After the Dungeon Crawl Jam of 2023

1 year ago by dcsw

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Going Into the Jam

The theme for this years game jam was “duality”. My first thought was to use a mind/body approach or to have a ‘ghost’ feature where you could go out-of-body and look around without actually opening doors and alerting monsters. I did a little testing with this idea but eventually settled on two choices for each interaction. My personal goal was to include more story and a coherent theme in the game for this year, and having two choices for every interaction aligned well with these goals and was pretty simple to implement.

The strategy going into the start of the jam was to use basically the same code that I used for Strange Slime Sewers, the game I submitted last year to the 2022 DC Jam, except I should use automatically generated wall and monster textures and add more features as time allowed. I thought about using Zooperdan’s AtlasMaker tool, but since I was taking a slightly different approach to displaying the textures, I implemented my own texture transformation tool which uses ruby and ImageMagick that I call Surface-Stretcher. I know that it is reinventing the wheel, but I defend it with the fact that I get joy out of doing and understanding myself, which is probably pretty common for game jammers.

Thanks!

Thanks to these artists, whose awesome work I can use to lend TTT some credibility.

The ripping background music by Matthew Pablo: https://opengameart.org/content/blackmoor-tides-epic-pirate-battle-theme
The foot step sounds from The Blender Foundation: https://opengameart.org/content/rock-walk-step-sound-yo-frankie
Nearly all art was generated using the stable diffusion text-to-image AI via the stable horde, thank you to the people donating their computers to the stable horde. https://stablehorde.net/
These cool Penrose tiles. By the way! This is the pattern I wanted to tile my house with but couldn’t find a pre-cut version and I wasn't going to cut them all myself. Image and generation program: https://github.com/samm00/penrose
Thanks to the DragonRuby community for an awesome game engine that targets a lot of platforms. They make game jamming fun, allow me to code in ruby, and have a great discord. https://dragonruby.org/toolkit/game
Thanks to Zooperdan, the guest judges, the streamers, and everyone that participated in making this a really great game jam.

Thanks to a very stable and cozy package of tools:

ImageMagick
Ruby
Kate Editor
GIMP
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

A lot of inspiration comes from Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), Advanced Fantasy Fighting (AFF), and Tunnels and Trolls (T&T) as those are what I’ve been reading recently.

During the Jam

I had hoped to have Surface-Stretcher completed before the jam, and I got it most of the way completed just as the jam started. However, actually using the textures led me to find some issues that I needed to fix during the jam. I am releasing the tool as free software here: https://gitlab.com/DustinCSWagner/surface-stretcher.

Here is a list of features, notes, and achievements completed during the jam:

Initial working version of surface-stretcher.
Rendering of the POV was improved and simplified.
Monsters move around randomly.
Monster spawn randomly throughout the map.
Monster will chase the player when the player is visible to the monster.
A cool player stats page and player controls screen.
A home-brewed RPG rule-set using a lot of D12s.

Future Work

Although I had hoped to include a certain story in the game, it ultimately only has a brief introduction and an abrupt ending when you meet the end-game conditions. Nonetheless, there are numerous features and improvements I intend to implement in TTT. Although I plan to maintain much of the game's visual design, I have compiled a list of changes and additions that I hope to implement within the next year:

Add a vendor with two random purchase options
Have buttons for all actions (tablet friendly)
Add save / load functionality
Start / Pause Menu with volume sliders, save, load
Fix display issues for small items in the left/right FOV.
Dialog with monsters / NPC story
Sub-goals / side quests acquired via NPC interaction.
Add stairs down / up functionality to have two levels
Traps
The floor and ceiling move
More sound effects
Better monster movement when diagonal to player.

In the ** distant future ** I would like to figure out basic 3D effects for DragonRuby, so that I could get parallax and some basic 3D animations when rotating in the dungeon. I could sort of hack this by per-rendering 3 or 4 frames for most rotations within one or two distance. This would give a slide-show effect to the player. Its one route that I know could be achieved, but it would be a lot cooler to have a smooth rotation.

Cool Pictures and Maps

In keeping with last year’s post. Here is a map of the game that I submitted and some work in progress pictures.

Decoder:   
a = avatar (@)
# = wall
j = jungle
t = treasure
d = closed door
o = open door (all doors are closed to start with and are replaced with an ‘o’ if opened)
g = gnome
p = pug1
m = pug2
B = boss (You'll notice there are two bosses, I didn't want to make it too hard to find one.)