gamedev 

Had to shelve the platformer project because of poor planning and feature creep. I decided to work on an action dungeon crawler. Right now, you can only move your character and thrust your sword, but I plan on including randomly generated levels.

I'm more experienced with top-down games, so this might be easier.

gamedev 

Created solid tiles, a couple of enemies, knockback, and the sword. I also divided the screen. There will be a hud on top, but right now, it is blank.

gamedev 

I got a random dungeon generation algorithm implemented. It is the same one from this post (gameliberty.club/@xianc78/1117), but written in C++ instead of Java. It's pretty basic at the moment. I plan on having each room randomly pick a design from a template.

gamedev 

Here is a second dungeon, in case you don't believe me.

gamedev 

Tried to add random enemy placement to the dungeon, but they all appear in the same room. I realize that the common way to do RNG in C and C++, srand(time(NULL)) uses time (in seconds) as a seed, and since the loop obviously runs multiple times per second, I'm getting the same results.

I think my solution would be to use my own RNG algorithm with a seed that increments every time it is called.

gamedev 

Wrote my own RNG algorithm (just take the sine of a seed and increment the seed by one for the next time). I also made it so that enemies can't spawn in the first room.

@xianc78 why not just spawn the enemies on entering the room so they aren't using resources when you haven't reached them yet? Truly random distributions suck and are never good - and weirdly this is the one overlap I found true between business programming and game dev.

You could also use the approach of old games like Soul Blazer and Gauntlet where you have enemy spawners so the room can have enemies spawned in over time.

Monster nests like in Soul Blazer are a rare enough mechanic that there is a lot of room to make it your own if you wanted to.

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@brigrammer I could have made it like Soul Blazer, but I wanted this game to be more like Zelda 1. I think that game had no enemies in the first room in every dungeon.

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@xianc78 sure, but if you want the enemies to be hand placed then hand place them - if you want them to be random because you want the game to be generative, then choose a fun randomization system

Zelda 1 already exists, if the goal is to make Zelda then make it - if it is to make something like it but with a twist, focus of finding your twist - say a zelda 1 style game with Soul Blazer style self altering levels from enemy nests, or add movement abilities to a NES zelda style game, or diablo style loot, or something else - there are tons of cool mechanics that when added to an old game could make it very fresh

however you do it, global random sucks because random is hyper spikey - what people think is random and what people think is random and feels good are miles apart - there is a reason more games use Nd6 than a d20+N

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