monsters no longer appear so quickly the player gets swamped. I know this is a bit of balancing, but if I'm going to be testing this a bajillion times, I might as well not have it so hard to kill a group of monsters as to be impossible.

Then I found the monsters, ran away and while on the other map I died. I was like 'whaaaat?'. So, I looked and I found that while I was marking the player as being on the new map, he was still being treated as if he were on the staircase of every level he passed through. Which means if a monster on another map walked by a staircase I had passed through, it would 'see' me, approach, and attack (and eventually kill) me. Glad I figured that out, that would have been an annoying issue to have resurface every now and then.

If it was so easy, why did it take me so long?

2009-12-17T12:56:00.000-08:00

Taking a step out of my naration for a moment, you might remember that I stopped working on TinyGame a while back because I was having difficulty with bugs regarding map changing code.

Now, I've finally abstracted everything to the correct level so I have a world, which contain a number of maps, which contain a number of tiles that can hold a number of things, of which one may be a creature (which may also be holding things). Some of those tiles can be stair tiles, which when walked over and activated bring the player to a new map. It sounds so simple, doesn't it?

It certainly didn't turn out simple. After I abstracted from just having maps to having a world containing maps, my player class exploded to no longer wanting to be a creature. I had to rewrite the player class almost from scratch to fix that, and I'm still not even sure why that happened, and am deathly afraid of setting it of again.

Then, I had to come up with a way that the staircases weren't considered items, nor quite terrain, nor creatures. They needed to be something new, and now they take the place of a tile instead of occupying it.

Finally, I needed a way to keep the game, when the player moved from one map to another, from a) displaying the whole game and b)keeping the camera on the player (because other than the fact that it is controlled externally, it's just another creature as far as the game is concerned). I solved that with a little flag on the map that the player is on. Basically, it says 'this map draws'. Combined with art being so much more computationally intensive than the rest of the code, and everything else the game is still running quite smootly with a few monsters running around, and four layers of mps for them to run around on.

Next, I integrate the map generation back onto the maps!

Age of Magic

2009-12-15T10:06:00.000-08:00

For years, the gods watched the world, sure in themselves that this time, the wold was perfect. Of course, it was not, for there was an impalance of power in the world. The great dragons were many times more powerful than the races, and felt that the gods created them soley to rule and command them, instead of to inspire.

The dragons descended onto Ronar, and demanded alleigence from the kings and peasants alike, claiming to be the new rulers, gods and leaders. Some lands submitted, most however fought back. And so, the first dragon war began. It was not much of a war, the races prepared mighty war-machines and the dragons came and destroyed entire cities. The races called upon mighty power from the gods, and the dragons came and crushed the temples. The dragons were careful never to do more damage than the races could sustain, after all they needed someone to be venerated by. But, that was little less than utter chaos.

The gods looked down at the expanding war, and realized that the races were in no way equal to the dragons. The matter that they survived as long as they had was a mark to their merit. And so, Garsog, Geisfarl, Their wives and children gods pooled their powers together and created an endless supply of energy that would run all across the surface of Ronar and through it's center, and even out into the sky and to Paio, the moon. Some of these lines of power would reach as far as the sun, though not many. The weave of these lines was wild, and invisible to the naked eye, but it was very powerful. The gods called this power Magic, and the lines of power Ley-Lines.

Then, the gods appeared to the races and revealed this unfortold power, a weapon with which the races could fight the dragons, and the other beasts of the land, and could be used for any number of purposes. The races took to this power like fish to water, and within a year use of magic was commonplace. Within two, the races were powerful enough to keep the dragons from simply descending and crushing a city at their will. Citys expanded like never before, and the races flourished. The dragons did not give up the hope of the assault, and combined forces to continue to attack the races. This, was the age of magic.

After six years, a warrior of great renoun had mastered magict a great degree, and he gathered about him all the most powerful armies of the land, and the great heroes. He tracked down the dragon of earth to it's hiding place, and challenged it to a duel to the death. The dragon laughed, for it had never been defeated, or even challenged. The battle lasted two days, and in the end, Miraud and his army was victorious. The great dragon of earth was dead, the greatest creature ever created by the gods was destroyed. Miraud cast a spell as it released it's dying breath, and captured it's soul into a massive crystal, not letting it return to the gods lest it be returned to the world. It's body, though, he did offer to the gods who, impressed by his courage and strength and uncommon dedication, took it and used it's bones to gave Miraud a new land to call his own, Ouvetlam, a continent across the sea.

Victorious, the armies returned home, thousands were dead or injured, but it was still a victory. The great dragons cried out in anguish, and left the races alone for a time. And for a time, it was peaceful.

The First Intervention

2009-12-14T10:31:00.000-08:00

For hundreds of years, humans on Ronar grow, prosper and colonize. They do not know of the gods, or of magic, or of anything beyond the expanding land they are building. Languages come into being, kingdoms, and more. Life is simple, and it's purpose is to grow and expand. One king saw history and that much of it was being forgotten. Since he never wished to be forgotten, he created a way to measure time, the days, years and seasons. The first and only major calendar of Ronar. Thus, the first year of recording came to pass. As did the second, and the third. Still, humankind was expanding.

But the gods looked down at the world, and saw that the humans were not stopping where they had expected them to. The gods had put the humans down on one major continent of three, and slowly they were expanding beyond it's borders. Building simple boats to build on the islands, cutting down the forests to build still grander cities. And most worrisome to the gods, they did not spare so much as a thought to whether or not the gods existed at all.

And so, on the fourth day of the month of NewYear, year 103 of counting, the gods descended into the world to much awe and wonderment of the humans. They chided the humans for being so simpleminded in their expansion, and reminded them that they would be watching. They also declared that since the humans could not be trusted to care frr the world, they would create new races to live alongside them. There were the Torin, placed deep within the forests to live wih and protect them. There were the Unofoine and the Cyclops placed within the earth to live with and protect it. There were the Shadowkin placed to watch and protect the skies.

The humans, however never quite believed what the gods were, or understood what was happening, and so the gods decided to also leave marks of their power in the world - six mighty dragons, each stronger than ten-thousand strong men. These dragons were creatures of magic and fury, and were to always inspire complacency amongst the races.

The dragon of fire was born to the center of the world, sleeping in the heat within that occasionally rocketed forth onto the surface. It was the most similar to the lesser dragons already created, simply larger and more grand.

The dragon of water was born into the oceans, endlessly swimming with the tides. It was long and thin, with no wings and great fins aong it's side, each larger than a sailing ship.

The dragon of earth was born upon the land, and given the most power such that humans could see it and would be awed. It's back was formed of a small mountain, and each of it's claws and fangs were diamonds.

The dragon of air was born high in the sky, just within a mortal's sight. It was so light that i did not need wings to fly, swimmimg through the air with it's sinuous body miles long.

The dragon of light was born in the warmth of sunlight, and would endlessly chase the ball of fire above it. It's body was as clear as crystal, almost invisible against the sky.

The dragon of darkness was born at midnight, and would chase the day it never understood, at the same time fleeing from it in fear. It's body was not formed of physical stuff, but of shadows. Mortals only knew of it's existance by the footprints they wuld find left behind.

After the beginning

2009-12-09T12:19:00.000-08:00

now, Ronar existed, and it was much like the nothing in which GOD had came to be. But the Masters of Reality gave things a push. No point in waiting for an eternity, after all.

So was created the first god. He was made without emotion, without bias, so that there would be an empty slate for this competition. The Masters then backed away, beyond the realm of the god's power, and watched with an oath to never interfere.

The god created was called Geisfarl. Geisfarl saw the universe, and that it was empty, even of himself. His first act was to give himself form, the same form that would later be used to build the most populace of the creations: humans. Geisfarl then saw that the universe was still empty, and created the sun, and the single planet of Ronar. Now, the universe was not empty, and there was light. But now Geisfarl could not see all, for he could watch the light, and the empty world below with it, he could not see the far side. Geisfarl split himself in two, creating Garsog, the god of the night, to watch over what parts of Ronar he could not see. Garsog saw that the world and the universe were beautiful, and full, but they were plain. For, being made of all that Geisfarl was not, he detested the emptiness upon the world, and created water, so that the world would move and flow, no longer static. Once water has been created, Geisfarl began to long again for his solid, stable and strong world. He crafted himself the first tools, and used them to dig out great spaces of Ronar, so that the water would flow into them. Thus, Geisfarl created the continents, and indirectly the oceans. Together, Garsog and Geisfarl looked at the world and were satisfied, but over time, they began to tire. They created for themselves three wives each, to keep them company.

The wives were each alike them in form, but different. The genders themselves were not entirely defined at this point, but they created the goddesses nonetheless, different, yet the same. The six wives were; Malladine, Sanfra, and Alldora were the wives of Geisfarl, and Paio, Estel, and Ner were the wives of Garsog. Each godess looked upon the world and decided that even with it's solidness, and it's fluidity, it was empty.

First, Sanfra created plants of the land, grasses, bushes, trees and other life that grows from the ground. She took to the woods and forests, claiming their domains as her own. Next, Alldora created all manner of beasts to walk the land. They would live forever, and reproduce. She took to the spark of life, and claimed it's domain as her own. Then, Malladine created fruit, wheat and other foods from the ground, so that the beasts might eat, and grow. She took to the fields and foods and claimed their domains as her own.

Garsog's wives saw what the others had done, and while it was beautiful, it had flaws. If the creatures never died, they would soon cover the whole world, and it would grow filthy and disguisting. Paio herself became the moon, and declared that creatures would only live for a time, before passing the world on to new ones, so each might experience the world anew. She took to the passing of lives, and claimed it's domain as her own. Estel saw that while the land that Giesfarl had created as teeming with life, the sea and the air were barren. She created all manner of fish and birds to teem forth into the sea and the sky, and fill the world to it's brim. She also filled the night sky with stars, filling the world with light where it had none, with life where it had none, and with knowledge where it had none. She took to the thrill of filling these little places in the world, and in minds, and claimed their domains as her own. Ner now looked upon the world, and was saddened. It was perfect, full and in harmony, in constant motion and still solid and fluid at once. She saw the other gods and goddesses and felt that they were all more beautiful than herself and became angry. She brought onto Ronar pain and suffering such that she felt. That each creature might know pain both to give contrast to the good in the world, and as a petty revenge for the goddess. She took to the pain and the suffering and hate, and claimed their domains as her own.

Geisfarl and Garsog now looked upon the world they can created, and their wives had filled with life, and despaired their own shortsightedness. Of course there should have been life! However, rather than being outwitted by their own wives, and thus their own creations, they together created a creature not unlike themselves. They called it a 'human' and set it down in Ronar. It would have a power the other creatures did not have, that of a clever mind. With it, it could rise in power over the other creatures. This act also solidified the aspects of the gods as male, and the godesses as female - in the Garsog and Geisfarl's minds, this was proper.

The gods sit back and watch their creations grow and prosper, and time passes.

The Creation of Ronar

2009-12-07T12:27:00.000-08:00

Before I can get into the weapons of legend, I need to explain to you what they were created out of, and why what they were created out of exists. Which brings me almost all the way back to the creation of Ronar. So, to get to the weapons of legend, you're going to have to sit through a little history lesson. Fortunately, it's a fairly interesting one.

In the beginning, there was nothing. No space, no time, no universe for it to exist in. But, in the timeless space that was nothing, eternity passes in an instant, and everything that could happen in nothing happens all at once. And so, an entity that was more of a will than a physical creature came into existance, and in his observing it, there was time.

With time, came the time for the timeless being in the nothing to harness the power to create. And thus, within itself, it created the first universe. Now having a body, and inside it a universe, the entity was the true creator, the protector of all that was from all that was not. It was the guardian of the universe, and from the inside it was the guardian of darkness. Eventually it would become known as simply G.O.D., and later still simply GOD.

Inside the first universe, GOD created creatures like itself but lesser. They had many shapes, and many opinions. They were given one rule - they must create, and they must do it together. For, GOD had tried, and found his creativity infinite, so it was always the same, for with too many options, one tended to choose the same one over and over again. Instead, he much rather enjoyed watching his creations work things out for themselves.

These new creatures knew the true nature of GOD and the multiverse, and knew that they had the power to shape realities. They dubbed themselves after that, Reality Masters, and begun to work. But, as the Masters were so diverse, issues arose. Whose shape to use? Who would be the leader? What rules should they follow within themselves? Those rules were simple: do not create or destroy any other reality masters, although they had the power to do so.

But like all rules, that rule was eventually broken. One Reality Master, decided that the work would be better with one more master, and created him. Many Masters were appaled, and others were overjoyed. They formed allegiences, those who followed the rules that had been set out titled themselves 'Good' and those who felt that they needed to follow no rules, dubbed themselves 'Evil'. There were also those who refused to take sides, seeing a bloody end to this feud, and declared that they were 'neutral' and wished no part in these direct affairs.

Time passed, and the three factions eventually did create a multitude of multiverses. Some were fantastic, with gods and mortals, and beasts and magic. Others were mundane, with strict laws governing every particle.

But the Masters had enough of each other, they began to compete, to decide which group was superior. They held countless contests to decide. Finally, they settled on one final contest, that none of them would affect. One universe, filled with all creatures fantastic, and when it brought itself to an eventual end, the victor would be the side whom the universe balanced itself inexorably towards.

Three Masters were tasked with this universe, one from Evil, one from Good, and a mediator, from Neutral.

The evil was the instigator of the mess, the one who began to call himself Angel of the Fallen. Spirals of red hair rose from his head, and wings of ash grey sprouted from his back.

The good, while usually timid, sent out one of their more calculating masters, one who is all and many forms at once, and is called Shift.

The judgment giver was Tareel, the most observant of the neutral.

And the contest began, and has now run for thousands of years. Nobody knows when it will end, or who will win. But, every action affects the fate of not only this universe, nor this multiverse, but all multiverses everywhere. And thusly, was Ronar created.

Cyclops

2009-11-30T10:27:00.000-08:00

In addition to the main intelligent races of Ronar, there are a number of other 'sub-intelligent' races, or at least races created as such. Cyclops are one of them.

Originally, Cyclops were created by the gods in the place of the Unofotine, intended to be one with the rock and the land. However, the gods were unsatisfied with their creation, and created but created a single demigod, insead of a race. This demigod was to later be known as Tel'Aak-Reji, which in the language of the people he created in his own image means te stone king.

Cyclops are tall and humanoid, with broad shoulders and wide hips. Have tiny ears and noses, and a single massive eye. They have a small amount of hair on the top of their head, often only along the back of their head and the sides, which is always black. Their skin ranges in many of the colors of stone, from which Tel'Aak-Reji created them - normally grey, brown, but occasionally darker oranges or the occasional pale yellow.

While physically they resemble humans in most regards, and socially they are smilar to Unofotine, biologically they are fairly different. To gain depth perception with only a single eye, the cyclops eye must rapidly change focal distance, through flexing their iris, often as rapidly as once per second. This allows them almost as perfect depth perception as the other races. As their eye takes up the majority of their heads, their brain is stored in their upper pelvis, behind their stomach. As such, while few cyclops survive the loss of senses and the loss of ability to eat that comes with beheading, they are able to survive it if care is taken immediately, and the head is magically reattached. Some Cyclops have been known to, with proper care, live for months without a head.

Mostly, Cyclops are content to live under the ground, in the vast underground tunnels beneath the island of Raitdas, worshiping and living off the rock and ground. While they are considered sub-intelligent, and as a race they are not nearly as advanced as the other races, individuals have been known to interact with the other races with little to no difficulty, implying they need litte other than time to develop as a race.

Shadowkin, in detail

2009-11-18T13:15:00.000-08:00

Since I've finally nailed down what shadowkin actually look like properly, I'll cover that bit first.

Shadowkin are smaller than humans, though mostly in height, and have skin typically black or grey. Lighter skinned shadowkin are not unknown, but always the skin is monochromatically black and white, without a drop of color. Their nose and upper lip is hard and bone-like, resembling an oddly shaped beak of a bird, though their bottom lip and tongue are similar to that of a human. Their eyes are large and placed closer to the side of their head. They have tiny ears, and their hair is stiff and coarse and contains tiny threads, almost exactly like feathers of birds.

They are an industrious race, and particularly magical. In the age of magic, one shadowkin by the name of Marshal Hian, built a large castle powered by the magic of one of the great weapons of legend (wait, weapons of legend? Yes, I'll go into them later), and tied to himself to the power, granting him intense power and prolonged life. This castle became the center of shadowkin culture and society, and Marshal Hian used his great magic power to lift the castle into the air above Grittlanni. Years passed, and while shadowkin were reclusive, they made great strides in magic and society. The other races generally held them in awe until the day that Marshal Hian died of old age - as his magic gave him a long, but not infinite life. His death cut the power to the spells holding the magic castle in the air, and in under a minute, decades of progress and all the greatest minds of Shadowkin kind were smashed to peices. The castle remains unfound, or at least unexplored to the current day, as it is fiercely guarded by the natives of the jungles of Grittlanni in the depths of which it crashed.

After that day, Shadowkin rallied together, but the age of magic was drawing to an end, and they fell back into savagery. They are not unintelligent, but with all their leadership destroyed the few other cities they build fell into disarray and they were a superpower no longer.

In current day Ronar, few shadowkin leave the continent of Grittlanni, but those that do are members of society as much as any other intelligent race. They are simply rare and generally reclusive, which is justified because their rarity and unusual ability to become incorporial for a short time scares the other races.

Shadowkin, like all races, can interbreed with the other races. These crossbreeds are extremely rare, due to the inital scarcity of shadowkin and the tentativeness of the other races regarding them. When they do exist, they typically appear to have washed out colors, even to the point of seeming to be charcoal drawings, and have literally stiff upper lips, and large, wide-set eyes.

A-maze-ing

2009-11-17T14:37:00.000-08:00

I was stumbling around the internet today, and I found something rather interesting.

Now, maze-solvers are relatively simply pieces of code. From the start point, follow the left (or right) wall until you reach the exit. There are some few variations as to whether or not the dead-ends are considered part of the end solution, generally they aren't, but that's not what this is about.

Random maze generators are the sort of thing that *sound* easy to make, but I would imagine are quite difficult. Heck, manually drawing a maze is tough to do. You have to come up with exactly one route through a series of squares, and the rest of the squares have to be part of routes that connect to the rest of the maze, but do not lead to the exit. Sure, you can draw a bunch of squiggly connected lines on a peice of paper, but you really have to give kudos to any guy who has a maze generator that follows all these rules, and generates truly random mazes with start and goal squares, and fills every single square on the map.

There was a windows screensaver where a dude ran around a 3d maze, but that maze was tiny, and didn't follow the one important rule - exactly one path from start to goal. I don't really have anything else to say on that, so I'll just give you all the link so you can take a look and see what you think of it yourself.

http://www.math.com/students/puzzles/mazegen/mazegen.html

Humans, in detail

2009-11-13T07:24:00.000-08:00

Think you know everything about humans, eh?

Humans were the first race created by the gods, and the form which the gods them took in the world. They are pink-skinned with brown, yellow or occasionally red hair at the tops of their heads but virtually none elsewhere, save for some males with hair all about their faces.

They are very industrious, adventurous and always inventig new things. When they were created, the intention was that they would settle Ronar and then stop. So far, they haven't managed to do the second part, which was why the other races were created in the first place. However, they have progressed as a race, and most of their development has passed to the other races as well, faster than the gods had ever dreamed.

Humans create their cities in flat, open spaces, typically near waterways to facilitate transport of materials and produce, and will most often transform an area into what is needed rather than looking for a more ideal spot.

Humans are the most common race to crossbreed with any other race, mostly due to their adventurous nature. They also are naturally able to crossbreed with Orcs, which is upsetting to realize that they are the only compatable species without magical help. Then again, orcs were created in mockery of humans.

Most Human half-breeds live in small niches of society. Half-unofotine will work as laborers, half-shadowkin will work as spies, half-orcs will work as craftsmen. Half torins are the exception, as they are numerous enough to build ther own societies, and Torin viewpoints and appearances blend most easily into Human society unnoticed.

Unofotine in detail

2009-11-11T11:57:00.000-08:00

The Unofotine were also created after humans had been, with a similar intent from the gods of a race that would not simply develop and expand to infinity within the world. Unlike Torin however, they were given drawbacks to expansion, large eyes to make the sun seem too bright, hands not shaped for holding tools, and a community-minded dispostion. The Unofotine were intended to be a race that expanded slowly, with tight knit villages, undergroud and unable to exploit the resources the humans were so fond of.

The Unofotine, however, did not take this particularly well, and within a half-dozen generations had built massive underground catacombs and structures, learned to use their large clawed hands in place of the tools they were unable to easily use, and developed a strong heirchacal society. The Unofotine were impossibly strong willed, and while they broke out of the mould set for them by the gods almost immediately they were smiled upon for doing so.

Now, the Unofotine still use almost the same ruling structure, although the leader has changed names now to King, rather than Mayor or Lord. They are united, and maintain a strong sense of duty to their people and their culture. They grow their hair long to keep the sun out of their eyes, and suffer none for it, and they are almost as nimble with their hands as humans are, despite their long claws.

Occasonally, Human and Unofotine people will have children, for Unofotine resemble the strongest humans - though also the hairiest. These Half-Unofotine Half-humans are feirce though unweildly, and often find themselves among the outcasts of both races, not feeling the same draw to community that pure Unofotine do where they are shunned as lazy, and seeming monsterous to humans with their large eyes and clawed hands. It is fortunate there are few of these folk, for otherwise there might be a public stand against them ironically banding both races against their own kin.

Torin, more in depth

2009-11-10T08:19:00.001-08:00

It's been a while since I've touched on Ronar, getting all caught up in procedural content and all. Let's look a little more in-depth at one o the races, the Torin.

Torin were one of the races created after humans, and they were created with a mindset to preserve the world around them rather than to expand and develop wantonly. Hard-wired as naturalists, this instinct influences nearly every aspect of Torin life, although as is always the case different individuals take such a cause quite differently.

Most Torin have the view that one should live in harmony with nature, taking what you need and giving back in turn what you can. They do not hunt for sport, they do not cut down great trees to build their structures (Most often they will grow Rowan trees for this purpose, as they grow very large branches). They do not accept collateral damage in their fights and overall live a very peaceful, calm lifestyle. This also means that most Torin cities are reasonably small, to prevent the over-use of natural resourcesm unlike human cities that simply change the resources available to fit their expanding cities.

However, not every Torin is average. There are entire groups of Torins that view their proclaimed ward of nature as a calling to eliminate all creatures that abuse it. Humans, of course, are their prime goal, and these oft-fanatical sects will attack human cities, destroying as much as they can and murdering without pause especially when human settlements attempt to expand or grow beyond what they consider to be an acceptable size.

Some Torin, too, take it upon themselves to attempt to convert human cities over to their way of life, although few are particularly successful. These are few and far between, as most Torin feel that the humans and them are far too different to see eye to eye on such matters, which was why the gods created them seperately.

Torin and Human often see close enough eye-to-eye that they find each other attractive. Being the most similar two of the intelligent races, in the Age of mortals, Half-torin half-human children became easily the most dominant of the half-breed races. They appear mostly human, though they have pointed ears and a light fuzz often giving their skin odd colorings. They rarely have the tails that Torin have, apparently it not being a particularly dominant trait. These have-breeds strike a strong stance between the two races, expanding at a decent rate, but not abusing the resources of the world. It is unlikely they will ever become as dominant as either of their parent races, but the merging of traits andboth physical and cultural is truly a positive force in Ronar.

Randomly generated names

2009-11-03T09:36:00.001-08:00

I've done some super-minor tweaks to the name generator, one of which allows me to generate more than one name at a time. Here is a random selection of names for you to judge how well this project is coming along on your own.

Iallquu
Igesposc
Zsui
Slegoita
Cruywausc-u
Sta
Stastia
Bleiy'scipu
Clesidro
Brie'naibr
Rflu
Tstai
Zcluau
Edabvydu
Geibrow
Nyu'rubliek
Mwezuuvl
Eiwflaa
Eziri
Aue'tu'okdrau
Reivl'aunaucr
Chahujausty
Fyaufe
Je'jiiwe
Audwai
Epaafauz
Eidau'ezusla
Uamquau
Fleiebrslaumeichyqui
Druhyo

My favorite I've generated to this point is: Rocksoutthejam, which becomes with spaces 'Rocks out the jam'

The longest 'name' I've generated yet is: Spousmeivlaeibrwuacle

which leads me to see fairly obviously that as a name gets longer, the chance that it becomes unreadable increases exponentially. Let's reduce the odds of extra syllables down a bit.

Vefauv! get back here!

2009-11-02T12:12:00.000-08:00

One of the problems with my random name generator to now is that the only combinations of letters it can spit out are randomly generated ones. You could never ever generate the combination of letters 'str' because it generates one vowel and one consonant, adds them together in a random orer and then repeats. There's virtually no difference between the syllables, at all

One big change I've made so far, beyond randomly generating letters, is making the names end on a vowel more often. It makes a lot of names sound slightly more femminine, as ending with an 'e' or an 'a' often does, but I'm okay with that, because ending with an o or u makes the name more masculine and i is pretty neutral. But it adds more prevention to names ending with awkward letters like 'j'

The other thing I did, which is only big because the scope of the program is so small, is added letter combinations, mostly with 'l' and 'h' so we have 'cl' and 'ch' and 'sl' and so on. This allows combinations like str to exist, although it still enables things like to exist, which produces a few uncomfortable names.

Current percentage of random names that could be used for things, about 30%.
Next goal: increase liklihood of common letters,like 'e' or 'r'.

Damsel Get!

2009-10-26T06:28:00.000-07:00

It almost doesn't matter how interesting the level you build is, if there's no goal in it other than the finish line, it will get boring pretty fast. In Spelunky, there are three different goals to aim for, asides from finishing the game, and each one ties to a different randomly generated item in the levels.

The first, and most obvious goal is to collect treasure. Once the terrain has been generated, treasure items of varying kinds are sprinkled across it like delicious candy, and it's Spelunkyman's job to go and pick it up. Each different peice is worth a different amount of money/points, which can be spent as you progress through the levels at shops or to create checkpoints, or stached up to create a high score, which in turn unlocks it's own rewards, which I'll get to later.

But even with collecting treasure, it's not quite as simple as that. The loot is spread out pretty evenly throughout the floor, but it's not always just laying out in the open. There are pots, which usually contain treasure but occasionally also a snake or spider (so you have to be careful when you look inside), there are chests which may require keys found elsewhere in the level, and there are shiny golden idols, which are important into and of themselves. Not only is each idol worth a staggering 15,000 points, almost five times as much as any other treasure item in the game, they present two distinct challenges. The first challenge is to remove it without dying. Like in Raiders of the lost arc, when Indiana Jones picks the idol off the pedestal and has to outrun a giant boulder, different areas have a number of different traps guarding their treasures. From giant rolling boulders to floors collapsing into piranah pools, and even the dreaded falling ceiling, each one must be escaped simply to *get* the idol in the first place. Then, as a secondary challenge, unlike the rest of the treasure, you have to navigate the rest of the level and physically bring it to the exit door before you get your reward. This means you can't attack (short of throwing the idol, which works, but may cause you to lose it), you can't drop bombs or use ropes, and you have to be very careful dropping off of high ledges because you can't grab onto most ledges without dropping the idol. The reward is great, though, because often an idol will be enough to more than double the score you've collected elsewhere in the level. And since you're shooting for about a hundred and fifty thousand points in one run for the top treasure challenge, it's a hearty bite.

The second challenge is also as you might expect, it's to kill monsters on your way through. Each monster has a distinct way of moving and attacking (typically just bumping into you), and you have to be very careful to rack up a hundred and fifty kills throughout the levels. You can't always just throw them into a trap, you have to brutally murder them yourself by landing on their heads or smashing them with your whip. Usually.

Each terrain type has a handful of monsters in it that will appear as the level is generated. The basic caves will have snakes, spiders, bats, and cavemen running around in it, all of which are pretty simple to predict and to smash, although the cavemen take a handful of hits to do away with permanantly. The jungle has frogs, piranahs, monkeys and yes, man eating plants. The ice caves have yetis and aliens, and if you break open a block of ice, you can uncover frozen cavement too. Finally the ancient temple has cultists, and a mix of monsters from all the other levels, just to keep you on your toes. They're placed randomly too, and it's an occasional inconvienence to find and reach, or epecially kill them, but it's always tempting to wreak havok as you pass through.

But there's one more twist on monsters, and that's special levels. In special levels, the normal rules for generating monsters are put on hold for special rules. There are bosses for almost each type of monsters, giant spiders, fish, aliens, yeti or the feirceome giant mummy, and a few special levels for the others - snake pits, undead monsters, and dark rooms (which are like boss levels for traps). Bosses are still only worth one monster despite their eighteen hit points (to a normal monster's one, or occasionally three) but always drop two things: treasure and items. Treasure is great for obvious reasons, but items make it worth to kill the bosses, because for the rare time you generate an item shop, do you really want to spend two levels of treasure just to grab the high-jump-shoes? Bosses all have special areas and attacks all to themselves, and bypassing them is almost always easier than fighting them, but the occasional fight against something so giant is fun, challenging, and rewarding - making this more than a little side-quest.

Finally we come to the last type challenge in the game, rescuing trapped damsels. Damsels will appear on about every second level you play, and can appear absolutely anywhere, giving them equal chances of appearing on flat ground or on a hard-to-reach ledge. Once you rescue them, you have to carry them all the way to the exit (often harder than not), and you can't even throw them like you can the idols, as they only have a few hits before you kill them. Damsels are fragile after all.

But damsels offer you one of the best rewards in the game, even outside of attempting to rescue nine of them in a fifteen level game; each time you successfully rescue them, you gain an extra hit point. You start with four, and this is the only way to empower youself with more, making the damsels expressly important to surviving to the end of the game. Then again, if you're really good you might want to sacrifice the damsel at one of the occasional sacrificial altars in the game, to gain favor with the gods. You gain different types of rewards for this, but they can be equally tempting.

If you eventually collect enough treasure, kills, or damsel rescues to get a high score in a particular area, you unlock the ability to play special challenges, or to play *as* different characters throughout the game. Those rewards are fantastic, because the different characters each have their own tricks, like the storekeeper's shotgun, or the shortcut guy's ability to dig through solid rock.

Every reward in this game really feels like you've earned it.

Run, jump, plummet...

2009-10-23T11:24:00.000-07:00

The level design in Spelunky - yes, even though a computer is doing it, it's still level design - at first looks totally random. You have long strethes of tunnel, deep craters. criss-crossing passageways and more, but even with a really clever program it would be almost impossible to create an actually playable level if you're using totally random level generation.

Note that all I'm going to talk about here is reverse-engineering the game, and may or may not be the way it's actually done. Some bits are more obvious than others, but I make no assumption that I know what's in the code.

The first thing that goes into the level is the path to the exit. You start with about four floors worth of map, with the entrance in one of the top corners and the exit in one of the bottom corners. Then, paths are cut between the different layers, they only need to be a single space wide, but we'll get to the variations in a minute.

Once a basic path is created, terrain is put in. After playing the game for some time I can see that there are a number of different terrain blocks that get used, most of them one floor high and twenty or thirty tiles wide. There are tiles that contain entrances, tiles that contain exits, tiles that contain paths to the next floor, tiles that contain idols, and other tiles that contain nothing but rocks, so far. (What's an Idol, you ask? I'll cover that next post, but it's a game mechanic). There are some special peices of terrain that cross more than one floor worth of space, and others that cross less than one, but for the most part, it's simple cut and paste from the database.

But that would make for a boring game, wouldn't it? Yes it would, but because Spelunky is great, the terrain doesn't stop it's generation there. First, on each terrain peice, there are a number of blocks that may or may not contain a tile of terrain. Sometimes, this allows you extra tunnels, other times it makes jumps harder, and still other times it gives the monsters distinct advantages over your character, for example in a tight tunnel with nothing but a whip (usually) spelunkyman really has a tough time overthrowing a yeti, who has to be jumped on to disable.

These little variations add an almost infinite amount of varaition to the game, even before you consider the enemies, treasure, and other challenges that are generated after the terrain, and especially before you consider the number of different interlocking art tiles that make even identical hallways look just a touch different. You really will play a different game every time you play, the occasional four-level deep pit or endless floor of spiked death mixing up what might be a standard crawl through.

Exposition Expose.

2009-10-22T06:34:00.000-07:00

From the opening screen of Spelunky, everything is randomly generated. The story too, although it is only three lines of setup.

It goes to show how little story is actually needed to make a good game great. Three lines transforms what might have been a fun little pointless platformer into what feels like an epic story, and the three lines aren't even related to what happens in the game, other than for exposition.

The exposition in Spleunky works through all the old movie cliches. Fate guiding one's steps, father's last words, mysterious voices, native guides, and so on. It fits the game's feel, diving into an underground tunnel to search for buried treasure so well that it makes this game feel like an old action movie - indiana jones in particular.

One procedurally game I particularly like is ADOM, Ancient Domains Of Mystery, and while the game is fantastic in many ways it's exposition is one of the simplest of them all, a fixed bit of information tied to a randomly generated story filled in with bits from your character creation. You were born in X, you grew up Y, your parents were Z. You trained to be a fighter and left for the draklor chain where chaos was threatening to destroy the world. A great story, and simple.

Procedurally generated games without any in-game story, like rogue or nethack always feel lacking. They become a world, and while adventuring through them is a number of rewards in and of itself, it's never quite satisfying. Why did you go into the Dungeon? Who were you before? Are you a champion of justice, a madman, or a greedy delver? Nothing is answered without just a touch of exposition.

Spelunking

2009-10-21T06:18:00.000-07:00

So, I've been playing this game lately, called Spelunky. It's a freeware downloadable game by Derek Yu, and it is to nethack what mario is to zelda.

For those of you without extensive knowledge of all the gaming world, I'll clairify that little metaphor. Zelda is an expansive top down two dimensional world where you collect items, fight monsters, and generally be a sword-weilding menace. Every map in the game is lovingly touched by dozens of designers, artists and programmers to make the game perfectly balanced and nice to look at. Nethack is a procedurally generated dungeon crawler where the maps are randomly generated (sphagetti dungeons, unfortunately), and you collect weapons to kill monsters and generally be a sword-weilding menace. See the similarities?

By that extension, Mario is a two dimensional side-scrolling platformer game where you go through several worlds of varying types, jumping on the tops of enemies, hopefully collecting powerups and uncovering shortcuts. Spelunky, now that I've finally gotten to it, is a procedurally generated two dimensional sidescrolling game where you travel through several levels of varying types, jumping on enemies, trying to collect powerups and unlock shortcuts. The similarities are obvious, to both nethack and mario, and I feel this game is a stunning and essential addition to both today's gaming climate and the world of procedurally generated games.

You see, this game is good, and not just pong good, I'm talking will probably make it's way eventually to a console good; and while it's only been out for a month or so, the important telltale sign is that a community has sprung up around the game, spaders, overaccheivers, version testers and more. You don't get that on an average play-once-and-discard game.

Most importantly, Spelunky is a solid peice of proof that dungeon crawlers are not the only type of game that can be successfully procedurally generated. You could, theoretically, procedurally generate an entire game of *any* genre, and while the obvious place the industry started is on the simple end of the scale, I'd wager that eventually you're going to wind up with more complex games for more complex genres.

Zzigy the Warrior

2009-10-18T14:20:00.000-07:00

One thing that often bothers me is random name generation. Almost every 'random' name generator program anywhere is actually a single random number generator that picks a name out of an existing list. So, everyone who can't think of a name for a familiar in say, kingdom of loathing, winds up with one of four names, not an *actual* random name.

Names are complex things, I can give that up. Michael isn't exactly a word you would nicely find by putting in seven random letters, and words are generally more complex than that in the first place. So what can be done? Well, dwarf fortress has a good start to it (although like everything in the game it's way too complex). Each dwarf you randomly generate has a number of spaces in their names, and each one can be filled with one of a group of name sections like "shu" or "Meh". Unfortunately, almost all of them are from the same list, so it is possible for you to wind up with Shushu Shushu as a name if you're really unlucky. Each of the names has it's own description and if you're looking to build a dwarf name you can read them. But there's hundreds of them, and that's what makes the names seem random. Combined, you wind up with a few tens of thousands of combinations and that's what you're picking out of, but still, only a small fraction of them are both readable or interesting.

I've started fooling around with another program that generates random strings of characters. It's nowhere near random name quality, but it's certainly better than coming up with "Gort" or "Shushu" every thirty seconds. So far it generates two to five sections composed of one vowel and one consonant, in no particular order. There's about a ten percent change of getting a fantasy-name-joiner in there too, like a ' or a - . You get a lot of unreadable gibberish, but nothing unpronouncable save the rare cases where you have x's matching up and that's *still* not that bad. I'll let you know as it continues to shape up.

And for anyone wondering how tinyworld is coming along, I've stripped out all the code I had for making multiple floors, and am attempting a higher-level way to work it out. I'll keep you up to tabs if I ever get that working.

Mini Gaming

2009-10-13T08:17:00.000-07:00

Mini games are one of the tender areas inside gaming that nobody is quite sure what to do with. Sometimes the mini games are as simple as pushing one button a hundred times in as short a time as you can. Other times it's more complicated and integrated with the controls of the rest of the game you're playing. One of the most popular methods of minigaming is the quicktime event.

Quicktime events are, to quote a narcissistic australian I'm sure you know, times when you are forced to press X to not die. It's simple, often unexpected, and can bring about long periods of gameplay you are forced to redo, because no matter how skilled you are, or how much time you put into training, if you fail to quickly and properly react to a particular series of all-but-random events, you are brought to the game over screen. So why are they so popular? Because they're easy to do! Programmers have to take like, fifteen seconds to code in 'if this button is not pressed by this time, the player dies', while if they had made it an actual in-game challenge it would have taken them hours, weeks or days to build it.

Allow me to say that I think minigames are absolutely required in today's gaming world. In shorter games they can provide some pacing as well as adding in length for much cheaper than standard levels, and in longer games they can provide a fast-paced moment of pickup much needed in slower sections of the game, especially if they provide in-game rewards for doing them.

Just so long as you don't go gold saucer on us, requiring hours upon hours of play to get any reasonable rewards.

See Dungeon Runner... Oh, forget it, it's a boring joke anyways.

2009-10-08T09:09:00.000-07:00

When randomly generating a dungeon, one thing you have to think about is the challenge of it. Is the average player going to be able to breeze through it? Will only the most experienced and quick-witted be able to pass? Are there going to be some challenges harder than others? Some challenges that allow the player to take a figurative breather? How quickly do they get more challenging, if at all?

Dungeon runner takes a very simplistic look at this, and like the shapes of the rooms that eventually get stitched together, the monster encounters are basically cookie-cutter fights, although even a cookie cutter can surprise you sometimes.

Basically, monsters are divided up into groups. Typically there is exactly one group per room, and they spread themselves out fairly randomly. That only matters on the first shot, though because the AI is extremely basic. If you kill a monster in one shot without it seeing you, you don't draw agro. If you don't kill it in one shot, regardless of whether the rest of the monsters in that group are able to see you, or the proximity you are to other, different groups, you draw aggro from exactly every monster in that group and no others. (in case you don't know, drawing aggro means to make a monster aggrivated, and chase you to attack). That's a fine system, but there are some 'scout' monsters who random-walk way outside of the room they are grouped in, allowing you to accidentally double-up a fight even when you're already losing.

There are several simple 'shapes' I've seen these cookie cutters come in. Medium, Swarm, and Boss.

Medium groups contain a half-dozen average melee units and one or three ranged units. Once in a while they'll contain a ranged unit who can heal your opponents or poison you or the like. Mostly it'll just be one knockdown per melee opponent, and then fight until they're all dead. No real variation, minimal strategy. It's not even much different based on what type of enemy you're fighting. All the melee enemies can knock you over exactly once. I suppose it's a charging bonus or something.

Swarm groups are larger than medium groups and in addition to a small handful of melee guys and a larger handful of ranged guys, they contain about ten or fifteen fodder guys whose only purpose is to absorb your fire and get in your way by getting as close to you as possible and doing the smallest amount of damage possible for you to want to kill them all. There's still not a lot of strategy here, you use an area attack once they get in close, then kill each of the fodder guys in one hit. It doesn't hurt that everyone gets area attacks of every element, so you can do it no matter who you're fighting. I'm sure there's other strategies, but this one works and it's simple.

Now we get to the boss fights, which is where the strategy actually comes in. Boss fights typically contain a good number of melee units, a few ranged units, and a boss enemy selected from among the available enemies that you're fighting. That does include the fodder units, but that just means they do less damage, they still have a huge number of hit points. Now, you actually have to prioritize your targets, because if you just attack the boss, then the other units will kill you. However, ignoring the boss will lead to the opposite scenario, forcing you to respawn and once again meet up with the now lackey-free boss and wipe the floor with him. I've found the best strategy is to take out about half the flunkies, then the boss, and clean up the flunkies last. It's simple, but the fact that the bosses have names, drop more loot than normal, and guard treasure chests puts just enough variation in the kill ten enemies, wait thirty seconds for health to recharge. Kill then enemies...

Of course, the names are 'randomly generated', too. Or, randomly picked from a list for that particular group. I'll never forget the first "Particuarly Rude Broodling" or "Pyrus the Smoldering" I fought. At least, until January when the game clears away.

Form or Function

2009-10-05T10:35:00.001-07:00

I'm sure you can all think of a point in time where you were playing a game, running along, and you run across a peice of the story that doesn't fit with the game world. A character dies, for instance, and while you have a dozen scrolls of ressurection in your backpack, you can't save their lives.

The delicate balance of gameplay versus story is the most evident when dealing with resurrection. If you can bring a character back from the dead with no effort, any tension the game might be trying to build is lessened, because any threats are suddenly less so. If resurrection becomes too much of an obstacle, the game becomes hard and unforgiving. Worse still, since you should have more powerful abilities and more resources available at the end of the game than you did at the beginning, there have to be new, more challenging ways to keep the tension in the game.

This particular argument was raised by a discussion on Final Fantasy. The series has been handled well over the years, breaking ground in many different fields, having new stories with common elements and so on. In several of the games, however, you have characters die on you as part of the story. PCs, and NPCs alike. Then, you are jolted out of your suspension of disbelief because for ten hours you've been fighting monsters and getting killed regularly, only to cast a little magic spell (typically called 'life', so there's no confusion as to simply recovering consiousness) to pick your mangled body up off the ground, and it doesn't work in the cutscene you're watching. Or afterwards. You can drag 'dead' party members around for days and ressurect them at the drop of a hat, but if someone dies in a cutscene they're gone for good, and forget about raising that dead NPC king who was the only one who knew where the secret treasure room was.

And that brings us back to the challenge of ressurection in games. If you could raise any NPC from the dead who died, towns would no longer be in threat of being destroyed. The baddies would never be any sort of a threat, because all you'd need to do is get strong enough, buy a million pheonix downs, let them wipe all life off the world, and start casting ressurect!

One way to get around this would be to make there be something special about the PCs. They could have special amulets that allow the bodies to be raised if they fall - but most NPCs don't have that amulet (or whatever it's decided to be). a character could be in real danger if that item or trait is taken away, allowing a game to threaten the characters when needed, but make things easy otherwise. But, would it work?

See Dungeon Runner Run

2009-09-29T14:45:00.000-07:00

Man, I really should have saved that little ditty from my past post for titles, there's a lot to talk about for dungeon runner.

Not only does dungeon runner generate dungeons, Dungeon Runner also randomly generates all the items in the game. And I mean all the items. There are, of course, upsides and downsides to this.

WHen you're randomly generating items, you don't have to worry about keeping things level appropriate. Every item has a stat that is simply multiplied by the level of the item, and the player can only equip items that are their level or lower. Great. In dungeon runner, items typically grant a +1 bonus per level, or twice that for your weapon. This is divided evenly amongst up to three attributes (of your four). It then also gets a secondary bonus for each rarity level it is (common, uncommon, rare, or mythic) that is applied randomly across a score of lesser attributes (like attack speed, elemental resistance, damage reflection, spell damage increases...). The item is then given a random name based on it`s stats (or possibly, the name is generated first and the stats are given afterwards.)

There`s one enormous problem not immdiately evident from this description - what do you call it? Dungeon Runner sticks with it's whimsical roots and gives things names like "overweight greatsword of the angry termite". Great, but what does that mean? You can take a quick glance at items to see their names, but that's now useless. How are players to know without research and memorization that termite is a bonus to intellect and dexterity? At least if it were called, say, clever greatsword it would be more useful. It's even worse when you get into more rare items, because they get more suffixes and prefixes added onto the end. "(warning may cause rash)" or "(size 17)" are funny, but utterly useless and ultimately degridating to gameplay.

Okay, so you finally decide that you want to buy a termite sword now. You walk to the shop, and open up the weapons tab.

Oh look, more random weapons. The weapons shop is not just weapons for you though, each of teh three equipment stores in the game holds random items for thirty levels of characters, meaning if you're level fifteen and walk into the shop, half the items won't even be usable to you, even before you exclude the fact that items only paid users can use about half the items, too. You wind up with a selection of items, probably two or three of which are near your level enough to be useful. Now, you have to cross your fingers that: -One of the items is what you're looking for and that -the shop doesn't refresh before you buy that item, because it refreshes every seven minutes regardless if you're looking at it or not. Sure, that gets rid of some of that poor selection problem, but it can just as easily exacerbate it by taking that item away at the last moment!

And to add onto all that, there are random item shops, where you get to either pay a small amount and get a random item near your level, or pay a large amount and get a random (typically useful) item for exactly your level, primary stat and slot. You still don't get to choose the look though, which can be frustrating for people trying to keep with a theme. Oh, and you can't choose if you're looking for a ranged or melee weapon either. You could just as easily get a bow as a longsword.

Did I mention that on top of all that there's about a dozen different armor sets? Most players take what they get and are satisfied with their character changing in appearance entirely each time they log in and play. Some people, I'm sure, will give preference to one type of armor over another, despite the fact that in the end, everyone should be in heavy armor because it has no penalties and a much higher defence. Sure it looks stupid to be carrying a staff while wearing it, but that's a small price to pay for improved DPS right?

This is Dungeon Runner

2009-09-27T18:33:00.000-07:00

See dungeon runner run.
run dungeon runner, run.

Dungeon runner is an MMO that I've been playing lately. I purchased it about a week before it released the news that it was going out of business. That's unfortunate, but I think I'll survive. I mean, I paid five dollars for the game *and* six month's subscription. I wish I could see how they went out of business with a business plan like that. Oh, and did I mention their server only holds 500 people, total? That's like, five thousand dollars of profit a year, man! Except that more than half their players subscribe to the free version of the game. That means their items are about 10% worse than paid customers. Boy, what value for that money, huh?

Obvious business plan flaws aside, Dungeon Runners is a pretty fun game. It's light-hearted, erring on the side of ridiculous, and looks nice, plays inteutively and so on. Did I mention that the dungeons are (kinda) randomly generated, too? All the better.

Dungeons in dungeon runner follow a few simple rules. There are eight floors, divided into three sections. Upper, lower and boss. There are also six sub-areas off of varying floors, two off the upper and four off the lower. Each group (upper, upper-sub, lower and lower-sub) has a different theme. Undead, blizzard, fire, standard dungeon and so on. Each theme has several variations, and overall it's not too sore on the eyes. They're then mapped out by taking a number of puzzle-piece like pre-generated areas and randomly sticking them beside one another until it's about half an hour to cross from one end to the other. It works out well for them.

There are four different classifications of monsters I've come across so far. Whiskers (rat-men), Oroks (orcs and ogres), Fade (undead) and mutants. Each of those groups comes in about six units (discounting bosses) and each unit comes in one of the six major elements. Typically a particular floor in a dungeon will contain either one type of enemy, or one element of enemy. There's a few problems with this, namely that you will either see hundreds of the same enemy on a given floor, or you will have to have many different elemental attacks ready making your play rather like a game of simon-says involving far too many healing potions.

You play through the game, completing quests for the various silly NPCs around the main area, unlocking a new dungeon every ten levels or so. It's a fairly good system. If not for the silly quests though, the game would get old fast. Now that the game is ending, you get five times the experience you would have otherwise. That means you can blow through a half-dozen levels in an afternoon, rather than one. Not that it matters. All levels matter is what skills you have available to you, and which enemies give you experience points. I'm now thirty levels too high to gain experience points in the first dungeon, but I still encounter swarms of enemies that force me to use healing potions, and enemies I can't kill in one hit. What's the point of being so powerful if you don't actually get stronger?

Despite all my nitpicks of the game, it does have a je-ne-sai-quas that makes it fun. Or, fun most of the time at least.

Randomly written story

2009-09-21T08:44:00.000-07:00

Some undetermined length of time ago, in some undetermined place, some undetermined entity did some undetermined thing which ended up creating a dungeon.

Generating a story out of nothing is something that is easy to do at a most base level, but very difficult to do at a complex level that the player is likely to care about. Anyone can throw together a random plot generator with a few set paameters. After all, attacked the king, and fled into the . That makes a compelling story, right?

On the king's corination two years ago, your father built a great vast dungeon. The dungeon was built on the other side of the river, to keep for himself the alchemists stone. Unfortunately, for him, your evil twin located the dungeon, just yesterday.

With more variables, like my opening line, you can wind up with some interesting permutations of plot. But what does the player care if it's not going to affect the game? You could add in random snippets of plot and paste them all together, perhaps even generating a great fantastic tale. But the player is there to play a game, not to read a book. If they skip the story sections will it affect the gamepla any? It should, if only in little ways.

Long before you were born, a long ago king built a great vast dungeon. The dungeon was built just over the mountains, to seal away a terrible evil. Unfortunately, for them, a disloyal knight located the dungeon, just A few days ago.

Obviously, the villian I noted has to show up somewhere in the dungeon. How long ago determines how deep in the dungeon he should be. The builders of the dungeon should affect what the dungeon looks like, archetecture wise. How old the dungeon itself is should affect what sort of monsters have moved in. Newer dungeons should have less of a veriety of monsters than an older one that's had time for different monsters to move in and out, lock more doors and so on. And most importantly - the purpose for the dungeon should be what gets discovered on the last floor.

A few months ago, a lost civilization built a great vast dungeon. The dungeon was built not far from the castle, to seal away the fountain of youth. Unfortunately, for them, a murderer from a thousand years in the future located the dungeon, just as you are reading this.

Furthermore, each important randomly generated aspect of the dungeon should have *things* in the dungeon to relate to. Crumbling rooms for old dungeons versus unfinished ones for really new ones. Alchemical labratories show up in a dungeon designed to hold the alchemists stone. Magic circles show up in dungeons holding back a terrible evil. You get the idea.

Some short time ago, an evil DM wrote an article on randomly generating stories. The article was posted on a blogging site to open it to the public. Fortunately for you, you just read this article.

Havok and Chaos

2009-09-16T13:01:00.000-07:00

So, I mentioned that I had started a new campaign on this website I'm part of. It's just gotten off the ground a few days ago, and so far it's going well. The characters are already out of their cells and it's only been what, thirty seconds since the guard slipped and hit his head? They're very resourceful.

Which is encouraging, because I don't actually have a plot for this game beyond the first castle. I have a plot for some good guys to come chasing them after, but at the moment they have to make their own goals. Some players are good with this, some aren't. Many players simply wait for a prompt from the DM before they take *any* action, let alone one that progresses the story.

In Havok and Chaos, I'm going to have to get creative, because at least at first they won't have any NPCs friendly to them. I'll have to dig through the character's backgrounds, find their motives, and build their story around it. How exciting.

Real Dungeon Design

2009-09-12T13:42:00.000-07:00

In order to properly build random dungeons, you have to understand the way that real dungeons are built up. And in order to understand how real dungeons are built up, you have to know what they were before they got filled with monsters.

Probably the most obvious one is the abandoned temple. However, the contrast between a real-life temple (or even one not yet abandoned), and one where monsters are crawling about is pretty staggering.

Real temples (take a church for instance) have one main area of worship. This is typically almost as soon as you come in, funnels as much traffic from the entranceway into it as possible. There are a few side passageways that occasionally connect and have a few small side-rooms off of each of them. That's about it. If you look at one designed to be a dungeon, you have to climb down three ladders, and walk down a hundred feet of corridor to get to the main altar way in the back. On the way there are dozens of branch-off passages each with one or more rooms, but none of them have obvious "main altar this way" signs. Most of the passages are even the same size!

Okay, it's more interesting like that, but less realistic. Is there a middle-ground? Of course, and while it requires just a little bit more work, it also produces far better results. Take a look at the map below.

This map could have been a real temple. One main entranceway, one main passage to the main altar, several smaller walkways to side rooms. Perfect. How does it make a good dungeon then, if you could just walk in and get to the biggest room undoubtedly holding the baddest guy? That dark grey circle in the middle. That represents a cave-in, and the main passageway is blocked from all sides, so you can't just stroll straight in. You have to take a side passage around the main walkway, entering about half the rooms in the dungeon and work your way to the other side of the rubble. It looks like a real place, it acts like a real place and it took one single grey circle to make it a good level, rather than just a real place.

Now that you have a basic design, you determine room use by location. Those mid-sized rooms right before the end? One's a bunk, the other's a mess. The small ones near the front? storage. The funny shaped ones around the side, library and kitchen. The more used and desirable a room is, the more it goes near the other desirable and used rooms. Thus, the food and the sleep go beside the worship, but the place to put all the extra mats for the ceremonies is further away (although you could put a closet nearby, containing treasure...). And the basic design is done. You can fill it with whatever you want, be it orcs and wizards, to a dragon and dopplegangers. What it was is set and now it just has to be a place for players to go and kill monsters.

PC of the living dead

2009-09-08T12:42:00.001-07:00

So, I'm working on a new DnD campaign. It's a mid-level evil campaign where the characters are starting by breaking out from prison. That's not quite so important, but one of the characters applying to join the game has the ultimate goal of becoming a lich, which is a great goal for an evil campaign, right?

But what about the other characters? Liches are strong creatures, and when one becomes a lich, there's essentially a four level increase in power all at once. The other players alongside this character have to either get a similar increase in power or deal with an inferiority complex for a few levels. Both have some serious issues.

Becoming a Lich takes some time in-game, so let's say that the character goes off for one adventure to do this, while the other characters adventure. What does the player for that character do? Does he go away while the other characters gain *four* levels? That could be months! So, that's not really a plausable option. Does he play with nerfed powers? That's probably a good idea, although it won't be as fun for the player who now has to wait through even more time in order to complete their transformation. Why spend so much money to have to wait so long to actually get the bang for your buck.

So, we give the player all their powers after, say, one missed session. Now, the other players are four levels behind, give or take. Everything everyone does is incomparable to what the lich can do. He outcasts the casters, he soaks up more damage than the meatshield, he is more effective sneaking around than the rogue. So the other players need to gain power to match. Do they gain four levels to catch up? Then the lich suddenly feels gipped - he just sold his soul to gain power, and now everyone else auto-magically catches up to him for free. Same issue with items, either the Lich has to get a share of some way-overpowered treasure (making him even more powerful), or he'll be gipped. You could potentially squeeze it in while he's off becoming a lich but that'll still be taking from him one of the best bits of becoming the lich in the first place - power.

The best solutions I can come up with are these: Either the player has to spend levels as he approaches lichdom and slowly gain the power it would bestow. It requires building a several-step lich class, but that's a small amount of work for the pain you would otherwise be inflicting upon yourself. The other option is that lichdom requires a sacrifice of several class levels to do so. The player would have to take the option: lich power, or class power. It's not a bad option but it cuts down a lot of things the player's worked for for a good while.

Anyone else have an opinions?

Four walls

2009-09-03T15:28:00.000-07:00

Clearly I had no idea what I was talking about when I said starting a blog was the hardest thing to do. Coming up with things to talk about in a development blog when development is sluggish - that's what's hard.

Recently I've added roofs to the rooms in my dungeon. Before a player enters them, they are dark. After a player enters them, they're bright. Hurrah! Right?

There's a few issues this raises that aren't immediately obvious. Items in the rooms are drawn after the rooms themselves (that is, the room is drawn on the map, then the items are drawn in the room). Since the roof is part of the room, and not an item in the room - what do you do with all the items? Do they dissapear? Do they only generate when you enter the door? How about things that move other than the player entering a darkened room? The best solution I can see with the engine I have is to simple not draw any item that's in a room that hasn't been discovered yet. It'll be a little more computationally intensive than, say, keeping each room as it's own object and going from there. (rooms are collections of coordinates, see.)

The outside, of course, will have to count as a room too. Otherwise there might become strange logic as to things not being in a room - although with my code the way it is, things don't care about rooms or not, yet. Hell, they don't really even care about walls. But the outside has to be made a room just for carefulness's sake.

But now is the big question: walls.

Why are walls such a big issue when I'm drawing the rooms? Because you shouldn't be able to see them when you're walking around outside the building - you should only be able to see the walls once you've got inside. So, walls don't appear until you've entered the room. Great, the building will look like a big black shape on the map, because we now aren't drawing *exterior* walls. And If I start to keep them in their own buffer, what about when I draw a funny shaped building? What if I want to change the code to add more rooms on?

Sigh, times are tough...

Non-Player-Characters

2009-09-02T07:18:00.000-07:00

No matter how much effort you put into your world, the player will only see what is on the surface without some method of relaying information to them. Sure, you could provide the player with a library of documentation, but that gets dull, and there's little way of guiding the player away from things they don't need to know until later, and things they might want to know now.

Enter the NPC, or non-player-character. This title officially covers anything in the game that can think, but isn't controlled by the player, although it's come to be a term for only friendly characters the player meets along their route. Evil characters are villians, anything that attacks you is a monster - or perhaps a boss. They're not considered an NPC until they shake your hand and say something to you.

In a video game, most NPCs typically have one, and exactly one, peice of information to give the player when prompted. You have to wonder what the player asks to get such varied responses from people all over the world, "What's going on?" perhaps? Regardless, the information almost always remains static throughout the game unless something signifigant happens in the area, at which time the information changes to that NPCs comment about the event.

NPCs are usually used to say something about the current point in the story and the current area the player is in. An NPC in the castle might say "Sigh, times are tough." An NPC in the forest might say "The green snails are plentiful this year." They provide you with a little window into the setting that the player wouldn't otherwise get a chance to know. Most of the information isn't useful, but it's interesting for the player to know. Sometimes what they say is important, but that's not quite what I'm talking about here.

While this is an essential window into the world, there is a problem with it. Once an NPC says the same thing twice, most players won't talk to them ever again. To make the NPCs more lifelike, more dynamic in the world, there needs to be a list of things for them to say. This can be drawn from a pool of tidbits about the current point in the story "I hear the volcano in Maxitone errupted", information about the area the NPC is in "granny makes so many pies now that the apples are ripe, anyone can get one", and a few that could be used for any NPC across the world, "My feet are sore". This lets the NPC, with little extra effort, suddenly becomes interesting for the player to listen to more than once. But, there has to be a balancing act between interesting and repeating. If the NPCs always have something new and interesting to say, the player's never going to go and save the world, they'll spend all day chatting in town!

The obvious choice

2009-08-28T09:57:00.000-07:00

If you've been paying attention to my blog so far, you probably figured out what I'm planning on working on for this game design competition. That's right, my dungeon crawler.

Sure, there are dozens of dungeon crawlers out there for every day or every month, but as was my original goal with the tinygame, it wouldnt just be a generic dungeon crawler. It would be an infinitely replayable dungeon crawler with charm. It's a bit of a high goal, and I might not succeed for the game design competition, but that's what I want.

The first thing I need for the game design competition is a story. And how do you make a story in a 'generic' dungeon crawler interesting? Why, you make it as procedurally generated as the dungeon of course! Which lends me to the topic of procedureally generated stories in the first place.

One of the few games I've played with procedurally generated stories is Daggerfall, Elder Scrolls II. When you went to a guild and asked for a quest, it gave you a random reason to go to a random place and kill a random thing. Sometimes this was as simple as " got into house. Go kill it." Other times it was more complex, " broke into the guild and stole . We've tracked it to , go and kill it - and take back our stuff."

It was really simple, but it kept the dungeons - which were rather ridiculous in their own random generation - and the quests themselves nice and flavorful in a world that woiuld have otherwise been extremely samey. I want to implement a similar thing, but since my world is goign to be a much smaller scope, so my story behind it doesn't have to be painted with such broad strokes. I can talk about the creation of the dungeon and it's history, I can make the villian more complex than just a random monster. And most importatly, I can make the story the player discovers as he runs through the game different enough that he might want to play through it more than once.

Mainstream

2009-08-27T09:24:00.000-07:00

When thinking of the theme 'explore' the most common idea thrown about is that of a simple point and click adventure. You have a screen in front of you, or several to navigate around, and you click on things until you accomplish an in-game-goal. Like escaping a room, or finding waldo.

This was the second-to-last exploration idea I came up with, and while I like it, it's far too generic by itself to be worth anyone's while. There are thousands of room escape games out there, many of them good, many of them terrible for one reason or another. Poor execution, pixel-hunting, and puzzles with convoluted "space-logic" are the worst killers, especially that last one.

There are some great examples of the genre, though - and most of them are in the genre of where's waldo. Finding one object amid a sea of random obstacles can be great fun, or matching the differences between two concurrent storylines - which has become quite popular lately.

I didn't like the idea of just looking around for one object or another anyways, even ignoring the fact that it would take forever to draw all the art. Although where's waldo reminded me of a comic, and that comic co-starred carmen sandiego, which I think is to this day one of the best games that has ever touched on the topic of exploring.

In the "Where in the world is carmen sandiego" game, there is a random crime in a random city in the world, caused by carmen or one of her lackeys. You have to gather clues by travelling all around the world, and catch the villian before time runs out. It was executed well, it was fun, and it had replay value. But to be honest, I didn't think of this until after I started the game for the final idea I had in regards to the explore topic - although it might be a worthwhile idea to look into later.

Exploring the theme 'Explore'

2009-08-26T10:17:00.000-07:00

After contemplating the maze idea for far too long, I realized that it would be way too hard to do properly within the time frame. After all, it's not a concept design competition.

So, I went looking for inspiration, and came up with a few more ideas. The next one was a text-based adventure. More of a mental one, it would be about exploring your mind, to come up with the answers for life's bug questions... or something. I didn't get very far before I gave up on this one, too. I didn't have any really good topics to 'explore'. I'm sure that with a good idea, someone could build this up, but not m right now.

The next idea was inspired by one of my favorite sites, Squidi. Exploring your memory, once it has been lost. Basically, the player wakes up with amnesia, and has to figure out what's going on. He discovers quickly that there was some crime he was involved in, perhaps even being framed for, and he has to discover who really did it. As the game progresses, the player is able to go back and dreg through the character's memories, as well as travel around the present day. Finding things in the persent day make things available in your memories, and memories unlock the ability to go places an talk about things in the present day. Squidi's twist was that as you walk around your memories, things that are there but you do not remember the signifigance of appear as static. That's a really clever way of showing the player the things they still need to remember within the memory.

Exploring your memory and travelling back and forth would be a really interesting game, and it would perhaps be the most successful if I could come up with a plot for it. But plots are hard. Villians? Motivations? Locations? Names? And all the art for everything.

That's ultimately what put me off this idea, the art required. I'm not very good at art, and producing a lot of it, especially the same character in different poses, is something that is simply beyond my skills. If I was working on a team, then perhaps ths idea would be plausable, but for now, I have to move on to different ideas.

Perhaps procedurally generated content would be a good place to start?

Jay is Games

2009-08-25T08:17:00.000-07:00

So, there's a game design competition just starting at Jay Is Games. The theme? Explore.

When they originally suggested explore as a topic, there were a lot of ideas that came to my mind, none of which were what the public was afraid the competition would be full of.

My first idea was a platformer game, and the idea was based around a really badly designed maze I played about a year ago. Basically, you would be given some arbitrary, and more importantly impossible goal. The impossibility of the goal isn't immediately apparent, because any game can say 'find the boss' or 'collect a hundred coins'. Obviously, whatever is needed to access the end of the game is absent - the last coin, the key to the boss door, whatever. It is also important to have the game be extremely maze-like and moderately large. One-way tunnels are great for this. The goal, of course, isn't to have the player actually complete the goal you set for them, but in fact for the player to draw a map of all the different routes they could be taking. This would spell out - if it were done correctly - a code phrase, or even a world location that they would have not have been able to decipher without a map.

But there are a number of difficulties with this particular method. The biggest difficulty is the fact that the actual goal is different from the goal stated. Not all players - in fact likely very few players - will even realize the secondary goal, even if hinted at subtly. Most players would likely stumble around without a map until they got frustrated, then leave and say they didn't enjoy it - and that's the opposite of good design. There has to be a deliberate mechanism to encourage the player to make the map. The second difficulty is the lack of reply value. Let's face it, once one person has beaten the game and let everyone know that the secret is the code hidden in the map itself, there will only be a few people who continue the game, and nobody will come back to it once they've beaten it themselves. The last difficulty is level design. How do you build a game whose map contains an obvious message for the player drawing the map out, but has the message - or even the fact there is a message - hidden from those who aren't drawing that map. Have it be really big? Have the paths between areas be the letters? Only display the points, and have the players connect the dots? ... actually, that last one's proven effecive in Kingdom of Loathing, but again - once one player picks up the trick and lets everyone know - it gets redundant for others to do the same.

The next idea I had had, was actually an offshoot of this. What about doing the above in the dark, using a flashlight? The message is written on the floor spread across all sorts of different areas, but the sections of the letter won't appear until you shine your light on them. It's another neat idea, but the idea of programming a flashlight in a maze is daunting for any programmer. It still has almost all the same problems, too. No replay value. The message is either totally obvious, or completely abstract. Intensely complex maze design required. Clearly, this particular idea isn't going anywhere.

Time to move onto the next idea.

Choose your own adventure

2009-08-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

Branching stories are occasionally chided for being unrealistic becase of the limited choices available to the player, versus the number of real posibilities. Why can't I use the sledgehammer I'm carrying around on the locked door? What am I really supposed to be doing?

In my game at work, email conversations are essentially choose your own adventures. You're presented with a problem and a number of solutions (typically two) and proceed. The conversation is recorded as it happens, and at the end you've either successfully accomplished your goal based on your responses, or you haven't. It's one of the few situations that I feel branching stories actually work well.

When you're at work, you typically only have a small number of actions, like do the work yourself or delegate the task to someone else - so having only the options "Tell her to go ahead" and "Tell her to meet with the team first" is actually plausable. You don't have to worry about many different plausable options, because you're not doing estranged problem solving, you're balancing efficenty of what you think is happening against efficency of what you're asking to be done.

Plausability is a very important thing in games, beacuse of the all-important suspension of disbeleif. Once something starts happening that forces the player to step away with a "huh", they lose the world you're trying to immerse them in. When you fail to present an option that a player would think is plausable, they stop reading, playing and having fun. That's catastrophic.

realistic responses

2009-08-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

In the game I'm working on for work, we attempt to simulate a real social network in a real company. There are a number of characters, several of them canadian, several of them not canadian (this is important, because it's a game about how immigrants are different from canadians in various important ways).

There are a number of challenges therein, some of which I had a hand in helping to solve, some of which I did not. One of the biggest challenges was making these characters in the game feel like real people, rather than just props - which they ultimately are. Backgrounds for the characters were crafted, resumes written, and personal photographs created, but what really gets the player involved with the characters is the conversations with them.

There are two types of conversations that exist in the game, chats and emails. Chats give you insight to the character's lives, allowing you access to their thoughts, feelings, and backgrounds. It also helps you build trust with them, which opens up more conversational opportunities, which allows you to learn more about them and so on. Depending on where you chat with them, how quickly and how deeply, determines your untimate success in the entire game, because later-game decisions need to be based on information you uncovered in these early chats with your in-game coworkers.

Emails are more work-centric. They involve your projects, the different teams, who's in charge, and wind up affecting how effectively the characters work - which is also important when you're attempting to be their manager. Good decisions in the emails leads to good results, and bad decisions leads ultimately to poor results, just like the real world.

But the point of making this game so realistic isn't to amuse people, unfortunately. It's to show people how different people are in canada than people from elsewhere in the world. Asians are very group-centric - and it reflects in everything they do - while americans are self-centric, looking for personal rewards and praise, unlike most immigrants who would prefer the team be rewarded even if much of it was their own effort.

Which do you prefer?

A whisp of Smoke

2009-08-21T09:24:00.000-07:00

Shadowkin, also called shadowlings, live near the equator of Ronar in the jungles of Grittlanni. Their race is clever, quick, and not entirely solid, allowing them the opportunity to pass through even the tiniest crack - though it requires sufficent concentration and energy to do so.

Shadowkin appear to be black-skinned humanoids with long thin fingers and a beaklike mouth, and feathers for hair. They are shorter than humans, and take well to both water, and magic. They do not easily speak the same languages the other races do, and as such are a virtual unknown across the rest of the world.

Adding to that, the devestation of the race during the ancient age of magic, they are not as advanced as a society as far as any of the other intelligent races, opting for a more tribal way of life, among the creatures and trees of the jungles.

Short and hairy

2009-08-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

As elves are to Torin, so are dwarves to Unofotine. They fill the role of short, hairy men that live mostly underground, and they keep great pride in their work - and for good reason.

Unofotine were created at the same time as the Torin by the god of challenges. They were placed on a desolate rocky continent and forced to eek out a living from the rocks and their own two hands. As such, their simple survival as a species gives them a lot to be proud of, and they are feircely defensive of any member of their own race. They dug down to escape the harsh sunlight, building first caves and warrens, then a grand civlization. Hundreds of years after burying themselves underground, they spread out to the surface again, now prepared for it's dangers, and ultimately to mingle with the other races and the rest of the world.

Unofotine would average five feet were they to stand straight, but their lives underground give them hunched postures, and with their hands and forarms evolved with thick bones and long talons for digging through the ground they mildly resemble gorillas, although in face and temperment they would more likely be likened to bears. The claws at the end of their hands make it difficult for them to use their hands for much delicate work, and they have developed only the crudest written language.

They are not craftsmen of fine and delicate things, but of great and rough things. Caves, magic stones, occasionally armor or weapons, and mostly buildings. They are great architects and tireless laborers, but their services are not cheap - they enjoy the labor of the more finely-fingered races for delicate workings. Still, they mostly stay to themselves when they can.

Tree-Huggers

2009-08-19T06:17:00.000-07:00

In Ronar, Torin fill the place that Elves fill in most fanasy worlds. That is, they are more magical than humans, taller, have pointier ears and are more in touch with nature. However, that's about where the similarities end.

Torin are tall and lanky, with large catlike ears extending out the side of their head and a thin layer of usually tan fur covering their entire body from their ears to the tip of their tail. Well, of course they have a tail, why wouldn't they? They are based after jungle cats, afterall. Males tails are thicker and typically used for balance when climbing through the trees, while females tails are more dextrous and can even be used to hold more delicate objects like a quill or a sword.

Unlike Human villages which sprawl out over a countryside, Torin villages are built much more vertically around large trees, and occasionally lack many walkways between the structures at all, the Torin leaping from branch to branch with ease. While the cities of all the other races are accessable to most of the other races, most of the Torin cities are inaccessable, merely due to their design, adding to the race's desire to be left alone by the other, more destructive races.

There are a lot of paralells obvious between elves and the Torin, but the idea was to make them familliar enough to the player that they would be comfortable with them, yet different enough that they would be curious about them. I may still have some aspects of Torin society that need to change to make them interesting enough, but I think this is a fairly good start.

Living and Breathing

2009-08-18T09:52:00.000-07:00

One of the big things that makes any world is it's creatures. Some fantasy worlds are only populated by humans, some include existing mythological creatures like Minotaurs and hydras, and many contain creatures like Elves and Dwarves in the manner popularized by Tolkien.

Humans, of course, should build the cornerstone of the races in your world, because you're expecting the player to relate to them. Society works similarly, people stand on two legs and speak English (well, in the north-American localization anyways), and so on. You could build a world where singing spiders were the dominant race, and the whom the player interacts with, but people wouldn't understand it as well - although you'd be able to get away with a lot more things that would pass as odd in a world the players think they understand.

In Ronar, there are four dominant races, known collectively as 'the intelligent races'. There are Humans, the most abundant; Shadowkin an etherial race borrowing some traits of birds; Torin, the naturalistic catfolk; and Unofotine the stout underground race resembling moles. They each fit a mold a player expects, they each fill a role in the world, they each have their own societies that are based on aspects of human society, and they each are distinct from what the player might be expecting. And they're each associated with a different god - although I'll get into gods another day

Humans, of course, fill all the same positions they do in the real world. They farm, they teach, they rule, and they live in cities all about the world. They excel in anything they choose - although typically only one thing per person, and unlike in many fantasy worlds - they live about as long as any other intelligent race in the world.

The other three races I'll cover later.

Roomy

2009-08-16T07:42:00.000-07:00

While I deal with bugs not entrely related to the creation of the rooms themselves I should mention some of the engine I built before getting to this point.

The game is, ultimately, built on a grid map, a two-dimensional series of tile objects. Each tile has several different attributes; a ground color, a creature on it, a stack of treasure, and whether or not it can be passed over by a creature (which preempts having a creature on it, of course).

I decided to keep all the tiles in a one-dimensional array, for a specific reason I now forget, and use a function to calculate what the index of a tile at a particular X,Y coordinates is. So far, it's worked just fine.

Now, that means I'll have hundreds of tiles - heck, hundreds in each map - but I don't want to draw so many of them. Afterall, it's an isometric display, I can only fit about a ten by ten screen up at a time. So, based on the location of the player, I only draw the tiles, and the contents thereof, which are visible to the player. It does mean a lot of extra checks for tiles that aren't onscreen - but that's something I'll work out later. It's certainly more efficient than drawing the entire world every frame.

Now, the player has the world to walk around in, and while it's pretty dull before I put the dungeon on it, it's certainly servicable. Eventually, I'll need to have them connect to other maps, but I figure I can wait until I reach the second floor of teh dungeon to start worrying about that.

Behind door number one

2009-08-15T11:26:00.000-07:00

Dungeons are build primarily out of, believe it or not, rooms. There are big rooms and small rooms. Rooms at the top of towers, and rooms at the bottom of crevices. Some rooms have monsters, some have treasure, and some are regretfully empty.

My current challenge in my game, whose working title is TinyGame, is to find a way to figure out what the spaces are for each room.

My world is divided up into tiles, nostalgia from old rogue-likes i suppose, and each tile can either be a movable space, or a piece of terrain that can't be moved through (yet). Oh sure, there's items and creatures and so on, but this is about the rooms themselves.

Right now I generate the rooms like this:

I find a spot somewhere in the bottom middle of my map. That becomes the main doorway for the dungeon. From there I generate a width, and a height and draw my walls just inside that, leaving the middle empty. This is the atrium for the building, and it's always one of the largest rooms in the place. Sure, not every type of dungeon needs an atrium, but I'm starting simple here.

From the atrium, I randomly decide how many rooms are off the side, one, two or three. One room is off the top, two rooms is off to the side, and three rooms is all the way around. The size of these rooms is a factor of how big the atrium is. And each of them has up to two side-rooms, too. The back room's rooms are on the side, the side room's rooms are further to the side, or to the top - which can overlap with the top-rooms's side rooms.

But now, they're just walls and spaces. I need to remember them as rooms themselves, so I can do things with them, like add monsters and delicious treasure.

What's the Point?

2009-08-14T07:55:00.001-07:00

Whenever you're building something, you have a goal in mind. If you're building a house, you might be doing it to provide shelter to your family, and you might be doing it to eventually sell for profit and become rich. When you design a program you might be doing it to teach a player a standard, and you might be doing it to entertain. Regardless, you have a goal in mind.

When you're building a world, however, your goal is probably not to house your family or entertain - although those might be why you're doing the design in the first place - you're usually designing a world to act as a background as something. Lord of the Rings is a great story, but without Middle Earth it would be fairly generic story. Final Fantasy games have been progressing to a single world for their games to take place in - the world again is the background for the story and the action.

But it's important to remember that for the things that exist in the world, it's usually not *just* a background. People supposedly live their entire lives there and have for generations. Buildings are built to be used, typically not just to be abandoned and filled with monsters. Everything needs to have some sort of purpose in the world rather than just filling it with things for the players to see on their way from point A to point B. Sure, once the purpose is served it should be interesting, but the fact of the matter is that truth is stranger than fiction. The less realistic, or at least the less plausable, an ecosystem is in a world, the more likely the player's going to pick up on it.

But i'll go into more detail in a later post.

Nose to the Grindstone

2009-08-13T09:38:00.001-07:00

So, I've been working on a game at my full-time job...

Ah yes, I should have mentioned - I work in the gaming industry. Sure, it's games-based-elearning, but it's a very innovative field because it's not very well developed of defined. When you come up with a new method of finding out how much someone learns from playing a game, it's a huge deal! That's not my job, that's just an example.

I'm a game developer. That means I'm the guy who implements the game. It also means I'm one of the few people with a hand in saying what's possible to do and what's not. It's a powerful position. Although in crunch time, it gets a little strenuous - after all, crunch time is when things have to all be done, and when you're the one who implements them...

Roll Initiative

2009-08-13T04:22:00.000-07:00

I mentioned that some of my opinions on the topic of randomly generating dungeon content would be colored by dungeons and dragons. Overall I'm a huge fan, even in the controversial 4e stuff.

I've been playing DnD for about fifteen years now, and I've been dungeon master for about ten of those. I call the shots, I make the rules, I design the dungeons and the stories that go with them. In the past four years, I've been with an online site called www.dndonlinegames.com. Working on a play-by-post style, it's easy to plan moves, react to players well and so on. You don't have to have the answers at the drop of a hat, you have to have them within a few hours. I can take the time to redesign the monsters coming up in the dungeon if the players are struggling with them.

It's always part of a DMs job to balance the game for a player so that they have a challenging time - but not too hard. It's the DMs job to make it so the dungeons feel like a real place the PCs are exploring (if that's what they want). The DM has a lot of responsibility in keeping the game flowing, and all games should follow this structure.

If the DM's no good at any one of those things, the game can fall flat on it's face. Let's hope I can fake a good DM in the background, hmm?

Starting a blog is always the hardest

2009-08-12T04:10:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been working on an RPG in my spare time. The original idea is based on Squidi's Tiny Dungeon model, but it's grown a lot since then. The main point of making the game in the first place is to build some good randomly generated worlds.

I've always been a big fan of dungeon crawlers, and roguelikes in particular, but one of their big falling downs is lack of logic in their randomly generated content. You throw a bunch of rooms into solid rock and connect them with a maze of tunnels that have nothing to do with anything, and look like spagetti. Most people call this a randomly generated dungeon, I call it a spagetti-maze. Especially because the content in each room has nothing to do with the other rooms. Each room is almost exclusively a new entity in and of itself and that's just silly. Who built it? Why is it there? Some games try to hint at those answers, but never very well. Why don't all the infinite variety of monsters eat eachother?

Maybe I'm just biased because of all my years playing Dungeons and Dragons. In this world, it's much harder to get away with rooms that don't connect, or with dungeons out there in the middle of nowhere filled inexplicably with monsters... Well, usually. Lots of DMs and adventures and campaigns are all the same sort of thing - kick down the door, kill the monster, take their stuff. But what's important is dungeon layout.

In DnD, you hever have a hundred feet of twisting hallway to lead to the door to the next room. You have ten at most. Often the rooms will be pressed up against eachother, like they would be in real life. They might not be arranged in much of a logical manner, the contents may still be random, but is a realistic design really so far fetched as to be unable to be randomly generated?

Of course not. Dungeons have to start out as something - prisons, temples, towns - and all of them have distinct looks. Temples start with an atrium, then there's a main place of worship in the back, and some hallways off to the side containing smaller rooms. It's not complicated and as I continue to work on this project and update this blog, we'll see just how simple it is to mimic real-world archetecture using only the NLG.