Okay i was super close to ask about it here but finally google did the job. It's been some years i was not able to find  the name of an old game that I remember as hard and scary... I've found it ! Here's a screenshot just for fun :



Who remembers this ?

Easy, Metal Mutant by Silmarils. One of my all-time favourites.

Nice devlog, thanks! I'll also soon start working on the dialogue system for Wanderer and it's very interesting to read how other are tackling it!

Cool, glad you liked it! Hope it will be useful for you. =)

Hey everyone, Siilk here. Today I'd like to tell you a bit about my current task, implementation of the dialogue and multi-stage interactions in DNC. For an adventure game, dialogue trees are one of the core mechanics so making it potent and flexible is very important. Hence I avoided any kind of hard-coded dialogues and decided to go with dialogue processor approach, with tree-like data structure to hold the dialogue data a dedicated general-purpose processing code that would bring it to life.

I started with designing a data unit, a single dialogue node that will become building blocks for dialogue trees. To represent a single "step" of the dialogue, each node must have basic data fields(NPC speech to display etc) and also be linked to other nodes(child nodes for lower-level subtrees, back to parent node etc). So I decided to use GameMaker's object to build dialogue node from as it allowed me to use it's built-in rudimentary OOP support and add data fields to the object itself instead of creating data structure from an array or a list. This also gave me another unexpected advantage but I'll get back to that later.

In it's current current form, each dialogue node object contain prompt text(text that will be shown as player's choice for an option that will lead to this node), descriptive text that will be displayed when player will "enter" this node(NPC speech in reply to his choice etc), a couple of internal use fields to contain unique name of the whole dialogue and the node itself and a list of child elements(nodes this node will allow player to "move" to; this will represent dialogue options for this node). After some testing I also added a redirect field. This will be used to turn the node into a single-prompt redirect node that can be used to bring player back to a higher-level node. Such nodes can then be used to create a tree-like structure (a directed graph to be exact) that will represent a single dialogue with all possible choices and transitions between them.

After the basic data structure was more or less functional, I implemented the dialogue controller, an object that will act as a processor for dialogues. It's purpose is to draw the dialogue UI, process player input and change active dialogue node depending on player choice. Controller is still in it's infancy and so far lacks proper GUI(I use text output for debug purposes) but it already does the most important thing: brings dialogue data structure to life.

The biggest limitation this systems have so far is the lack of conditional changes to the dialogue graph. Ideally I would like to make conditions dynamically addable at runtime but so far it seems that it might be impossible to do in GameMaker. Another thing I would love to do with this is to implement a graphical dialogue editor that will allow us to create dialogues visually via custom-made GUI instead of writing the GML code to describe the graph structure. This is when nodes being GameMaker objects will come in handy as I will be able to draw them directly instead of creating the wrapper objects to represent each node on the screen.

There are of course other things like adding a field to store NPC emotion, dealing with multi-character dialogues etc but that's the distant future I guess. So far the most important thing is to add the actual GUI drawing subroutines.

Here are some work in progress style gifs of what dialogue UI looks like right now, as seen in DNC testing area.

Current testing text-only UI



Same stuff with debug overlay turned on(yeah, I'm a bit of a debug output junkie)

lol, sneaky game journalists. I bet a lot of game bloggers and journalists lurks around forums such as this one to scoop for fresh new content. BTW, you should totally contact the guy who wrote the article and ask if he'll be interested in an extended interview with you.

Hey everyone, just popping up to say hello in my first post here as a coder for DO NOT CROSS. =) I will do my best to create an engine to match pixely awesomeness of ZeroTec's art. I do enjoy working on this project as I like it's unusual premise and all those rather unorthodox gameplay elements ZeroTec concocted for it. Making this game already proved to be an enjoyable experience for me from the coding point of view so I am really looking forward to(and also kinda intimidated by ) the perspective of implementing all the fun stuff that is planned to be in this game.

Sent an email and a PM, just to be sure

A gradius-like game, but you could choose even pieces of the spaceships that would change it in aspect? It is a very old game - maybe dos game - from 90's. I've tried to find it FOR AGES! I'm even doubting it exists.
MAYBE it is star control II

Could it be B-Wings?

No, actually, Forth is fantastic for game development.

Care to elaborate? I mean reverse polish notation is not really convenient to write in to being with, not to mention the other forth's intricacies. Don't get me wrong, forth is a powerful language, but unless I'm missing something, from a game developer's perspective learning it just doesn't worth the effort. No offence intended BTW, just plain curious as forth is a bit exotic these days...

Why forth of all the possible things? Isn't it a bit, how can I put it, unsuitable for game development? 

6 is terrible

5 is ok but i dont like the art direction and interface at all

Yeah, 6 is kinda bad. It lost a lot of complexity that made homm games interesting in the first place and somehow it's visual quality feels rather underwhelming, compared to previous games. As for 5, the interface is indeed a bit clunky.

??

you can get the original for cheap from gog (it's actually on sale atm). it still runs well on modern PCs.

tablet port is cool tho, yes.

Yea, the old one is still perfectly viable. But the point of the hd remake is that they are redrawing all the in-game sprites by hand in a higher res. Now how better(or worse) looking the remake will end up being, that is entirely different question.

As for me, while homm3 was great and I love it quite a bunch, I still prefer homm5. Both it's aesthetics and the gameplay features are unsurpassed in my opinion, when it comes to homm games.

gog.com discounts! Why are there gog.com discounts?!? I'm supposed to be working on things, not downloading Settlers 2: 10th anniversary

lol yeah, true dat. Ended up spending $50+ yesterday. But heck, I bought such jewels as Evolva, Vangers or Anachronox for just a bit above $3 each.

People look to really like this "going inside a cube" mechanic, then goind inside another cube, then going deeper. It's like Inception, but with cubes.

Speaking of Inception, have you thought about adding time compression effects when entering the deeper level of cubes? For instance, each time player enters a cube, the time local will be pacing N times as fast as the "outside" time. So from player's perspective, outside world will be slowed each time he goes deeper. This will not work in multiplayer for obvious reasons but for a single player experience this could be a nice feature. And it will introduce an interesting effect of logic cubes working faster with each additional layer of depth. This may require additional energy cost for placing cubes at each additional level of depth to compensate for that(as well as the possibility to create more complex nested logic structures).

I just got a 500+ replies maxed out thread on 4chan /v/.


http://boards.4chan.org/v/thread/274412972

It was a crazy night, I spent 10 hours in a row answering everybody. Now the social counters are sky-rocketting (well, compared to the very small previous numbers).

Lol, that's probably the first time I see someone promoting their game on 4chan. But somehow it feels appropriate.

I'm making the system so you can physically enter the 16x16x16 space inside a cube, in order to edit / destroy it / pick the cubes you want.
Here is the example I'm working on:
- on the island, an enemy cube generator is generating cubes to build a structure
- you enter inside the enemy cube generator using one of your moving cube (your cube "get smaller")
- you are now a cube inside a 16x16x16 enemy structure
- you destroy inside laser towers which protect its inside world
- you follow the 3D electronics between the various softwares
- you find the cube containing the 3D map of the structure to build
- you enter inside the cube containing the structure
- you are now inside a 64x64x64 enemy structure
- you move to an important part of the structure, and edit it by destroying and adding blocks of your own
- now the enemy cube generator will destroy and add some cubes on the structure it is building on the island, accordingly to the new 3D map it contains

This reminds me of Inside a star-filled sky...

Yeah, great cat, really cute.

In the past I've played games like The Sims, Sim City, Dogz and Catz.  They are fun to play with but do not feel the same as games with objectives or collectables.

Good examples. Will Wright (designer of Sim City & the Sims) has sometimes used the term "software toy" to describe them.

Yep, that's a very accurate definition in my opinion. In games like Catz or a more resent Mountain, you have an object to play with in a rather toy-like manner and the game world is rather rudimentary and only there to provide the background. On the other hand in the sandbox games like Sim city or minecraft the virtual world itself is being a toy with it's elements only becoming meaningful when interacting with the rest of the world. Sims series falls somewhere in between, as you can argue that both game world as a whole and each of the virtual inhabitants are detailed enough to be entertaining on their own.

Speaking of jackpots...

10 and 11 are kinda the best of those. But I'm not sure that any of the variants actually matches the name...