Posts Tagged ‘rpg’

  • Lands of Lorez – our 32×32 pixel dungeon crawler

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    The Low Rez Game Jam was a month long jam organised by Deviever, where the objective was simple – create a game that ran in 32×32 pixels only. You were allowed to upscale your game of course, but it had to be natively running in just 32×32 pixels in order to qualify. To put that into perspective you could fit 48 games of that size into the resolution of a ZX Spectrum.

    Ilija and I decided early on to create a first-person perspective styled dungeon crawler. A homage to the old Westwood and SSI games like Eye of the Beholder and Dungeon Master. It wouldn’t be as advanced as any of those, but we hoped to still convey the same general feeling. Our game was called Lands of Lorez (puns on so many levels there) and here you can see it running in its native size:

    lol32

    and zoomed in to 256 x 256:

    sshot-2014-06-01-[1]

    After a couple of nights work we had the basic ‘crawling’ routine in place. Naturally I coded the game using Phaser, but ended-up creating an entire Tilemap Walker plugin to handle the movement in a way that I needed for a game like this.

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  • Looking for RPG / Strategy / Choose Your Adventure Game Designers

    If I had to put my finger on one specific type of game that I enjoy the most it would have to be the humble RPG. From the classic Ultima and Curse of the Azure Bonds style games through to Skyrim and Witcher 2 I enjoy them as much as time allows. For a while now I have harboured dreams of making a game in this style but several things have held me back.

    First is all of the rules and stats needed to make the game fair but fun. When do characters level? How much XP should items provide? How easy is Monster X to kill? And secondly is the setting itself. Coming up with fun quests to embark on. Towns, cities, destinations they’ll want to explore. And characters you care about. These are all skills I’m well aware that I don’t posses. So I’m posting this in the hope that there are some budding game designers out there who perhaps have the opposite problem: stacks of ideas, but no skill/time to turn them into an actual game.

    So I’m putting this post out in the hope that you may be such a person.

    If you’ve got a burning game concept you’d like to see made, that falls somewhere into the realms of an RPG game, a card game, a turn-based game, a fantasy strategy game or even a choose-your-own-adventure style game, then I’d love to hear from you. I’m open to exploring all styles and genres, within reason, although I’ll be honest and confess I do have a particular love for the stock Tolkein, but that won’t prevent me from looking at others.

    I’m not expecting you to just hand over your game design and be done. We will treat this as a proper business deal and agree terms that benefit us both. But if this sounds even slightly interesting to you, or maybe someone you know, then please get in touch. All I ask is that you actually have a game idea ready formed. We can take it from there together.

  • A sneak peek at Dungeon Darts

    We’ve been busy working on our own titles recently, along way a raft of games for the BBC, and one of our new titles is called Dungeon Darts. It’s part of my series of games where I tried to think what sort of bar games would take place in a stock Tolkein fantasy land. In this outing we’ve got dwarfs playing darts, using jewel encrusted daggers and a dragon emblazed dart board 🙂 Here’s a WIP of the title page:

    The game art was created by Ezra Allen, so if you’re ever in the need of quality 3D modelling or illustration then drop him a line. We hope to have the game itself released in the next couple of months.

  • Announcing Turbo Stripe Software

    I was digging through some boxes in our attic when I came across an old folder. It contained computer magazines and comics I had made back in the mid 1980s, aged around 10 years old. I used to sit there and literally draw my own magazines. I’d draw the covers, the layout, even screen shots for the games I was reviewing. One such magazine I called Arcade & Software. Very much inspired by Computer + Video Games (C+VG) of the mid 80s:

    Arcade and Software Magazine Cover

    Here is the cover of issue 1. I only ever made 2 issues. The two games I’ve drawn on the cover are Knight Tyme (on the left) and Alien 8 on the right. Not that the robot looks a thing like the robot in Alien 8 mind you.

    While flicking through Arcade & Software what caught my eye however was the inclusion of the Turbo Stripe Sofware Catalogue. This catalogue contained a list of games that as a 10 year old I really wanted to be making myself, complete with box cover artwork, short descriptions and even prices and ordering instructions.

    These games never existed, I didn’t actually code them back then. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so at that age. It would be a couple more years before I started programming for myself. Reading through this fictitious catalogue there was something captivating about knowing that several decades ago this is what I really wanted to be doing. And these were the sorts of games a 10 year old me wanted to making.

    So you know what? It’s time to fulfil a small part of that childhood dream and actually make one of those games. But which one? To decide let’s push embarrassment aside for a moment and dive right in …

    … I present to you, in all its time-warped yellow-sellotaped glory the Turbo Stripe Software Catalogue (1987). Please excuse the horrendous spelling. And I claim no responsibility for copyright infringement re: the game ideas shown.

    Turbo Stripe Software Catalogue Page 1

    So here’s the front cover. The first thing to explain is that as a child I owned a Toshiba MSX 8-bit computer. In hindsight this was an incredible machine. It had a built-in cartridge port for which you could get some amazing games from the likes of Capcom and Konami. Games such as Nemesis (Gradius), Road Fighter, Sky Jaguar and Castlevania. It also had a tape recorder for the cheap tape-based games from Mastertronic, Ocean, Gremlin and other software houses of the day.

    It was a great computer, even if virtually no-one else owned one (which made acquiring games in the school playgroup extremely difficult).

    Obviously the kid playing on the MSX on this front cover is doing so with some kind of advanced invisible Wiimote. Turning the page …

    Turbo Stripe Software Catalogue Page 2

    And here we have the first two games. I’ll give you no clues as to what Hoppin Harry was going to be a clone of. As you can see collecting the “lady frog” would net you “bounes points” [sic]. I think the 00010 number is the ordering code. Obviously leaving room for another 99,000 or so titles of similar quality.

    Turbo Driver was my version of the bastard child of Spy Hunter and Super Sprint. Needless to say this would have incredible graphics too (at least I managed to spell that correctly this time). I’m not entirely sure how this game would play or look, I think it’s just filling space to be honest 🙂

    Turbo Stripe Software Catalogue Page 3

    Ahh the classic Lock In Man. No, it has nothing to do with after-hours at a pub/bar. Instead you are trapped in a maze with “pellets” to eat and ghosts to avoid. I’m not sure why I didn’t just call it Pacman and be done with it. The one thing I remember most about my plans for this game, and which is alluded to in the description, is that it would ship with a level editor. I always got bored of the single level layout of Pacman and figured it’d be fun to create your own. I still think there is a shred of inspiration in that idea. Perhaps the maze could literally change around you as you play? So it becomes not so much about reflex based survival as it does puzzle solving.

    The final game in the catalogue is Chalic. That’s my 10 year olds spelling of chalice (i.e. a cup/goblet). This was going to be a hybrid Gauntlet / Rogue game with more fantasy RPG overtones. As you can read in the description you’d be trapped in an ever-changing maze, and are trying to rescue a chalice before the Wizards monster does. I’ve no idea on earth why a chalice would need “rescuing”. I mean it’s just a bloody cup. But obviously it was in danger. Maybe if the Wizard drank from it, the world would be forever enslaved and “Prince Hugh” would wither and die? Who knows. I wrote the damned thing and even my mind is still reeling.

    It’s worth noting that “Chalic” was only going to have “good” graphics rather than “excellent”. I find it interesting that I wrote it would have a “good title page”. Obviously game title pages were very important to me at the time. And the more I reflect on that I realise that actually they still are important to me today. I will often spend a disproportionate amount of time on the title pages for my games.

    Coming soon was SOS North Sea and Ship-T11. SOS North Sea was a blatant rip of Chop Lifter. Ship-T11 was just going to be a shmup, the T11 part being the name of my calculate I had at the time. I’m not including these two games as being eligible for creation.

    Which of these four gems do I feel is worth of being converted to Flash? It’s a tough choice.. personally I’m favouring “Chalic”, but I’ll open this up to the couple of you insane enough to have read this far. Which would you like to play? 🙂