[Mattias Gustavsson]

I'm working on a 2d, top-down, turn-based dungeon crawl game at the moment. Basically, you move one whole room at a time, and the levels are procedurally generated. When you enter a room, there's a random event (might be nothing, or you find something or there's a monster etc). If you do encounter a monster, there will be a fight, and I'm sort of drawing a blank for how to do combat for this game. Any ideas at all are welcome!

This is a mockup of how the game might look:


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www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
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www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

[DeveloperX]

Personally, I'd like an active system similar to final fantasy XII's battle mode...you are running around the map, and when an enemy is near, you draw your weapon, and can perform several attacks even magic spells.
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[cowgod]

I suspect that combat will have to be in a whole separate screen because you can't move around in the room you're in.

There's already a game like this called Fast Crawl. It's not that great of a game, but the problems with it have nothing to do with moving a whole room at a time.

I've been considering using a similar system, though I'm unsure whether I want to or not. Most maps wouldn't be randomly generated, though some of them might be.

Regardless of whether I have people move a whole room at a time, I plan to have a vaguely Final Fantasy 3ish combat screen. I want to include some Fallout-ish elements such as action points as well.

[Scrim]

I'm a little unclear from your description: when you say you move "one room at a time" - does that mean the game world is cut into small areas like in your Kassandra game? What I am getting at is does your avatar have freedom of movement within the current room or not?

Do you allow multiple monsters in one room?

There's always the good-old rogue-like "bump into a monster to attack" mode...

[RampantCoyote]

I would say that whatever you do, you want animation as he moves around and attacks. So while movement may be one room at a time, you'll want to show your hero and the bad guy marching towards each other and beating the crap out of each other. Ideally you want combat to run off this same view.
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[ManaTroph]

I agree with scrim. You need to be a lot more clear on how your chaacter moves. So let's see; screen to screen, i would imagine that you move your character around the fixed screen and when the character attempts to cross to the next sceen he then apears on the edge of the next screen. Tell me if this is correct. If so then confining the combat to the current screen i would use turn based strategy combat.

[RedSlash]

The overhead view would make me think something related to strategy-type game. But it seems that you are able to move freely inside the room, so it'd probably be quite suited to switch into a combat scene when you run into guys.

[cowgod]

Fast Crawl is essentially a tile-based game where each tile is a room. I think each room is the same size, and it just randomly selects an image for a room that has doors in the right places.

From what he said, I think that's what he's doing here. No movement within the room.

That's why I suggested having combat be in a separate screen. You aren't going to move a whole room at a time during combat, so combat would probably be fixed in place if it were on the same screen.

It would be cool if the game kind of zoomed in onto the one room and then you could see a close up of the room with the guys fighting in it. I might implement it that way myself if I use whole room at a time movement in the RPG I plan to make.

[Mattias Gustavsson]

Ok, thanks for helping guys, and you're right, I should have provided more details...

Here's the thing: you start of standing in the middle of a room. You can click on any of the available exits from that room, and when you do, the player character will turn to face that exit, and start walking. The player will stay in the center of the screen, and the background will start scrolling. This goes on until the character reach either the center of the adjacent room, or in the case where there's a monster, the entrance of that room.

If there is a monster, the player will stop at the entrance of that room, and be given a choice for how to handle the situation (basically attack or run away). If the player choose attack, he will continue moving until adjacent to the monster. And then it's time for some sort of combat.

In the game, you won't be able to move around freely in the room, but you always go from the center of one room to the center of another (with a possible short pause at the entrance).
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www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

[Scrim]

So basically you have a "single character vs single monster" battle. I think the real challenge in that situation is giving the player enough tactical choices to make combat interesting.

You've ruled out movement, so there's no element of finding a good position from which to attack. You are only fighting one monster at a time so there is no element of choosing targets. You only have one character so any kind of "defend" option is always going to be a dominated strategy and thus not useful to the player.

So, what's left? You can have different kinds of attacks, maybe. You could introduce moves that stun the monster or otherwise slow them down for a round or two. You can introduce some resource management: i.e., do I use up my powerful wand or limited magic ability in this fight and hope I don't need them later, or do I try to brute force it and hope I have enough potions left to heal myself up afterwards?

The combat can be as simple as clicking a button and awaiting the result, as long as choosing which button to click forces the player to think a little.

[Rainer Deyke]

The ultimate quick combat system: Roll 1dx for the player, where x is the player's level. Roll 1dy for the monster, where y is the monster's level. The lower roll wins. The loser dies. In case of a tie, both survive and the combat goes on to a second round.

For slightly more depth, give each character 2-3 hit points and the loser of each round of combat only loses one hit point. (The player can have more hit points than the monster if you want to make things easier.) For even more depth, give the player to choice between fighting and drinking a healing potion each in each round.

Really, there's no need to have an elaborate combat system unless you want to. Many rpgs focus way too much on combat, so why not go to the opposite extreme? Unless you want to focus on combat, in which case you shouldn't have to ask about how the combat system works.

Try to optimize the product of speed and depth. You can make things deeper at the expense of speed and you can make things faster at the expense of depth, but avoid systems that are both slow and shallow.

[Mattias Gustavsson]

Thanks for the help guys. Lots of useful thoughts here, really helped me get my priorities sorted :-)

I'm definitely looking at speed at the expense of depth for this one :-) I think that for this game, combat is not the focus...
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www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

[cowgod]

[Rainer Deyke]

[Mattias Gustavsson]

This game have been sort of on the back burner for a long time now, but recently I've started to look at it again...

Basically, it's meant to be a turn-based RPG where you walk around in a dungeon, but I started working on it mostly because I just wanted to play around with generating random dungeons.



There's a demo here:
rpg_demo.zip
where you can walk around in the dungeon using the cursor keys (and use TAB to display a map).

I feel like I'm a bit stuck now, in that I'm not really sure where to take it next (the drawback of not having a clear plan when I started, I guess :P). So basically, I'd like to hear if you guys have any ideas of what I could do with it, in terms of objectives, game mechanics etc.

I had the idea of having a choice of player character (male or female, and possibly with slightly different abilities), and I've done a couple of monsters too.



Also, the idea is to have a mini-map displayed on the main game screen (in addition to the full map you'll get by pressing TAB), like in this mockup:



but I haven't gotten around to add that to the game yet (I'll probably go with the left one, I think it looks nicer).

So, that's what I have so far, and I still would like to do something with this, but I don't feel like I really have any good ideas at the moment, so any input on this is appreciated :-) Thanks
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www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine