Dragontorc MS1

Last sunday I hit MS1.

I will try to keep Milestones small and focused, so I can have some short-term goals to achieve, as it will just make me feel better, as I am actually doing something and pushing things forward.

What was what I wanted for MS1? Well, that list I made up when I already had most of it done, so it is actually not "what I wanted", rather just "what I did":

• Framework for game
• Basic setup of whole world (regions, sub-regions, rooms)
• Basic layout of rooms with doors connecting them
• Automatic placement of rooms and doors inside
• Player's character and movement
• Doors opening and closing

And already I had to change one thing comparing to original game. Doors don't open towards player, they open away from him. And there are two reasons for that.

1. Visual glitch. I can't push player back away from door too much, as it looks bad and player loses control for a while and possibly will end up on a monster that is following him. And if I don't push, door go right through player which just looks bad.
2. If all doors open into the room and you go from one room to another it just looks strange. And is more confusing as well, but I realised that only when I switched openning doors to be always away from player. Then, even if room orientation changes, it is much easier to see from where did you come and you can connect both rooms inside your head. Although it still requires some spacial imagination. But I want to keep it that way, just to be more faithful to the original and because it looks nice (yeah, 90 degree corners are actually 45 degree, everything has to be moved around)

As you will see on video below, you notice that the game looks currently pretty bad. And it will look so until MS11. I want to keep it that way, so I can focus on gameplay and until then I probably won't decide on the style. Now I have to very different ideas - one of them being more or less realistic 3D representation (which could require some more advanced animation system but I am pretty happy to create one, at last) and other looking like it takes place in a book (and it would be more faithful to original game, although would look worse than 3D one).

As you can see, there are some issues with navigation, which is on my todo list, as few other bugs I noticed, but I plan on fixing minor bugs and tweaking in MS5, and it looks pretty ugly, but you can get the idea of how the character will move around.

One more thing, I can't tell how much time did it take, but probably 15-20 hours. It isn't impressive, but there is some more code behind scenes that I could omit if I just wanted to have dirty prototype. Maybe I will have such info at the end here.

Ok, so as I finished MS1, let's head towards MS2, which will bring us items, inventory, servant and some basic interaction.

MS1

Started at: 2011/03/03

Ended at: 2011/03/20

Actual time taken: 15-20mh

Status: success? I am pretty happy about it.

Remake of Dragontorc

Ok, this game was haunting me for almost twenty years now, and at least for five I wanted to create a remake of it. And while I still want to create some monumental piece of art, the greatest game ever, I know that I will never do it. No, if I am working on engine and doing some uber boring stuff just to start going. So I decided to switch to C# and start working on actual game creating some engine on the way.

Of course I don't want to create just a remake of Dragontorc. I don't even know if it will be possible, if there won't be any problems with copyrights. But if there will be, it's not that complicated to change it a little bit to have unique game. Anyway, I already want to add some new features and modify existing ones.

Because I do it in my spare time and I don't have much of it, it may take far amount of months, just to have some early playable game, but it is much better to have one working game than thousands of ideas, few started, none completed, right?