Jacob Repp » underground heroes

Two new game music track sketches

proj — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 05:56:52 +0000

I haven’t posted music in a long time but I have been quietly working on some tracks. Especially lately as I’m preparing some music and sound effects for a few side projects. So here are a few tracks that are in the works. They aren’t complete yet:

Glitch Form and Movement Intro to Facts

Tell me what you think. I’ll have more up in the future and hopefully more finalized versions of these and some other tracks I haven’t exported to MP3 yet. I’m pretty fed up with the ADPCM encoding in XACT it doesn’t compress as well as MP3 does.

I have two other other tracks for under ground heroes and a bunch of sound effects that I whipped together using various samples and effects to get an approximation of what I wanted. They were using too much space so I went with a lower sample frequency and got rid of the stereo channel. I only kept the stereo channel in the music tracks but I compressed them using the max ADPCM compression allowed. The tracks sound okay on headphones and the sound effects are so short you hardly notice the bad quality. The sound and music is down to around 5mb now.

XNA RPG: Bug fixes and gameplay tweaks

proj — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:41:32 +0000

I finally got around to dumping all of the equipment, monsters and items into a giant spreadsheet. Mind you, this project was written over the span of a few days so there is intentionally very little config files here. The system is still ‘data-driven’ in that there is a good common object model and the data items are plugged into an internal database.

One of the problems I’ve been running into playing the game has been balance past the first 5-10 levels. As soon as I made the loot drops dungeon level appropriate the game became increasingly difficult.

Â Since the primary goal is for this game to be fun to play I decided to go back to the drawing board and re-balance all the stat based stuff in the game. I have a new-found respect for the ammount of work that goes into this area of game development on the top teir RPGs, where you may have many hundreds of mobs and thousands of items.

Â The various battle gameplay mechanics are having their algorithms tuned as well. For physical damage the system is basically layed out like this:

Evasion calculation
Parry calculation
Damage jitter
Main damage calculation
Crit calculation
Elemental modifiers

So there is a good ammount of stuff going on that has to to balanced out. The problem that I ran into is that the algorithms I used didn’t scale very well as they were very basic. The only one that seems balanced later in the game is the crit calculation. The main part of the problem is that I hadn’t really setup good operating boundaries for most of the basic stats on equipement. A related problem is that weapons and armor have too wide an array of bonuses on basic stats. Sometimes an uber weapon is all you need to get insanely good chance rolls in each phase of physical attack as it can buff defense, evasion and attack.

Some games have simplified this to where each type of item only boosts one or two player stats. This simplifies things for the player a bit as well because they can more clearly understand the trade-offs of equiping a certain item.Â At this point I think I will just be dropping one stat bonus from weapons (defense) which will change the way parry calculation is done.

So my general plan to fix this has been:

Get all stats into a spreadsheet
Break down player and mob stat progression into the sheet
Translate the probability and damage calculation into the spreadsheet
Use the empirical data that comes out of that to tune various pieces of equipment and level progression

It all seems a bit dry and it’s not as fun as designing the spell particle effects was but I’ve been entertaining myself by researching different mythologies and rolling new mobs, mini-bosses, unique weapons and what not into the mix.

Massimo and I were talking the other day too about the beastiary, I think there will be another meta-game created for that. Currently there is a fun meta-game in the llama store where you actually have to buy higher level gifts for your llama to unlock more carrying capacity and items. The current plan is to have an additional meta-game around the beastiary, if you kill a certain number of a given mob type there will be a unique drop based on that mobs equipment. Normally, the enemy weapons are not instanced in the player database but you can change this by hunting down these mobs.

One of the harder mobs that I’m working on is Zahhak who is a figure in Persian mythology. He has a unique weapon called the Usurper’sÂ Blade. This is based on the story of how Zahhak came into his power. This weapon has a unique type of stat leeching and pretty good overall stats.

Â Oh one little feature I added to the HUD is nice. You can see the health for any mobs you’re attack or are attacking you now. This was a great addition suggested by my friend Mike. Thanks Mike!

Â At some point in the near future I think we’ll need to publish a limited Alpha for PC. We’ll also be alpha testing on our retail kits in a few days. After that we may open it up to more people. If you’re interested let me know.

XNA RPG: Underground Heros

proj — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 07:28:51 +0000

Just before the thanksgiving weekend I was talking to my friend/fellow coder/work associate Massimo and he tells me that he wants to write this ‘simple’ RPG and having it running before Sunday. Sounds impossible but I told him I want to play whatever he has done. The next day I’m getting a bit frustrated because some of the directions I’ve gone with the procedural shooter have been dead ends and I strike up a conversation over IM with him. I ask him if it’s ok for me to burn a few cycles creating a loot system for his game and so I set myself loose on that. It started innocently enough: loot database, stats, player and entity data in a console app. I build a test harness and pretty soon I’ve gotten an automated battle running in a console window with auto respawning of both player and new monsters.

The next day I start integrating this thing in. Massimo had a clear idea of what he wanted to build so I took his mock-up of the hud and built a simple layout engine with my bmfont code and some extra stuff to render it. Eventually battle was working and hey we had a fun little game. So I went off and wrote an effects/particle system and based on some input from people playing the game eventually wrote a inventory system and a store. Of course Massimo was coding like the crazy coder-monkey that he is. He’s written this cool dungeon generator complete with minimap and smooth scrolling.

So here’s some screenshots of the functional, and quite fun RPG Underground Heroes (UGH). If you have any questions feel free to post comments. As soon as we have our take home XNA builds we’ll be trying this out on our retail consoles.

I haven’t given up on the procedural shooter, I’m still brainstorming.

Console app test harness for the loot/battle engine:

In game with some barely visible particle effects and the finished HUD:

The inventory and store interface. No need for backpacks when you have a llama. Llama gifts are available in the store (This pick also shows a certain cheat that gives you all of the available equipment in the game):