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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   3074 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 28, 2022

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Well, my adlib tracker is almost complete. I should really put in some QOL stuff, but you can modify the properties of all 9 adlib channels, play notes on all of them, save your work, load your work, and then export it to a pretty simple adlib player format I cooked up. So while I wrap up those QOL features I want it to have before I start making game music, I've been having a good think about the style of RPG I want to make.

While my heart will always yearn to make a first person dungeon crawl, I have a 16x16 EGA sprite editor made, so I guess I'll just stick with a top down perspective on tiled sprites. There are a range of combat models I could go for here. Ultima 1 had a painfully simple combat model where every tick in the overworld, you were attacked, and could attack. Then you go up to the Gold Box Games which had a full tactical combat system. I think I may start with the Ultima super simple system, with a mind towards expanding it towards the Gold Box system, and see where I end up.

For the world model, when it comes to games that are exclusively top down, it always rubbed me the wrong way when the overworld had a different scale than dungeons or towns. Especially when it was the same sprites, at the same size, in all contexts. So I'm thinking everything will be a uniform scale, with multiple layers of underworld you need to explore beneath all the cities and towns.

I'm not sure how much I would expect anyone to manually map out what is likely to be a rather wide and complicated underworld, so perhaps a capacity to make your own sign posts would be fun. Or maybe an alternate tile set which lets you highlight a preferred path you've figured out.

I still have zero clue what I want the story of this game to be. I suppose when in doubt "Save the princess" isn't a bad model. Can't hurt to try to tell a classic story inside the constraints of a 1980's style CRPG.

At some point I'll probably share all the assembly, and the development environment I've homebrewed to export my Visual Studio Code breakpoints to DOSBOX. Just doesn't feel mature enough at this point though.

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