New indie old school RPG

I found a link to this at a forum I randomly haunt.

http://www.dungeontreasure.com/

Looks pretty good, and has a good chance to come out in some playable form long before Grimoire. I'm not affiliated with this one, just found it last night actually.

Looks interesting. We'll see how progress goes. I'd be interested to see more about character creation.

Quite frankly, I'd like to see more about everything. But, it's better than anything I've worked on, which has never been shown to the public.

It seems to go on road of modern RPG, fancy graphics, fancy 3D, real time, single character, first person point of view, I wonder what is old school here.

It seems to remind me of Dungeon Master, EOB or ShadowGate after looking at the pictures in more detail. If you click on the screenshots the resulting image brings in the background as well.

How is this fancy 3d.....heheh wow.

I've long since learned to never feed the trolls. Which is why I didn't bother to respond. But, I'm feeling generous tonight.

At a glance, it appears to be a tile based map; in the vein of most Wizardry, Bard's Tale, and early Might and Magic titles. The first person perspective is obviously a modern invention, as shown by the fantastic graphics-fest called Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overloard. *sarcasm alert!* Graphics likewise are not 3D textures but appear drawn; the monsters remind me more of the more cartoonish Might and Magic series than Wizardry, but the rest speaks more Wizardry.

There's a lot of room to the left, 3 or 4 characters can fit there. It wouldn't be the first time I've seen a stock photo (especially this early on in development) that a single character was used rather than a party. At the least, I expect recruitable NPCs.

So it looks like and appears to play as a classic Wizardry or Might and Magic style game. I guess it means it's a Final Fantasy clone with no gameplay, cardboard NPCs, and no plot then. And, despite the evidence to the contrary, it must have 3D graphics which would strain any gaming computer built to the max in three years.

Specs will be 400gb of RAM, and a 20gb video card and a 20gb physics card.

since when did old-school mean horrible graphics?

I think old-school means the gameplay, challange level, and puzzles, etc etc.

That was one of the most stupid comments I heard in a long time.

This is the decade of the people who favour graphics over storytelling and everything else.

Screenshots remind me of Stonegate

Alrik Fassbauer said:

This is the decade of the people who favour graphics over storytelling and everything else.

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I think you are in denial if you think that was any different in previous decades....just our standards have increased due to inflation of what we consider good graphics.

Might be. But there is also no game like Monkey Island out there nowadays, and the often-mentioned PS:T will still be a gem further into the future.

One of my first games was Commander Keen. I had fun with it !

This kind of games seems to have died out for the PC platform as well. Nowadays, there's no more simple comic graphics like this anymore, too.
I fear that WOW has set a kind of "industry standard" in that respect, too.

What I also greatly miss is humour. Spontaneously, I can't think of many contemporary (read: released within the last few years) games with lots of humour.
And if there was one game, it'd be clearly called "cheesy humour", because the "standards" by which humour seems to be measured with nowadays seems to have changed as well. No more simple humour, please !

I have to say, graphics have always been a major part of how games are marketed. Especially in the old days, where distribution was much more difficult, and more likely to cost money. Now at least, Beta invitations and well-crafted demos can be used as well, prior to reliable, high speed internet (not AOL) demos were an anomaly.

In the old days, the primary method of marketing was screenshots, showing how gorgeous the worlds were. These were placed in ads in various tech and gaming magazines, and later on the WWW.

The reason there are no real innovative games coming out of the major studios is because the big money always follows the safe bet. Call of Duty 6 is a safe bet; all CoD titles have done well, and have established a large fanbase that by itself can cause the developers and publishers to turn a profit. Dwarf Fortress isn't, and if developed by a major developer would be a marketing nightmare, with it's steep learning curve and absence of graphics.

That said, This game by all appearances offers similar style and gameplay to Wizardry 7, which is one of the best old-school cRPGs made, among other similar games. The graphics, while nicely done, are not spectacular 3D models or even '03ish models but drawn 2D, just at a higher detail than the older games. Just because it appears (not confirmed) to use a single character for the PC (ala Ultima Alkalabeth and 1, the Summoning and Veil of Darkness, and probably more older titles that I'm forgetting) and needs more than a 80486 (who even has one these days? I have a dual core laptop for my DOS games, thank you DOSBox) doesn't make it a modern graphics fest.

The mass market wants the same old, graphics and gore-fest that comes out 300 times a year. Thus, that is what the major developers make and the major publishers sell. The people who play RPGs are a niche, western styled rpgs a niche within a niche, and turn based games an even smaller niche. This is why most of my latest buys have been independently developed and sold. It's also why I'm going to college in the spring to learn to program and design games; I fully intend to write my own "Wizardry" style game.

The game seems to be coming along, and they are working on a trailer to release in the nearish future. There needs to be much more deliberation and liveliness in their forum though, a FAQ topic, sticky questions, etc.

Here's hoping!

It's true that graphics have always been a big part of how games were marketed, but I think what has changed is the amount of resources required to create the graphics. As they have become 3-D and ever more realistic, they consume a larger and larger portion of the budget.

I'm not even sure about that. I do know that 2D is expensive, especially in the style shown by DT. Artists don't come cheap. It's also somewhat expensive in memory as well; I know this from experience.

I wrote a complete RPG engine once, in QuickBASIC. After hardcoding in much of the graphics (I was young and dumb, so sue me) the source file was almost 5mb in size. It also wouldn't run with 640k, though the same engine would on my 2mb 486 laptop. Too many images being drawn to the screen wiped out the memory, causing it to crash every time. That was just the intro screen; in game, and if I had any effects going using the few animations I had, even my 486 drug to nearly a standstill.

Of course, that was a good decade ago, and I was, as stated, young and dumb. I know I could have optimized it much better, and the next time around I want to make it more easily modified. Thus, using outside sources for graphics and sound instead of everything hard coded.

I dfon't think that modern graphics cards are optimized for 2D. They're always optimized for 3D.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Might be. But there is also no game like Monkey Island out there nowadays, and the often-mentioned PS:T will still be a gem further into the future.

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What about A Vampyre Story?

azraelck said:

I'm not even sure about that. I do know that 2D is expensive, especially in the style shown by DT. Artists don't come cheap. It's also somewhat expensive in memory as well; I know this from experience.

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The very high end is expensive. Like the Infinity games (all those backdrops were hand painted IIRC) where you have dozens of artists working. But go a little farther back, like 256 VGA graphics and such and you see games with maybe 5-10 artists at most. Big difference in pricing there.

Gorath said:

What about A Vampyre Story?

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Okay, especially in terms of graphics.

But I still haven't it yet ...