Legends of Magic

Legends of Magic
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Hi everyone – this is a new game that I’ve been working on. It’s an isometric 3D quest/puzzle game which runs in a sub-window of an 800×600 display. Underneath the sub window you have controls for ‘Pick-Up’, ‘Drop’, ‘Examine’ and ‘Use’. I plan to release this for beta testing in mid-September and hope to release this at the ROUGOL show if all goes well.

It runs at ~25 FPS on my Raspberry Pi 1.

As well as the game, I plan to include a sub-directory for the development tools – although these will be presented “as is”. I am also hoping to include an unpublished novel that contains of how the Wizard, which you seek to defeat in this game, was banished.

Best Regards,

Tony Bartram
www.amcog-games.co.uk

If anyone is interested in beta testing please reply to this thread. Thanks, Tony.

I’d recommend some sort of graphical border to the screen, rather than black. Also perhaps use an outline font (or non-system font) for the Score/Health and other text?

I’m reminded of a PC game that I watched develop in the last few years called Underworld (www.olderbytes.com). The first version looked similarly minimalist http://www.rpgwatch.com/articles/swords-and-sorcery—underworld—review-155.html

In this case, Charles got the help of some Indonesian “artists for hire for peanuts” and ended up with

http://www.indieretronews.com/2013/01/swords-and-sorcery-underworld-gold.html

Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your recommendations. I will update the font + add a border/background

If I wrote a sequel, I know a couple of artists who could add more graphics to it. Currently there are between 100 & 200 sprites in Legends of Magic. As the game engine is very content driven – including the game rules themselves which are written via a simple byte code compiler – writing new games that extend the logic and replacing/extending the graphics is relatively easy.

Tony

Forgot to mention this is implemented as a 4 / 8 way scroller & is written in BBC BASIC. I expect it to run on the same machines as Overlord (i.e. Raspberry Pi 1 & 2, Iyonix, Pandaboard, Beagleboard, RPCEmu and VirtualAcorn.
Hopefully it will contain around 30 minutes of original music, depending on how editing goes.

The other game series that comes to mind from this art style is Eschelon (Books 1-3) from Basalisk games.

http://basiliskgames.com/eschalon-book-i/

If I recall, Book 1 also ran at 800×600, with a similar movement system etc. Might be worth having a look at what they did?

Their UI included a minimap, which might be worthwhile depending on how large your gameworld is – help to avoid people getting too lost, unless that’s part of the gameplay.

I’ll be honest that I suspect the timescale you’re giving yourself on this one may be a bit optimistic, as RPG/adventure type games tend to need a fair bit of time to build the gameworld, quests, puzzles, battles, enemies and level/mechanics.

Thanks for the link Andrew. Will look at it later. Trying to type this on my phone which is a bit slow… have written most of the puzzles and designed most of the map. Because the game logic is abstracted into a simple game language and the editor/map design has some simplifications I have been able to write it and design in 5 months.
However, based on the discussions I had at a rougol talk and on the old forum thread. And because I need to regression test I’ve targeted a perfect play at 1 to 2 hours.
The battle mechanics are very simple and its mostly a puzzle game with 1 main quest to seal a faded undead wizard in a a dimension that he was banished to.

Because the game logic is abstracted into a simple game language and the editor/map design has some simplification

Mmm, isn’t that sort of what they did with Quake, Duke Nukem, etc? An engine that runs the game, and a set of resources that define it?

Also usefully gives you the ability (if sufficiently abstracted) of offering add-on packs to alter or extend the game.

I think some customers may feel that 1-2hrs to beat the game may be a little on the light side. 4-6 tends to be the recommended length if possible. This can be helped by adding in side quests/puzzles or logic-type puzzles which require the player to puzzle over things for a while.

Hi Andrew,
Are you referring to a play where you know all of the answers at the beginning and are just doing a repeated play through? In terms of discovery it should (in theory) take somewhat longer. Where all of the answers are known already, I’m targeted 1 to 2 hours. I won’t really understand how long it takes to figure things out until beta however. I’ll try and add side puzzles none-the-less.

In terms of hints, I have included “The Guardians” that you can ask for advice, paths to follow om the island and an examine button. So there should be clues to avoid making the game too obscure, hopefully.

Thanks for your advice.
Tony

Hi Rick, the engine that I’ve written has lots of simplifications, however, yes the game is content driven via two binary data files which are the output of a simple rules compiler and editor. The game can be extended/changed via new data files. Its not 100% generic at this point.

If anyone is interested in beta testing please reply to this thread. Thanks, Tony.

I am.

Hi Krzystof,

Thanks for offering to beta test. Please drop me a line via the contact details on:
http://www.amcog-games.co.uk/about.htm

I will reply with the beta, hopefully, within the next couple of weeks.

Best Regards,

Tony

Well. Not far from being ready for beta now.
I’ve replaced the scroll on the right of the image, put a frame around the game area. Added sounds.
Also, I’ve put cycling animations for a couple of the game objects so the display is less static.

Finally, I’ve been allowing the game to be solved, with multiple alternate paths and a few side puzzles, so that the player can choose how to play it more flexibly.

Some music for the game. This consists of 4 background music themes that run consecutively:
Music tracks 1,2,3 & 4

Any feedback welcome. Not sure if the second track is a little too ‘ambient’, although I think its quite atmospheric.

As before, these are co-written with Simon Very.

Almost at beta now. Tidying things up enough to release for beta and making sure the game can be completed.
Added a font to the scroll and a border. Plan to send the beta out by 26/27th at the latest.

I’ve played the game to completion & have an application directory correctly set up.

Fixed another couple of bugs. So I should be able to send this out tomorrow for beta.

Testing is taking longer than I thought as it takes a while to play the game through and my save/load had a bug…

So I should be able to send this out tomorrow for beta.

that’s great :-)

Well its eleven minutes past 1 in the morning. The beta 1 pacakge is made. I’ve played it through again & recorded any issues I know of.

As it is now the day after tommorow (see my previous post), I may as well sleep and e-mail it out then after I’ve run the package on a raspberry pi 2, RPCEmu, Virtual Acorn and an Iyonix.

Apologies for the delay…

Beta 1 has now been released for testing.

Please let me know if anyone who was expecting it, did not receive it.

Thanks,

Tony

Great stuff. I’m a adventure fan. Sorry, my alltime favorite is “Maniac Mansion” ;-). But is nice to play for a non player like me. Is working with my “PiBook” (Was a part of my electrical/accu tests.).

Cool new game :)

Thanks David & Raik.

I’ve just e-mailed out Beta 2. Anyone who was expecting a copy but has not received it, please drop me a line.
I’ve tested it to completion on a Raspberry PI 2 and also play tested it on Virtual Acorn running RISC OS 4.02.
A key question I am looking at in Beta 2 is “are the puzzle solutions sufficiently discoverable?”

For completeness, I have included the development tools under the application directory. These tools are presented AS-IS and are not supported i.e. no usability improvements are planned. The tools consist of a game ‘logic-compiler’ and a game editor. I’ve put a “spoiler alert” in the directory above as looking at these programs may reveal some of the game solutions. To run them it is necessary to ‘set directory’ to the location of the tools and to copy the terrain file into the same directory as the editor.

I have discovered and am tracking 16 bugs of which 11 have been fixed. These bugs are listed within the beta-bug-list.

Improvements include:

• A new side puzzle.
• 2 new puzzles.
• Improved visual feedback during monster and monk fighting.
• Improved quality of graphics and smoothing of ground,sand,water.
• Tidied map layout.
• Corrected object alignments.
• The won screen.
• Volume controls for the music including stopping MP3 streaming when volume is at zero.
• Various other bug fixes.

I’m still targeting a release for ROUGOL, however this is dependant on whether any late show stopper bugs are found. At the moment, based on the size of the code and industry standard bug density (15 to 50 per kilo-LOC), I believe that most bugs have likely been identified.

Cheers,

Tony

I could make test under Pi (at the end of the month).
Question: what the game editor can do?

Hi David,
Thanks for offering to test. However, the test cycle is planned to finish within the next 10 days as I hope to release the game at ROUGOL on the 24th of October.

So far I’ve not found any show stopper issues via the beta.

Regarding the editor, I wrote this to create the landscape for the game. The game consists of background tiles and objects. Within the editor, the objects are represented by letters which also form the master key via mapping to an integer in an array for each object in the game. For example, a wall is represented by a capital W, health potion by an F and trees by a t. Monsters and enemies are read from the map and loaded into a separate array, for example a Monk is represented by an M.

Object ids are looked up thus:
DIM objectID$(255)
objectID$() = " ", “t”, “G”, “S” etc

The editor itself was written to the point that it was functional to create the game but is not a maintained product in its own right. All game objects can be positioned on the editor, except the player.

The game logic includes rules for objects and the map and held objects e.g. Use held health potion increases health, play drinking sound, write on the scroll looks like this:
DATA defFood, wel, 25, sbh, defEmpty, say, “Ahh. This potion has restored my health *7”, els, “I am full and can drink no more health potion”
i.e. where object held = food , Make player WELl by 25 health points, SuBstitute Held object with an empty bottle, say “Ahh. This potion has restored my health – Make sound 7”, else if an operation did not succeed say report error message “I am full and can drink no more health potion.”

These rules are serialised to a lookup table implemented as a block of memory.

Similarly the map data is stored in a block of memory as byte pairs, where one bye represents the background tile and one byte represents an object.

All movement is free and unrestricted by checking multiple tiles and integer division operations.

Cheers,

Tony

Very interesting. I hope that it will be provided in a completely usable form. It’s always interesting to be able to make new maps for software… Will the game support 3rd party maps loading?