The Doryen arena 0.8 released

I didn't put everything I wanted in this release, but at least it contains the challenges.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/arena

Arachnophobia

I added some more cool stuff to Arena 0.8 :

• creatures are pushed away when they die. The smaller creatures go further.
• corpse bleed for a few seconds. The arena rapidly becomes a blood bath. Warning, this game is M rated :)
• now the burning condition is visible on the main screen through the creature character color

Some creatures have fancy new skills :

• the gnoll becomes a gnoll sorcerer who can metamorphose himself into a much stronger "three headed gnoll abherration"...
• the giant spider can enter gestation and summon a bunch of annoying baby spiders

Arachnophobia : so rats and goblins couldn't tame you ? Maybe spiders will...

This inspired me a new challenge : arachnophobia. In this one, new giant spiders regularly enter the arena. You goal is to survive until the end of the round while keeping the total number of spiders under a certain limit. This is tricky since spiders can immobilize you with their web and quietly go and give birth to lots of baby spiders... You'd better bring a lot of firepower with you...

Sneak peek at arena 0.8

I've set up the challenge system in Arena pretty quickly. It was the occasion to clean the code that was leading to astronaut spaghetti after the quick and dirty development of the custom fight mode... The challenge mode is not yet finished, and things may still change until the 0.8 release.

Challenge selection screen

This is the challenge screen where you can see all available challenges, and which one you achieved. Some challenges can have scores. For the time being, I've setup only 3 challenges with 3 different gameplays :

• Goblin hunt : you have to win your fight before the time limit. If you succeed, you can try and improve your time.
• Fire dance : your health points shall not decrease beyond a certain limit.
• Infestation : you have to kill at least n creatures in a limited time. If you succeed, you can try to improve the number of creatures killed.

Infestation - Rats have never been so dangerous...

All those different game rules have been added pretty easily thanks to a pluggable module system : the game engine handles the core game rules (display the arena and panels, creatures AI, ...) and every specific rules are implemented in small independent modules. Each module handles a specific rule. There is a "time limit" module, an "enemy count" module, ... Even the demo AI on the title screen in now implemented in a "demo" module. When I start a game, I choose which modules I enable. This is really flexible and, I hope, will allow me to experiment and create lots of interesting mods for the upcoming versions.

I also added a few eye candy. Now the arena cast shadows depending on the time of the day. You can see here the same picture in the morning (left) and later in the afternoon (right). Yet, the creatures don't cast shadows. I'm not sure this would improve the look of the game.

Finally, I also added a new "rush" skill for the player. This one makes it possible to run towards opponents, hitting and possibly stunning every one in the way. It's also a good trick to escape your surrounding opponents when your situation becomes alarming...

So the 0.8 may follow 0.7 pretty quickly, but I still have to work on the core gameplay. I'm not satisfied with the fighting system. It's still too tedious. Moreover, the new game modes are really challenging and I have to make the player stronger. I'm thinking about buffing up "lesser skills" and maybe adding superpowerful weapons that you unlock by winning challenges.

There is another cool feature I'd like to have but I still haven't thought about it : fight replays. You should be able to save your fights and play them back later, and possibly post them on the Arena forum. But this may not be in the 0.8 as there are lots of pitfalls to overcome.

libtcod-1.3.2 + arena-0.7

I updated the libtcod 1.3.2 packages with a small fix for the C# port.

Arena 0.7 is also available in beta with the brand new custom fight mode. Here is my personal tournament highscore : 8012. Try and beat me ;) (without modifying the config files of course...)

News of the Arena

The next release of the Arena is near. I'm still tweaking the gameplay, trying to make it less confusing and repetitive. I have a few plans to allow the player to enter more smoothly into the game. The main issue for newcomers is currently to see all those different monsters attacking you without knowing them. I'll implement new game modes in the upcoming releases to fix that.

The 0.7 release features a "custom fight" mode in which you can select the creatures you fight.

Custom fight setup screen

This makes it possible for you to experiment with each different creatures. You can see the strength value of your selected opponents so that you can try to beat your score by winning against stronger and stronger opponents. If the tournament mode is too easy for you, here you can add opponents with no strength limit...

Wanna try and fight 10 balrogs ?...

Other modes to be added later are :

• a tutorial mode, where a master teaches you the different techniques (parry, combo, shield, ...) one after another.
• a challenge mode. Instead of simply having increasingly stronger opponents, you can choose different challenges and try to beat your score. For example, kill the maximum number of goblins in one minute, try and beat some creatures without taking any damages and so on...

Arena 0.6 is out

Nothing really new in this release. It tries to reduce the defects of the 0.5 :

• first levels less boring by making them more difficult
• allow the player to focus on interresting things (special skills, target selection, ...) instead of repeatedly hitting its target

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/arena

libtcod 1.3.1 + arena 0.5

Two releases at once ! Not bad for a thursday.

libtcod 1.3.1 fixes a few bugs and improves the modules added in the 1.3 with a default parser listener for basic config files and easier mouse button clicks detection. It also support fonts with more than 255 characters.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/thedoryenlibrary

arena 0.5 uses libtcod 1.3.1 (the 0.4 version could not be compiled with libtcod 1.3) and adds pathfinding for the creatures along with a few fixes.

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/arena

Arena 0.4

You can get the new version of Arena with a lot of new stuff, including some demo fights on the title screen.
I didn't work too much on the skills balance, but rather on the gameplay. There is now more feedback, especially when you get hit. I reduced the default speed of the game as the last version was a bit too frenzied.

I also introduced the balrog in the arena. Beware, this one is pretty nasty...

http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/arena

The Doryen Arena is released

It's still unfinished and a bit crude, but it has already some interresting gameplay and a lot of config files to play with. The AI is particularly bugged, so there will probably be some new releases soon. It also lacks finishing touches, especially in the static screens (title, death, victory). Well, after all,it's supposed to be a prototype to balance the melee fighting system, not a full blown game !

The main page :
http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/arena

The forums :
http://roguecentral.free.fr/arena/forum

Bad weather on The Arena

The Arena is taking shape and I spend some time on the eyecandy necessary to a Doryen game. I ported some of the weather features of TCOD to the arena and played a bit with some new ones. I'm pretty satisfied with the fog and I will definitely add it to TCOD too as soon as possible.
Each fight in the arena occurs at a random time of the day and with a random weather. It has absolutely no impact on the game but The Arena is also supposed to display the visual possibilities of libtcod.

So here are a few screenshots showing different atmospheres : rain, sunny, dawn, light fog, heavy fog, night. Each is not a unique atmosphere, they can combine : fog at night, rain during fog, ..

Arena death screen update

Things are getting better. It still lacks the tombstones and some more polishing... It's supposed to feature volumetric fog, but it's not noticeable. Hopefully, tombstones will make it more apparent...

arena death screen... voxels

Ok, one first good news, I've been able to setup a basic voxel engine for the cemetary ground. I expected it to be more difficult to settle. Currently, it looks awful, but with some lighting and fog effect, that'll do... The next difficult stuff is the fog. I don't know if I'll be able to make it look as good as I would like...

Arena death screen / mouse support

This is an early quick and dirty concept for the arena death screen. It doesn't look anything special here, but what I have in mind may be even better than TCOD's flaming skull... I cant' say more for now, I might know more about its feasibility tonight. This picture was just a test to see if could look good enough on a 80x50 resolution. The image has been scaled up 3 times here.


Concerning libtcod 1.3, the mouse support has already been added. Early adopters can find it here (sorry, only mingw32 version before the final release) :
http://jice.nospam.googlepages.com/libtcod-1.3wip-mingw32.zip
It's a work-in-progress version, so anything could still change until the final release. Especially the wheel_up / wheel_down flags that don't seem to work.

The Doryen Arena : weapons, skills, armors, conditions...

Things are taking shape slowly. Since I'm off today, I've been able to lay the foundations of the skill system, configurable through a text file. Weapons are just special skills that are activated when you bump into the opponent. Other skills are activated by specific keys.

For each level of the tournament, the speaker presents your opponent, his equipment and his skills. Then you have to choose your own equipment (weapons, armor parts) and your skills (up to 8 skills). You start with no special skill but you can learn one skill after each victorious fight. The skills form a tree.

Some special features (like wielding a shield or dual weapon wielding) will only be available after you reach a specific level in the tournament.

The trick is to carefully adapt your skills, equipment and your tactics to your opponent as different opponents may have different weak points and winning tactics against an opponent may be completely ineffective against the next one. Special skills use stamina so one of your challenge will be to keep your stamina level high enough to be able to keep fighting. There will also be some special attacks that can be triggered by well synchronized key combos. As you see, there will be lots of differents aspects to keep the player busy during the fight.

To finish, since it's a Doryen family game, there will be of course a lot of useless eyecandy...

A new project in the Doryen family

I've been thinking about the melee fights in the Chronicles Of Doryen for a few days, trying to figure out how to make it more fun. Generally, melee fighting in a roguelike involves bumping into an opponent until he dies. In fact it's so boring that it's often completely eclipsed by other forms of combat like ranged weapons or magic. Since the first release of TCOD will only feature melee fight, I have to make it really appealing and challenging.

The problem is that it is very tiresome to balance in TCOD because each time you modify something, you have to start the game, go and buy some stuff, go down in the dungeon, find an opponent...

That's why I decided to create a small program that makes it possible for me to test very easily the melee fight, and in which I can add new ideas without being restrained by the whole TCOD history. But instead of creating a dry prototype, I think it's more fun to make a small game with it. First, if it is presented as a game, the feedback from the players will quickly show if it sucks or not. Moreover, it's an opportunity to demonstrate the potential of the Doryen library. Think of it as a sort of 7DRL excepted that I won't be able to do it in 7 days. 7 weeks might be more realistic... Ok it's a 7WRL.

Ok, after this long introduction, I hereby announce the start of the Doryen Arena, a sub-project of the Chronicles Of Doryen dedicated exclusively to the melee fight ! If it succeeds, this fighting system will be incorporated in TCOD.

The arena - early concept