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[DementedChicken]

UPDATE:
Latest images:
Dungeon:

Outside:



Hi guys,

Tropical Dungeons is a first person, procedurally generated, arcade action-RPG (leveling up is though items, not grinding/stats).

The game is broken into two main parts - exploring beautiful tropical islands on your boat and on foot, and sneaking through dark, moldy dungeons.

Throughout the dungeons is hidden treasure which you can use to buy better equipment, and at the bottom of each dungeon is a special unique item that will give you new abilities.

We have all sorts of plans for making the graphics much better, adding good physics using the bullet physics engine, etc, etc.

Here are some early screenshots, do keep in mind that the environments are a bit bare because we haven't got all that many art assets done yet! :D





About us:
We are just two guys from New Zealand trying to make a game that we would enjoy playing - and we hope others will enjoy playing it too! This is our first game ever, so as I update this thread any criticism or comments would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

P.S. This will work on Linux as well as windows, Mac too! Oh, and sorry about the mouse cursor on the screen shots :s

[floatstarpx]

looks great so far! will be good to see how this progresses!

[saint11]

Cool, I also like the water

[DementedChicken]

Today wasn't a terribly exciting day, mainly worked on creating the doors to the dungeons on the islands. Up until now I've had to change some variables in the code to flick between spawning on an island and spawning in a dungeon because I hadn't done this yet!  

Here is a screenshot of a dungeon entrance:
(looks nasty against the ground because shadow maps aren't in yet )


Not sure if you're interested but this is what my (modeling) workspace looks like.


---

I forgot to talk about the engine, etc. in my first post!
I made the engine from scratch in C++. Models & animation are made in Blender and then exported to my proprietary file format through some python scripts I wrote. Collision detection is fast and robust, but I do plan to replace it with bullet physics collision detection later. (Bullet is awesome BTW!)

Working on getting the animation and weapon systems up and running now so hopefully we'll have more for you to see then. At the same time I'm also working on our web site, although some of the links don't work just yet. When that's up we might put updates on there too.

Back again soon!

[starsrift]

Why can't I use blender like that? 

This looks awesome!

[CoreDumped]

Looks great.  Love the water effect.  Looking forward to this

[hughperkins]

Looks cool.  Kind of want to try it.  Playable pre-demo?

[DementedChicken]

Thank you everyone for all your positive comments! It really helps our motivation! 

@starsrift: Keep Blendering and I'm sure you'll be a blender master in no time! If you ever run out of motivation, check the cgtalk forums. Some of the people there are so amazingly good, it's very inspiring!

Looks cool.  Kind of want to try it.  Playable pre-demo?

We are working on that right now!   :gentleman: Hopefully we can get something playable soonish.

We are planning on daily (or almost daily) updates of all the new content we add for each day, but some urgent business popped up and we were both away from our computers for the whole day - which means nothing new to show today. We promise two days worth of updates for tomorrow, then! 

[DementedChicken]

Hi again,

There are lots of updates. Hopefully it can be considered two days worth of updates like I promised yesterday!

OK, so first thing this morning when I woke up, I made a model of a ladder and passage for the dungeons, which will be used for going up a level when in multi-level dungeons. Here is the screenshot of it finished and working in-game:


Speaking of the dungeon levels, I also made it so that the dungeons can be a completely arbitrary size, and it will not slow down no matter how big the dungeon is. (although extremely large dungeons will eat a lot of memory, but a dungeon big enough to use any amount of memory to worry about would be so big that it would probably take days of play time to finish!!! Obviously these won't be in the game, although it's no harm in leaving an ini file somewhere that a player can change so they can have insanely huge dungeon marathons if they wish ...)

I have a screenshot of a segment of dungeon loaded into blender from back when I was developing the dungeon generator a couple of days ago:


The pink dots represent 2x2 meter squares of clear space. From that layout data my engine creates the dungeons. Note that now the algorithm has been tweaked and is much better!

Just a final bit about dungeons, a took this screenshot in noclip mode to give a general feel of the kind of layouts when rendered in-game:


-------

Finally, I have shadow maps working! Cool real-time dynamic shadows for the outside environments, which make the objects look much more solid and 'there.'



Oh, I also re-did the tree model with baked sub-surface scattering on the leaves and a much darker trunk, which for some reason just looked better.

Another screenshot of shadows:


Please remember that we only have a few art assets for props, etc. so far, so the objects outside are very repetitive. We'll fill the environments with lots and lots of different plants and ruins, etc. before we are finished.

Also, note how many things there are in the environment! This still runs well on our slow-ish computers even though no optimization has been done yet, so expect extremely dense foliage!!! 

[DementedChicken]

Hullo,

Today I made the collision detection system for the dungeon levels and started the animation system ... so nothing that I can show in a screenshot! 

We have a few new models done but they need texturing, which should happen tomorrow. So tomorrow we'll upload some screenshots of those and, providing there are no major problems with making the animation system, some short videos of weapon animation(s) in-game.

Also in the near future I'll make an auto-map for the dungeons, because without one you'd get lost and it could get frustrating!

Just another bit of info about gameplay - we are planning for huge numbers of monsters to battle at once in the outdoor environments for insane carnage. One of the planned weapons is bundles of TNT - I want to capture the incredibly satisfying sensation of blowing the living crap out of groups of enemies like in one of our favourite games: Blood from back in 1997! (complete with shaking screen and exploding body parts, etc.) 

To contrast with that, with dungeons will have less monsters, but ones that are much smarter and more challenging and fun to fight with one-on-one.

Back again tomorrow ...

[superflat]

Out of interest, have you ever played Captive on the Amiga / other 16-bit systems?

The entrances to your dungeons and the PG nature of this project remind of that game (which I absolutely loved.)

Either way, looks great!

[DementedChicken]

Out of interest, have you ever played Captive on the Amiga / other 16-bit systems?

The entrances to your dungeons and the PG nature of this project remind of that game (which I absolutely loved.)

Either way, looks great!

Thanks for the positive comment!! 

I can't say that I have! But I googled it just now and it looked cool. Kinda like a mix between Ultima Underworld and Eye of the Beholder, but set in the future!? Do you really need to finish all 65,535 levels to clock it!?

I can name some games that have an influence on Tropical Dungeons. Just of the top of my head, and in no particular order are:

• Zelda (wind waker)
• Desktop Dungeons
• Minecraft
• Blood
• Dragon Ball (The original 1980s manga) ... wait a minute, this isn't a game!

[DementedChicken]

'ello,

As I said yesterday, I worked on the animation system today. It's pretty much done and working now, and I can export any kind of animation from blender straight into the game engine without problems.
The finishing of the models got pushed back to tomorrow so the video of the animation will have to be then as well - because my test animation was a wriggling tube, which is kinda boring. Well actually it *was* kind of funny having a wobbly tube thrashing about in my dungeon.

... I wrote that and immediately decided it could be taken the wrong way. 

Um, anyway.

I wanted to do something a bit more fun so I did some more work on the lighting, and now the dungeons can have infinite light sources!

There is still some more code to be done before it looks completely seamless, but I'm sleepy and need to go to bed, so I'll show you guys in its *almost* complete state:


OK, that's me.

Goodnight! 

[CoreDumped]

I wanted to do something a bit more fun so I did some more work on the lighting, and now the dungeons can have infinite light sources!

Nice.  How do you do this? deferred rendering?

[DementedChicken]

I wanted to do something a bit more fun so I did some more work on the lighting, and now the dungeons can have infinite light sources!

Nice.  How do you do this? deferred rendering?

Nope! I'd never heard of deferred rendering before, but I just looked it up on Wikipedia and I don't think it's what I'm doing. I understand the concepts of computer graphics, but never actually got around to learning all the terminology! :s

Anyway ...

As you know, OpenGL only supports 8 lights by default, so what I've done is tell each object to keep a list of only the light sources that cast light on it. Before each separate object (and chunk of wall, floor, etc.) is rendered, OpenGL is told the location of the 8 closest light sources to *that particular* object and then that object is sent through the rendering pipeline.

The result is that the environment can have infinite light sources, but each individual object can only be affected by 8 lights at any one time. In reality, this isn't really a limitation as long as your environment is broken down into enough objects because anything lit by more than 8 light sources at any one time is going to be so brightly lit that you won't be able to tell if it's actually missing one or two lights.

Here are some screenshots of the lighting done: (I'm experimenting with making the ambient light darker)



Point light shadow maps are coming, but much later because there are more important things than graphics!

[starsrift]

I gotta say, that's looking really sexy.

Howcome you're not using a shader? Or did I misunderstand?

[DementedChicken]

I gotta say, that's looking really sexy.

Howcome you're not using a shader? Or did I misunderstand?

Yeah, you understand right. I want to make sure I understand your question before I answer though - by 'using a shader' do you mean something like this pseudo-code in glsl or something:

Code:

for(int i = 0;i < numOfLights;i++)
{
  outputColour += diffuseColourFromLight[i];
}

I think that's what you mean!

The reason I did it the way I did is because the way the map data is stored, it is extremely easy and cheap to calculate which lights are affecting which objects without any slowdown. Also, this avoids putting a for loop in a shader, which I heard slows things down quite a bit and doesn't work on some older hardware.

But I'm not an expert, and this might not be the best solution. But it made sense to me and it was easy to implement so I tried it and it runs well. Don't fix what ain't broke, right?

---

There are lots of updates that I wanted to post, but I'm having trouble with my Internet connection (dial-up!) and it's driving me crazy so I'll post them tomorrow. There will be video!

[jute]

You're creating something close to a "dream game" for me:  a procedural RPG with a tropical setting.  It looks wonderful.  A few questions:

• Are there infinite islands to sail to and explore?  How will sailing work?
• How do these dungeons compare with the enormous generated dungeons of Daggerfall?
• Will you charge for this game?
• Have you considered an open-source license for the game?  If so, there are many resources at OpenGameArt that could help you.  For instance, here are some plants: http://opengameart.org/search/art?keys=plant
• What kind of music do you have planned?  If you're looking for someone to handle the music, I might volunteer my services.

[DementedChicken]

Really!? That is a massive compliment and huge motivation/ego booster!! 

Ok, to answer your questions:

Are there infinite islands to sail to and explore?

Not sure on this one. Eventually I think yes, because there is nothing stopping the engine from doing this. The first alpha version we release might not have this though, because we simply don't have enough content to make the islands different enough. But in the long run, I don't see any reason why not!

How will sailing work?

You don't need to sail when you have an out-board motor on your boat, right?  The Tropical Dungeons universe is weird, it's about 80% fantasy and 20% science fiction/modern day. Notice the electric lights in the dungeons?  When you see the game closer to completion, you'll see that this isn't as weird as it sounds. ... I hope!

How do these dungeons compare with the enormous generated dungeons of Daggerfall?

When I was a kid I played the demo of Daggerfall to death!! ... but I don't think it had dungeons so I'm not sure how big the dungeons are in it though. To answer your question, there is no limit to how big the dungeons can get, they can be so huge they could take days to finish! But I don't think I'll make them that big because no-one will be able to finish the game. 
I was thinking of having dungeon size as one of the difficulty options or something, so the dungeons can be any size you like.

Will you charge for this game?

We are working on this all day every day, so we do need a little bit of pocket money to survive ... we quit our jobs as translators to try and become indie game devs, so we will ask for a small amount for the full version. But expect the open alpha version to be super-duper cheap. After that, providing we sell even a few copies, we will constantly be adding more content and expanding the game in free downloads. So you will get your money's worth we promise!!

Have you considered an open-source license for the game?

Not right now, but eventually I don't see why not. It's not like I have developed any secret technology or anything like that. It would be nice to contribute back to the open source society at some point, because I have benefited from it so much over the years.

What kind of music do you have planned?  If you're looking for someone to handle the music, I might volunteer my services.

That is insanely kind of you. I'm actually listening to your music right now - it seems we like the same kind of music, this is cool. (I'm a sucker for dark, moody ambient music!)
I'll PM you about this ...

---

Anyway, thanks!!! 

[DementedChicken]

Hi again,

Today was Sunday (I sound like Rebecca Black) so it was just a relaxed
day of bug fixing and clean up, etc. We haven't had a day off since we
started so we were starting to go a little bit crazy.

Anyway, here's a video of some random stuff.
DISCLAIMER!:
Heaps of stuff in this video will be changed soon! The view bobbing is
a bit unnatural, and the sword model has been re-textured since this
video. Also, the dungeon scenes are considerably better graphics than
the outdoor ones, so the outdoor areas need a lot of attention. Also,
as I've said before, the props are very repetitive at the moment but
we'll add more soon.





We will be busy again next week, so hopefully we can start to show
some actual game-play soon.

Goodnight!