RPGDX > Forums > Projects / Screenshots > "Dungeon Master"-style game

Mattias Gustavsson · Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2009 9:37 am Post subject: "Dungeon Master"-style game

The last few days, I've been experimenting a bit with art for a type of game I've been wanting to make for quite some time: a game in the style of good old Dungeon Master. Is there anyone here who used to play it, or other similar games? If so, I'd like to hear about what sort of things you remember from it, what made it fun and what would make you want to play a new game in the same style :-)

Anyway, here's a few examples of what my game will look like:

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Hajo · Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2009 10:03 am Post subject: Re: "Dungeon Master"-style game

DeveloperX · Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2009 12:45 pm Post subject:

Absolutely Phenomenal Renders Mattias!

I swear you crank out the best damn scenes I've ever seen!
Most commercial games don't even come close to your level of professionalism.
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Verious · Mage Joined: 06 Jan 2004 Posts: 409 Location: Online

I never played Dungeon Master, was it similar to Eye of the Beholder? Overall, the screenshots look incredible and would be very immersive in a game environment.

My two cents regarding the graphics: The ceiling texture is a bit too repetitive and a few of the walls seem to have unnaturally small slivers of brick (this is particularily evident in the dragon screenshot). In the real world, brick walls generally end with half or full bricks.

Malignus · Scholar Joined: 12 May 2009 Posts: 198

I love first-person dungeon crawlers. If you make it, I will play! :D

RampantCoyote · Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2009 6:43 pm Post subject:

DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!

Make it. Complete it. Polish it. Sell it. I will buy it. :)
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Mattias Gustavsson · Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 7:48 am Post subject: Re: "Dungeon Master"-style game

Thanks for the encouragement and kind words :-)

DeveloperX · Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 3:00 pm Post subject:

Sounds good to me.
I cannot wait to see what you come up with man!
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Hajo · Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 9:08 pm Post subject:

A thing that I didn't see in newer games anymore were the teleporter puzzles. Also invisible fields that rotated you by 90 degrees when walking through. Very confusing for people who try to draw maps :P

DeveloperX · Posted: Mon Aug 31, 2009 10:34 pm Post subject:

Verious · Mage Joined: 06 Jan 2004 Posts: 409 Location: Online

I think the last teleporter puzzle I played was in the original Gauntlet arcade game.

Hajo · Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 8:15 am Post subject:

Mattias are there any news on this project? I really liked the original very much, it was the game that opened the path to computer RPGs for me I think.

While waiting for news from your project, I felt inspired to try a dungeon corridor rendering, too.

I don't think my tools are bad, but it nowhere looks as good as yours. Particularly the lighting in your screens is amazing. So congrats for skill and choice of tools and assets :)

Aaaaaannnd .. you really have to make this game, since I'll be too lazy to make something of my rendered images and want to play a new Dungeon Master game since years :D

Mattias Gustavsson · Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 9:17 am Post subject:

Hey, that looks quite nice actually :-) And you probably did more all by yourself on yours than I did on mine :P Though I did spend many hours tweaking my light settings... lighting is hard. Here's what one of my early tests looked like.

For those interested (if any), I use Poser for the art, and for the walls/floor/ceiling, I just have plain boxes mapped (and displacement mapped) with some free textures from some NVIDIA texture pack. Most of the furniture and stuff is from this package, and the troll/ogre guy is this model with my own morph- and material settings.

I don't have much to show from this at the moment. I'm working on the base technology for it at the moment, and it is a really rather slow process, with lots of things to try and tweak. I think I'm close to having my render process script finished off now - it looks like I'll be rendering ~1000 images for each object, which of course takes some time (though not unreasomably so), and a lot of it is discarded in post-processing. I'm hoping to have a first test, where you can move around in a small test room where there's a single table, within the next few weeks. After that, it's on to making the actual game, design and programming-wise, and rendering loads of objects, art-wise, but that's more or less automatic at that point.
_________________
www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

Hajo · Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 10:08 am Post subject:

The hours that you spend on the light surely pay off now :)

1000 views per object look intimidating. Good to have that automated. I wonder a bit how many views the original DM used for walls, since memory was very limited, compared to today.

I can't remember if front walls darkened towards the sides in large rooms. If they do, that surely needs a lot of extra images. I have tried to make an educated guess how many views of the wall one needs, but when ending up with a number above 10, I decided it's too much work to bother with :P

In regard to designing the game - features that I liked were the multiple attacks for each weapon. Also that bare-fist attacks were best against some opponents, because they were among the fastest attacks. Also, that ghosts were immune to most physical attacks and that arrows and throwing weapons passed right through them. I don't remember if fire balls hit them ... maybe they also passed through. It surely was scary when running into the first ghost and noticing that none of the weapons were of any use.

Do you remember the spell for peeking through walls and doors? I guess that is pretty tricky graphics coding, but maybe it can be made with clever masking and overlays.

Good luck with the project. I'm looking forward to see more of it :)

Mattias Gustavsson · Posted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 11:20 am Post subject:

Well, the reason for the 1000 views of each object is that I'm aiming for animated movement around the dungeon, like this:

Which is not strictly necessary, but would be nice. You'd still turn 90 degrees at a time, and move a whole cell at a time, but with a quick animation rather than just skipping there. If I didn't do the animated thing, I't would be somewhere around 30 views for each object. It might be that I end up doing that if I don't get this to work as I'd like it to.
_________________
www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine