Posted April 17, 2023 by dcsw
#dcjam2023 #dragonruby #postmortem #dungeon #crawler
The theme for this years game jam was “duality”. My first thought was to use a mind/body approach or to have a ‘ghost’ feature where you could go out-of-body and look around without actually opening doors and alerting monsters. I did a little testing with this idea but eventually settled on two choices for each interaction. My personal goal was to include more story and a coherent theme in the game for this year, and having two choices for every interaction aligned well with these goals and was pretty simple to implement.
The strategy going into the start of the jam was to use basically the same code that I used for Strange Slime Sewers, the game I submitted last year to the 2022 DC Jam, except I should use automatically generated wall and monster textures and add more features as time allowed. I thought about using Zooperdan’s AtlasMaker tool, but since I was taking a slightly different approach to displaying the textures, I implemented my own texture transformation tool which uses ruby and ImageMagick that I call Surface-Stretcher. I know that it is reinventing the wheel, but I defend it with the fact that I get joy out of doing and understanding myself, which is probably pretty common for game jammers.
Thanks to these artists, whose awesome work I can use to lend TTT some credibility.
Thanks to a very stable and cozy package of tools:
A lot of inspiration comes from Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), Advanced Fantasy Fighting (AFF), and Tunnels and Trolls (T&T) as those are what I’ve been reading recently.
I had hoped to have Surface-Stretcher completed before the jam, and I got it most of the way completed just as the jam started. However, actually using the textures led me to find some issues that I needed to fix during the jam. I am releasing the tool as free software here: https://gitlab.com/DustinCSWagner/surface-stretcher.
Here is a list of features, notes, and achievements completed during the jam:
Although I had hoped to include a certain story in the game, it ultimately only has a brief introduction and an abrupt ending when you meet the end-game conditions. Nonetheless, there are numerous features and improvements I intend to implement in TTT. Although I plan to maintain much of the game's visual design, I have compiled a list of changes and additions that I hope to implement within the next year:
In the ** distant future ** I would like to figure out basic 3D effects for DragonRuby, so that I could get parallax and some basic 3D animations when rotating in the dungeon. I could sort of hack this by per-rendering 3 or 4 frames for most rotations within one or two distance. This would give a slide-show effect to the player. Its one route that I know could be achieved, but it would be a lot cooler to have a smooth rotation.
In keeping with last year’s post. Here is a map of the game that I submitted and some work in progress pictures.
Decoder: a = avatar (@) # = wall j = jungle t = treasure d = closed door o = open door (all doors are closed to start with and are replaced with an ‘o’ if opened) g = gnome p = pug1 m = pug2 B = boss (You'll notice there are two bosses, I didn't want to make it too hard to find one.)
I was able to create a self-signed Android apk package and install TTT on an Amazon Fire tablet:
I installed TTT on my Steam Deck and mapped all the keys to buttons. It runs great: