Crypts of Avaritia - roguelike dungeon crawler

r3jonwah85

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Helly everybody, long time lurker first time poster since I have finally something to say! :biggrin:

I have been working on my own RPG for a couple of months now and would like to share my progress with you here at rpgwatch. I am also hoping for feedback and discussion om game mechanics since I am a one man wolf pack doing this. when I started this I had done practically zero programming and had never touched Unity nor Blender (or any other 3D modeling tool for that matter), so the progress has been slow but I finally feel like there will actually be a nice end product.

Lets start off with the usual sell talk:
Crypts of Avaritia is a combination of randomly generated dungeons together with a first person view with gameplay similar to Heretic/Hexen combined with Dungeon Hack, Ultima Underworld, Dungeon Master, Might & Magic, Daggerfall, Arena and other games in the same genre. The gameplay will not force the player into melee combat as many other RPGs do, instead choice will be given to approach any problem the way the player seem fit, just like in Deus Ex. As such there are many non-combat attributes and skills for the player to upgrade. There are strong survival-mechanisms coupled to the gameplay, such as the player need to sleep, eat and drink water. You can also break bones, bleed and get poisoned.

A little video:


In the video you see:
- Improved graphics settings, a lot of Unity games just use the default quality settings but I think it is important to add as much as possible, so I have added most of what Unity offer.
- FOV settings works for those who like to tinker with that, I just think it looks weird
- Just demonstrating the new stuff on the character, if you are close to a wall the weapons/hands will move back a bit to make it more realistic, since I use 2 cameras to avoid clipping you got some scale issues before and the weapons looked tiny since they were actually far through the wall…
- The player can now lean slightly around corners just to peek before entering a room or whatever.
- Like mentioned before you cannot climb while having your hands equipped, to solve that I added holstering/sheathing of weapons.
- Some results of the attributes and skills are shown, in this case reflexes and luck that is used for the calculation of avoiding enemy attacks, this is still being tuned and my stats are maxed out as always, but you can see that you sometimes will evade the enemy attack even if you stand still.
- Now to get some sleep, we fin a cozy little shelter where we can rest our eyes a bit, the problem is that its location is unsafe… There will be 5 different states the sleeping place can have; dangerous, unsafe, uncertain, safe, secure. All have different percentages per hour of you being discovered, so a longer nap at a unsafe or dangerous place will probably end in an encounter with a enemy. A secure place will be just that, so sleep tight in those places.
- You get woken up by a enemy that passed by and made some noise, time to fight for your life.
- Since you were still tired, you take another 1 hour nap, this time nobody finds you. (If it looks edited, that is because it is. Those damn just kept popping up… Need to pick a better place to sleep next time.)
- Some floating platforms that are static, while jumping on stuff like that you can use the shadow as reference on where to land.
- Some new arrows, one for each magical element. All enemies have different resistance/weakness to different elements, this can be used to your advantage if the player knows those weaknesses.
- A little refinement to the aiming, looks a bit better in my opinion.
- Again, pick up arrows that weren't shot at a enemy. Had to fix some bugs with that but now it seems to work dandy.

- And lastly something a bit different, the generation of the dungeon. I have now made it possible to input words (strings) instead of integers which can be way more fun. As you will notice there is not much variation (except the width and length of the floor that is shown) since there is only one tile to draw when the algorithm is taking a random tile, this will of course be changed once the work with adding content begins.

And some pictures:
1.jpg

2.jpg

3.jpg

4.jpg

5.jpg

6.jpg

7.jpg


You can find more videos and images at my indieDb site:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/crypts-of-avaritia

And lastly, all comments, questions and discussion is extremely welcome, I believe that input from others would greatly improve the game (even though I am hard headed and have my mind set on most things, I love to be convinced by some nice arguments :biggrin:)

Actually, I have one specific question I am tinkering with at the moment… Perception in the game is supposed to determine if enemies and hidden stuff is nearby and tell the player, but I am not sure which way is the best to go.

1. The first option is system where all hidden objects/enemies get a rating from 1-10 (the same as all skills), if the player perception level is higher or equal to the object/enemy, the player will be prompted every time, that is 100% discover rate if equal to or above in level (or up to 90% and a 10% luck modifier, if both are at 100/100 then you truly will get 100% detection rate).
2. Option number two is to have no ratings, only set a object/enemy to discoverable. Then the player perception skill level determines a chance between 0-100 % chance (0 skillpoints give 0%, 10 points give 100%) to discover this object every time the player is close to the object/enemy. The potential downside to this is that the player can "spam" the skill by going back and forth in a area hoping to discover anythings that might be there. But on the other hand it is more like throwing a dice than the first option.

So what do you say? How does other games do it (both pen and paper games and computer games)?

And thanks for stopping by and hopefully got through the wall of text!
 
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The latest stuff including new inventory and equipment handling, first potion made with the crafting/cooking system and much more!



In order of appearance:
- Picking up some items that will be used later (placeholder graphics in many cases in case you wonder what the white blocks are, the same goes for icons in the inventory)
- New menu/options for opening doors. All doors that are locked by a lock (can also be locked by a trigger/latch, remote trigger or puzzle) can either be opened with the correct key type (iron, bronze, silver and gold keys) or be lockpicked (if the player is skilled enough).
- First door is lockpicked.
- Second door is opened with key.
-We find a water source. Here you can take a sip or use the water for various things. In this case we just fill up a empty bottle, but yiu will also have to rinse/clean eatable plants/vegetables. If you do not clean your vegetables you might catch a disease such as hepatitis (working on diseases at the moment).
- Take note that water sources can be clean sources or contaminated sources. The player does not now if the source is clean or contaminated, so to be sure you must boil the water. The same goes for meat in the game where Trichinella and other stuff might be present. Bur the player will at least know if the meat is rotten.
- Equipping a rock (use your imagination on the visuals).
- Picking up lost of other equipment.
- Throw the rocks, this will be useful for tricking enemies to check out movement/sound and thereby luring them away from their position if the guard something. It is implemented but not working 100% all the time so some more work is needed.
- Equipping a weapon and a shield, picking up arrows and move stuff around in the inventory.
- Equipping torch and light it up to demonstrate a critical function, swapping weapons between hands. This is very important since once you unequip a torch that is burning it will have to be ignited again, now the player can move it to another hand without having the need for igniting it again. Might sound like a minor thing but is crucial for immersion and realism.
- Find a fire source check out the possibilities. You can cook/craft items but also close wounds if you have no bandages to fix them. This will close the wound but also inflict some health on the player.
- Combine some water and salvia just to demonstrate how to make potions, in this case we create a minor healing potion. Recipes use a base ingredient at the top and then one or several other components to make something new. The recipe is sensitive to the order which ingredients is added, this makes it possible to make more complex recipes (and lessen abuse or trial and error, the combinations simply become to hard to find).
- Demonstrate the new way items are consumed, they have to be dragged and dropped at the use "button". This lessens the chance of accidental use of stuff.
- Just random messing around in the inventory.
- Video ends.

For those who want more visual stimulation I also post a picture of the updated inventory and equipment system:
inv1.jpg
 
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r3jonwah85 if you want to post videos you have to use
 
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Been a bit absent lately, but now I finally have something to show off. I have been working on procedural terrain generation, and the idea is to create an overworld that will tie all dungeons/crypts together. I will be working on foliage in the coming days/weeks and hopefully update soon.

terrain.jpg


terrain2.jpg
 
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Colors/textures are not right (only used for value indication) but what you see is the wind and moisture system in place. The wind (comes in from the left towards right) brings moisture from the sea, then the moisture decreases over land depending on height, then picks up moisture again if the wind blows across any new water (as seen in the little lagoon). Again, horrible z-fighting but that is editor only.

moisture.jpg
 
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Some progress I guess, I work on generating badlands/desert, still a long way to go. Trees are all wrong but at least they are placed procedurally, missing details and still a bit rough edges, but you have to start somewhere.

 
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Round 2 for badlands generation, tossed out the old algorithm and wrote a new one after I came up with some new ideas, much more realistic in my opinion.



The biomes I am going for are tundra/mountains, forest (cold pine forest), desert, badland, swamp and volcanic. How do you guys feel about that?
 
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First test of generating a swamp, this is just the basic concept so trees, grass and textures will change. But now I have all the tools functioning, placement of trees, grass and mesh details.

 
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Some changes, also started working on day/night cycle but it still a very much work in progress.

 
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Small update on my day/night cycle, still a lot missing like the moon, effects for sun rise and sun set, fading between clouds and water etc. At least I wrote my first shader.

 
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Looks great! Keep up the good work!
 
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Looks great! Keep up the good work!

Thanks! Since the interest here is pretty much zero I do not update as often here (rpgcodex seems to care more), but I have been working on a new procedural way to generate dungeons (threw the old one out altogether), here are some samples:

new_dungeons.jpg


new_dungeons2.jpg


new_dungeons3.jpg


new_dungeons4.jpg


new_dungeons5.jpg


And the latest update, might be hard to see but "looped" sections are now possible:
new_dungeons6.jpg
 
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Small update on something new, been writing the dungeon generation algorithm for a while and wanted to start implementing some features. From the very beginning I wanted to impement a stealth system that was similar to Thief but I just could not come up with a good way to do it (without using light maps). But today an idea just popped up in my head, and 4 hours later it was prototyped and working quite well. All "art" is placeholder, the orb that indicates the light on the player was the fastest way I could think of to get visual feedback, this will change later on.

 
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Not anything new, but i realized that I did not show anything with occluding objects, so this video highlights that. Also, since users might not be able to use shadows (I was actually not planning on using them at all for performance reasons, but is is better to make it an option I think to satisfy everybody) I show the difference with or without shadows. Shadows give you more of a visual que, other than that they work exactly the same.



So do you guys think it looks to weird when shadows are not used? Or is it possible to expect that the player have some imagination and understand that you can occlude the light behind a pillar?
 
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Update on the sound part of the stealth system, I now have different materials working.



After the video I updated and added some things, also put a web player for you guys to try out. Is there anything that feels off? As soon as I have some time I will play Thief to study more how they do things, and also to have some fun!

Run using left shift and sneak using left ctrl (hold them down that is).
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12407316/CryptsOfAvaritiaStealth/CryptsOfAvaritiaStealth.html
 
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Somehow I missed this until yesterday. It looks great! I like what you did for the last video with the stealth implementation. The first video is generally what happens with indie games. A kind of a true/false binary hidden check. The second update looks great.

Is it based on proximity, or point of view? As in, if I backed up towards the light while looking at darkness, would it still think i was hidden? Its hard to tell in the video.
 
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Somehow I missed this until yesterday. It looks great! I like what you did for the last video with the stealth implementation. The first video is generally what happens with indie games. A kind of a true/false binary hidden check. The second update looks great.

Is it based on proximity, or point of view? As in, if I backed up towards the light while looking at darkness, would it still think i was hidden? Its hard to tell in the video.

Thank you very much! The webplayer has a couple of tweaks that makes the whole thing more immersive and realistic, will perhaps do a part 4 once I tweaked it a bot more. But feel free to try it out since I update it bit by bit.

It is based on light intensity, distance between player and light source/sources (to calculate the actual intensity at the specific distance) and line of sight for each source. It is calculated at the player transform, so regardless of what direction the light comes from you still are exposed to the same amount of light, so if you back up you will get the same result as you would if you walked forward. The orbs just visualizes the calculated values, it does not "absorb" any light itself.
 
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