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[JimmyRobo]

Droidnaught is my procedurally generated first-person sci-fi dungeon crawler inspired by classics of the genre such as Captive, Hired Guns and Dungeon Master, combined with modern survival horror themes and roguelike elements.

When a deep space exploration sleeper ship goes silent hundreds of lightyears into its mission, controllers on Earth awaken a group of maintenance droids onboard in order to investigate what went wrong.

Developed as a solo project, it will eventually be built for Windows, Mac OS and Linux, with iOS/Android as a further milestone if there is enough interest.

It is written in C++ and uses the Irrlicht 3d engine (http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/).

GAMEPLAY VIDEO:



DEVBLOG HERE: http://droidnaught.tumblr.com/

** Playable build coming soon! **

Devlog aims:

Somewhat technical, but mostly design-centric. The trials and tribulations of making a randomly generated game playable (and fun, I hope!)

Latest screenshots:





Comments and suggestions are welcome!

[pluckyporcupine]

This looks great. Looking forward to trying it out.

Is it more of a roguelike or more of an RPG? As in - is there permadeath or is it more of an RPG with procedural dungeon levels?

[moi]

those shadows are a bit intriguing

[JimmyRobo]

Is it more of a roguelike or more of an RPG? As in - is there permadeath or is it more of an RPG with procedural dungeon levels?

It started off life as a turnbased 3d roguelike. But I felt that trying to generate a sense of dread when things can't sneak up on you in realtime was rather difficult. That said, it has the dungeon-carving, pathing and Field-of-view systems of a roguelike.

re: Permadeath. It's something I'd love to be able to include. My current design plan is to generate a whole colossal ship on new game creation, and have the droids make their way through all the various levels, enemies, traps, puzzles, etc to its ultimate conclusion. This would probably lend itself to permadeath nicely.

[DustyDrake]

If you call it Droidnaught and not put it on the android I will be very unhappy with you.
Because that's what I thought it was for when I read the title.

[JimmyRobo]

I will do my best to put it on mobile devices - if I get additional help on the project then that might be more of a reality!

[JimmyRobo]

UPDATE: Main menu, New game and Save/Resume are now implemented - which then makes it possible to implement the Permadeath/Hardcore style modes.

Savegame structure currently looks a little like this:

- World random seed
   (The entire map can be recreated from just the seed)
- Player group and all enemy group details
   (Health, energy, inventories, positions, etc.)
- Map discovery details
   (Where has the player group already been?)
- Door open states
- Items on the ground

For a 1 floor 32x32 map, the save size is around 6kb.

World gen and save loading currently takes just a couple of seconds. This will get longer as the ship starts to get more complicated.

The current plan is to allow saving whenever for regular difficulty modes, and save-on-quit for permadeath modes.

Next thing I'll probably work on is stairs and multiple-block-height rooms (which is already working, just disabled)

After that, probably some work on making a downloadable version.

[Superb Joe]

hired guns was cool. did you ever play the unreleased hired guns 2 beta? i downloaded it and then never played it. ANYWAY you should play paradroid too.

[JimmyRobo]

Great suggestions. I'll check them out.

Apparently there's a paradroid remake too..

Edit: screens from hired guns 2 beta: http://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=992

Which raises a good question: allow the group to split up, or keep them together at all times?

[Leon Fook]

This look sexy, especially those lighting. It's kinda remind me of Legend of Grimrock though.

*after watching the video*
Yup. Definitely remind me of Grimrock. But it still sexy.

[GeoffW]

Hi,

I love the way you've taken very old-school Dungeon Master style gameplay and subtly added a few modern tweaks like freedom of the camera, without taking it too far and destroying what it is.  I'm looking forward to playing when this game is finished!

[JimmyRobo]

Hi everyone,

Quick update on progress for the week:

Keycode doors and regular door open/close buttons
All doors now have controls associated with them. These currently come in regular and keycode flavors, but I intend to add more. Keycode doors are fully functional and require a code to open. The code required will either be dropped by an enemy on the level, or be found in a container. I may also experiment with scrawling codes on walls - but this may be easily missed by players. Once keycode doors are opened, they are able to be open/closed at will without re-entering the code (to allow for escapes/crushing enemies).




Rooms can have arbitrary size
Since the early days of development, I always intended the game to have large rooms with high ceilings, or to be able to walk on suspended walkways high above things like roaring hyperspace engines. The engine supports these huge rooms, but the dungeon digger currently only digs 2x high rooms. More complex arrangements will be coming soon.




Main Menu and Savegames
Dungeons and player progress can now be saved from the ingame pause menu, and resumed from the main menu. Eventually I will add hardcore/permadeath modes where saving is only permissable on exiting the game. Regular game modes will be allowed to save anywhere.



Thanks for your interest in the game!

--J

[JimmyRobo]

Just out of interest - what is the approved devlog format? Do people usually just modify their top post, or do they reply to the thread as I've been doing?

What works best for you guys?

[eigenbom]

Just keep posting replies with updates. I also sometimes put links to specific builds/milestones in my first post.

Edit: Whoops, forgot to say: this looks awesome, I'll follow this!

[JAnd]

I like the art style, very intriguing. Keep it up!

[s0]

there's something very appealing about the combination of these pixellated "cardboard" style sprites and the detailed lighting. it feels like it shouldn't work but somehow it does.

i love dungeon master as well so i'll be keeping an eye on this one.

[JimmyRobo]

Thank you for the encouraging comments on the artistic direction. I have considered possibly finding an artist for either improving on the 2d elements, or going full 3d - but maybe I'll keep exploring the current direction for now.

[superflat]

Captive is one of my favourite games, so I really look forward to seeing what you come up with!   

[JimmyRobo]

So, this morning I found out that there is another Sci-fi FP dungeon crawler in the works over at http://forums.epicgames.com/threads/908293-UDK-Sci-fi-Dungeon-crawler

Now I'm wondering whether to stay the course and keep creating something that could possibly be very similar - or to try to strike out in a different direction, maybe explore the roguelike domain a little more.

Thoughts?

[Interrupt]

I wouldn't worry too much about another similar project. Yours looks to be further along anyway, and the mortality rate for portfolio projects is very high.

Besides, if people killed their projects every time someone else started doing something slightly close nothing would ever get released