Adding more enemy types with different reactions sound like a good idea as well as some physical tics (possibly displaces the player randomly in one direction if you let it surface?)

As for the current prototype, movement feels a bit off, almost like I'm jumping between invisible rails, and getting through already open doors requires a few tries sometimes where I keep hitting the corners of the door but never manage to actually enter it. Attacking in front of the door will usually displace me enough to put me in the correct position to enter the door.

Also, the bomb's damage radius is so small I don't really feel it is useful except in very particular situations (rooms with lots of clumped sleeping enemies in the center), every other occasion they feel like more of a hindrance.

I read the original blog post and it seems it's making the rounds around gaming media right now, so congrats, I'm really glad for the reception it's getting.

I guess that's tomorrow? I might pop it to play for a bit even if I expect some SF3O syndrome, where the only people who still play the game are so incredibly good at it and will kick my ass so bad I'll just completely stop playing again.

Really nice stuff!
I'm currently already busy with a project right but I hope you manage to find someone to help put your art into a game.

Good luck!

One solution that does not rely on timing would be to introduce two sets of moves, defensive and offensive, where your defensive moves lead or chain into different offensive moves. You'd then balance your strong defensive moves (increased evasion, defense buffs, etc.) to only chain into weaker offensive moves, and your weak defensive moves to only chain into your strong offensive moves.

Except for the first turn every player would be performing both a defensive and offensive move on their turn. The defensive move to react to the other player's attack and an offensive move to set up his own attack.

Basically you'd be substituting the double blind mechanic for a combat system based on trade-offs.

This might end up adding some complexity to the usually very simple Pokemon combat model, but I think if you're getting rid of the double blind moves mechanic some extra complexity to make up for that is probably inevitable.

Deviator,

Your numbers are way off.

Steam is not the app store, you won't and shouldn't be selling your stuff for $1. Steam's cut, even if you get a bad deal, is also nowhere close to 80%.

Makai: Checking out your generator, it seems kind of solid, but could use better variation, or something that's capable of flipping/mirroring layout outputs. Of a dozen or so seeds I've plugged in, there seems to be only 2 totally-consistent layouts, and the dimensions of the rooms inside are all that really randomize.

-One has a narrow corridor of deepening rooms in the lower-left, practically vertical/North-South, and a small pack in the upper-right. Usually one 4-depth room in the middle that isolates.

-One has a tiny scattering of mid-depth ends in the upper-left, a vertical stretch one room away from the lower-left usually cumulating in 9-depth, and a neighboring 7-depth to the right of the corridor.

!! Your RNG is calculating only two seeds: 2460614254 and 1246315358.

Yeah, both known issues with that original version of the generator. I've since fixed the RNG and re-worked a lot of how the generator works. I'm still unsatisfied with only assigning new doors when we split the rooms and I'd like to do another pass afterwards to balance out the depths and layout into something more interesting.

I've actually been working with Miguelito to get a working prototype of the game going, we've got a fully explorable mansion going on and I'm in the final stages of getting all the props and furniture procedurally placed into the rooms.

Hopefully we'll have something playable soon and a cool venue to showcase the tilesets and some other great art he's made.

But! if you haven't come across it before, you might like this:
http://donjon.bin.sh/4e/dungeon/
(I think it looks better if you set the room layout to dense).

Page keeps timing out for me when trying to load... Hopefully it's just temporary and the page is not off the air for good.

The one thing that interests me is in making the play-field look and feel like a mansion, even if it's a quirky, weird mansion, but still a place where people would reside and not something like a dungeon, a place for people to get lost in and eventually die.

Procedural generation is something of a hobby of mine and I've written a few articles (tutorials? ramblings?) that may frame the problem in a different, perhaps better light.

http://www.squidi.net/three/entry.php?id=4
This one talks about the key-lock problem and how it can become trivial if you think of the game map as a tree.

http://www.squidi.net/mapmaker/musings/m110312.php

Great stuff Sqorgar! It's going to take me a while to check out your entire archive, but just from the linked articles and a quick glance at the index, I can tell there's some really interesting and useful information there.

Yeah, it doesn't really look very much like a house, but I'm hoping that might change if you scatter some more corridors around.

The only reason I started with a square perimeter and placed all the rooms on the inside is so I could prototype it faster by not having to deal with non-rectangular rooms. The algorithm would certainly work with all sorts of different polygonal shapes.

One thing that does bother me is that fact that a lot of the smaller rooms get clumped up together, but I'm not sure what I could do to avoid that right now.

Btw, I had a little bit of time today so have the generator calculate room depth and display it so you can easily see each room's depth as well as some other little things.

Mansion Generator

Alright, so I went ahead and spent a bit of time this weekend and implemented my algorithm just to see what kind of shape I'd get:

Mansion Generator

I went with a static square ring for now but I have an idea on how to skew it around into different shapes that I haven't gotten around to implementing yet.

The rooms are all based on template sizes (I'm using 15 different template sizes to be exact), and if I find a room that does not fit a template size I partition in into two rooms, and so on until every room either fits a template size or is has an area of 1 tile (at which point I'd mark that as a "pillar" and remove any entrances to it).

The original algorithm was getting me too many big rooms though, so I put a parameter in to limit how many of them you can have. It'd be pretty easy to add extra parameters to get a different balance of small/medium/large rooms.

I haven't had the time to look into door depth yet, but everything is at least reachable right now.

Got this yesterday on the PS3 and played it all evening (add Makai on PSN if you want to play some matches).

While I'm still not thrilled by the character's visual designs I have to say the core mechanics feel really nice. The engine seems to be very lenient with your inputs which makes this feel like one of the first fighting games where I can actually can pull out combos without having to struggle horribly.

Has anyone gotten the tagged in hit-boxes bug on the PS3 version? I seem to get it all the time on 360. The load times on 360 are a bit longer as well. If you're gonna get it, right now, the PS3 version version is looking like the way to go. Haven't played online on 360 enough to compare that component though.

I've seen this once or twice on the PS3, but it's not very frequent, although I might have just gotten lucky.

T=Machine (http://t-machine.org/index.php/2007/09/03/entity-systems-are-the-future-of-mmog-development-part-1/) has a few really interesting posts on implementing entity-systems. They're mostly presented in the context of MMO development, but I've found his implementation structure pretty interesting.

The main point he advocates are components as data carriers only and having specific systems acting on and manipulating the entities' components. So no Update() function on components; instead each system iterates through the components it cares about and does the data manipulation needed. I believe there's some example code in Java included.

I actually went and implemented a small entity-system in Lua based on this but haven't really found a use for it yet so I can't say how stable the engine is since I have really "field-tested" it.

The pre-made corridor blocks are certainly do-able and really not your most computationally intensive step, but it doesn't really seem necessary. Azure's method seems just fine for what you need.

If you're interested, a different method for room generation would be to start with one huge room covering the entire inner ring (as well as some other big rooms that can fit on the outter ring) and then splitting and slicing your rooms until all of them are within your minimum and maximum room dimensions.

As an added step, make sure every time you split a room into two you add a doorway between your two new rooms.
That would easily guarantee every room is reachable, but you might have to add some more doors afterwards to meet your required minimum number of doors.

Either way, you have my interest peaked.

Pretty interesting, but I do have to say I'm getting an awful amount of tearing on the screen. It doesn't necessarily affect game-play but it does make it a bit uncomfortable on the eyes.

Oh neat!
I've been keeping an eye open for a component-based game engine for Flash for a while now and was almost starting to thing about rolling my own.

I'll definitely give this a try on my next project.

Castle Shikigami 2, at least the translated version had such horrible voice acting and "engrish" dialogue that I'm still not sure if it wasn't done on purpose for comedic effect.

It ended up being a fairly decent shmup that was made even better by the shittyness of its dialogue.

I'd say the best way to get started with something like that is to just start it yourself and invite people to contribute. If you have the drive to see it through, then:

 1) Best case - people will slowly trickle in as they see the direction the project is heading.
 2) Worst case - you finish a game by yourself.

Either way you win in the end.

Games offer such a gamut of experiences they can be played for so many different reasons.

Personally, I play some games for the challenge they provide, some to socialize, some to be immersed in a different atmosphere, some to interact inside an interesting story, and some for the endorphin release.

I don't know about "grand purposes," but in the end gaming provides me with experiences I probably wouldn't be able to get as easily anywhere else.

It's not that Steam favors certain genres, it's that Steam favors certain target audiences. Your game can be any genre of game but as long as it appeals to a certain target audience then you have a better chance of getting on there. And of course, that target audience is the audience that enjoys Valve's own games - the core gamer. Not social, not casual. There's some social and casual games on there but by and large they are social and casual games that also appeal to core gamers.

Fair point. You worded it much better than I could.

Hangedman,
so in other words it is unlikely to be published on steam for average game?
I'm asking because there are some "not so eye attractive" games like this http://store.steampowered.com/app/55040/?snr=1_4_4__13

In AZS's defense I actually enjoyed the game quite a bit, enough to buy it after playing the demo. It's not the most polished of games, but it's got personality and good enough gameplay to catch my attention.

That said, I think having contact with people at Valve already is a great advantage to getting your game published there, so I'd say all you need is to get that first game/foot in the door and then you're set.