Dungeon crawler game prototype

John Tsiombikas nuclear@mutantstargoat.com

16 October 2012

I started writting a first person dungeon crawler game recently. Nothing ground-breaking, but I intend to fill up the void of the simplistic gameplay with over the top eye-candy. My main inspiration comes from eye-of-the-beholder-esque dungeon crawlers with awesome graphics (for their respective times) such as stonekeep and the legend of grimrock, without necessarily intending to stay true to the retro 90 degree grid-based movement.

Before starting, I wanted to try out a couple of things to see how they feel in practice, so I decided to make a prototype. The main thing I wanted to try out was a suggestion of a friend of mine, for keeping the level creation as simple as possible, to use a regular grid tile-based system with a couple of enhancments. Namely:

• Allowing multiple detail tiles on a single grid cell. Which makes it easy to lay down the whole level's corridors and then add details such as torches on the walls, furnitures or whatever here and there.
• Allowing arbitrary geometry for each tile, not necessarily contained in the volume of the grid cell it occupies. This would allow, for instance, elaborate prefab rooms to be attached at various places of the dungeon.

It turns out I don't like the extended grid-based idea that much, and for the actual game I will revert to a more powerful level organization, I came up with some time ago. More on that when I actually implement it.

The rendering is done with "deferred shading", a neat technique I implemented once before in the Theseis engine, which makes it possible to have hundreds of actual dynamic light sources active at the same time. This is the cornerstone of my "lots of eye-candy" idea, because it enables each and every torch, spell effect, flame, or magical glow to illuminate the dungeons and its denizens dynamically.

Finally I implemented a nice positional audio and music playback system, on top of OpenAL. It keeps static audio sources in a kd-tree for efficient selection of the nearest ones within a certain radius around the player and enables/disables the appropriate ones automatically.

In case you are curious to see it, I just uploaded a video on youtube. The actual tileset is obviously placeholder, since I made it myself in blender, to be replaced by proper artwork later on. The music and sound effects are made by George Savinidis, who will be in change of all the audio production for this game.

This was initially posted in my old wordpress blog. Visit the original version to see any comments.

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