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Work in Progress / Tekst - Stretching the definition of 'Text Based'

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Phosphoer
16
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Joined: 8th Dec 2007
Location: Seattle
Posted: 16th Sep 2008 08:55 Edited at: 22nd Sep 2008 09:06
Hey guys, as a bit of a side project from Space Potassium, I'm making a completely different kind of game.

Welcome to Tekst.
Tekst is a 'text based' dungeon crawler, with a twist. The twist is that all the graphics are rendered as text, so you play as "Person" (although your name changes as you progress), and you can shoot "Arrows" and so on. The screenshots will explain what I mean.

At the moment there is only one mode of play - Arena Mode, in which you fight progressively harder waves of NPCs.
In the second mode which will be released later on, you'll complete quests for different characters, trying to gain experience while retaining your morality at the same time (or not :p).

Tekst also includes a map editor, which is included the download.
If you make a map, feel free to post it in this thread, would be cool. ^^

The rest of the game pretty much explains itself when you start playing, so I'll leave you to it! See how high of a level you can get, it's quite hard I think I doubt that any of you can get to the limit (you get a new name every time you level up).

Some Screenshots:

Level up your character:


Menu.


Basic Shot:


Splattering text-based blood!


Bugs:
As far as I know, there are none! Please correct me if I'm wrong :p

Download: http://www.mediafire.com/?wes9rgs2hck
You can also download from the attachment if MediaFire is slow

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Roxas
19
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Joined: 11th Nov 2005
Location: http://forum.thegamecreators.com
Posted: 16th Sep 2008 17:51 Edited at: 16th Sep 2008 17:51
Wtf guess i should try it

darimc
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Location: Canada
Posted: 17th Sep 2008 02:53
This is actually a really cool idea. You might have been drunk when you made it, but it's a cool concept.



Heroefol
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Location: Somewhere playing poker with deep ones
Posted: 17th Sep 2008 11:11
Sounds really interesting I guess you get your idea from games like NetHack or ADOM

Phosphoer
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Posted: 17th Sep 2008 20:33
Thanks for the comments guys ^^.

I actually haven't ever played NetHack or ADOM lol, I've been told that NetHack is quite awesome though.

So I just realized that the demo I provided only runs in 1680x1050x32 resolution, I'll post a fix that has more supported resolutions sometime today.

Phosphoer
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Location: Seattle
Posted: 18th Sep 2008 00:26
Here's a screenshot of a new feature:



You can choose what attributes you increase each time you level up, allowing for more character customization. (Previously the amount of character customization was...well..zero :p).

This also makes the game even harder, because previously ALL those attributes were boosted at every level up. After more testing is concluded I may allow for either multiple attributes to be chosen or up the amount by which the attribute is multiplied.

I am planning on putting a limit on most of the attributes. You can't run around with insta-kill arrows or magic that flies across the entire map killing everything. Probably what I'll do is decrease the multiplier each time you use it. Either that or I won't limit your attributes, and buff up the NPC's a bunch, tell me what you think would be more fun

I'll post that screen res update in a bit, I promise. At work at the moment so can't get a whole lot done.

Phosphoer
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Location: Seattle
Posted: 18th Sep 2008 03:35
Alright! The demo has been updated to include:
- Multiple resolutions
- A pause menu in which you can change settings (shown below)
- The feature shown in the above post (Attribute selection)
- And some minor balance tweaks
- You no longer get HUGE amounts of experience for killing someone with magic
- I don't remember what else

Download is in first post!



Zotoaster
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Posted: 18th Sep 2008 05:32
I love the graphics man.

Alucard94
17
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Joined: 9th Jul 2007
Location: Stockholm, Sweden.
Posted: 18th Sep 2008 16:19 Edited at: 18th Sep 2008 19:14
Could you post a video, because this looks awesome and I want to see how it plays (Might help to find some bugs as well) but I'm not on windows at the moment so I can't try the demo. Again, <3 your work man.


tiresius
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Posted: 18th Sep 2008 17:38 Edited at: 18th Sep 2008 17:38
This is a cool concept. The arrow flying is a little wonky at times. I can't get it to go straight down in a south direction. And sometimes it just goes East on its own. But I definitely like the blood splatter or whatever it is!

For the important entities (enemies, nice guys, potions, etc) you should layer the text so it prints black text, then the regular text offset by a pixel or two on top. So it looks a little 3D (with a shadow). That would make it easier to read the text over the grass. Just an idea.

I'm not a real programmer but I play one with DBPro!
Phosphoer
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Posted: 18th Sep 2008 20:56
@Zotoaster: Thanks@

@Alucard: I definitely will, was thinking earlier of doing that.
Expect one soon.

@Tiresius: That's a good idea, it will probably make the next release ^^. The arrow is a little weird, it should work fine except when you are near the edges of the map. Something about the way I'm calculating scroll screws it up if there isn't actually any scroll applied. I'm going to look into it more.

Phosphoer
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Posted: 18th Sep 2008 21:25
As promised, here is the video!

http://www.screencast.com/t/O18ln1xiuR

Sorry it's so jerky, the game is quite smooth but the scrolling seems to kill my video capture device.

Alucard94
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Posted: 18th Sep 2008 21:48
Ooh, I get it now, wow, that's genius! =) Awesome.


Phosphoer
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 00:42
Thanks! xD

Here is a new screenshot, tell me what you think of this change.

In order to help make the characters more discernible from the clouds of text(in addition to adding the shadow that Tiresius suggested), I decided to make the background more like ASCII art in that instead of saying 'grass' i'll use ASCII symbols to represent grass. In this case I'm using the | symbol. I think it looks pretty good but I'm curious to see if you guys liked it better with all text or if you think this is cool.



White Fang 12
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Location: In my office coding
Posted: 19th Sep 2008 04:02
I like it, it is way better then before, because before it was cluttered now not so much

I'm a noob help will be accepted
Satchmo
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 06:02 Edited at: 19th Sep 2008 06:03
I wouldn't think it would, but a game like this works almost like a book, it lets you imagine the environment, what the wall would look like or what the corpse would be like. It's nice to see a game that would give someone so much room to use their imagination. When I look at that picture, it almost appears as how I imagine it.

Sergey K
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 07:41
waa.. never though that text based game will look soo.. 3d xD
it applys nice emagination on your self.. really cool work dude!

Get DBP stuff here! - (plugins/models/scripts and more!)
Phosphoer
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 12:59
@White Fang: I totally agree!

@Satchmo: That's really cool, I definitely didn't design the game with that in mind, but I'm glad that's how it works for you ^^.

@Sergey: Thanks!

I'm working on the Quest mode, it's going to be quite cool once I get it going.

Basically how it's going to work, is at the beginning all the 'good' people will spawn in one place, and all the 'evil' people will spawn in another. There are four NPC types for each team, so there's a total of 8 different names(but more than 8 NPCS). The lowest members of each team (think henchmen), have a morality rating of 0.0, which is equal to the player's morality at the beginning of the game. Anyone above or below that morality will dislike you. For example, the Devil, who has the lowest morality in the game (-5.0), will attack you unless you also have a -5.0 morality. His henchmen may not attack you though, and you can accept quests from them, which will lower your morality even further, eventually allowing you to barter with the devil, so to speak.

It doesn't work totally the same for both sides though. I thought about it, and it occurred to me that the 'good guys' dont' attack you unless you are bad, whereas the bad guys always attack you unless you are evil too. Therefore, the positive morality NPC's won't attack you unless you have a negative morality, though you may not be able to do quests for the really high ranked ones (for example the Saint).

I'm also going to make 3 different AI's. There'll be an idle AI in which the NPC just sort of wanders around, there's the angry AI in which he attacks the player, then there's the escort AI. When you get high up enough in the ranks of either side, the lower ranks will start following you around, and they'll attack any opponents that you encounter.

That was a lot of typing, now to go back to coding :p

NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 20th Sep 2008 12:42
Sincerely loving that game concept... it's tempting to steal it.

Morality -= 0.5;

Drew Cameron
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Posted: 20th Sep 2008 17:53
Best game idea I've seen on here. Ever.

Phosphoer
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Posted: 22nd Sep 2008 07:29
@NeX: Lol :p Thanks!
@Drew: Thanks very much

Bit of an update:

I'm in the midst of completely reworking the AI. I actually deleted ALL of my AI code, so it's from the ground up. This AI will be more flexible as far as assigning Quests goes, and will just be in general easier for me to work with.

One major change in the AI is that instead of moving in random directions, they are assigned a random destination, which they move to. With this base code, I'll be able to hopefully implement some sort of path-finding system with chains of linked destinations.

I've also re-worked the controls a bit. Clicking no longer attacks, but selects a target. Once you have a selected target, you can use the number keys to perform different attacks upon him (if you are in range of course). You'll also only see the display info for your target, which reduces clutter even more.

This pushes back the release of a new demo for a bit, but I'll have one soon, hopefully with Quest Mode!!

Phosphoer
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2008 01:48
Dialog is in progress, you can bring up a chat with idle AI's now, they will say different things based on their relation with you.



The Saint doesn't seem to hold me in high regard xD.

Crazy Programmer
AGK Developer
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2008 06:59
Very nice i wish i would have thought of that.


http://www.freewebs.com/zornoxstudios/
Learning C++ thanks DGDK
Phosphoer
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Posted: 25th Sep 2008 11:05
Thanks

Quest mode is almost up!!



At the moment you can talk to any NPC who is idle, and get a quest from him if you have high enough standing. At the moment there are only kill missions, but I'll add more. Upon killing your target, you get experience and an increased standing towards the quest-giving faction. You get more experience than you would if you had just killed the guy normally, so there is actually a reason to do the Quests.

What do you guys think about having an indicator to show where the target is? Or do you think it'd be snazzier to just have to go find your target?

Also ideas for types of quests would be cool, my other idea so far is finding weapons/artifacts for the quest-giver.

Phosphoer
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Posted: 30th Sep 2008 07:29 Edited at: 30th Sep 2008 07:31
New update!

Here's a link to a short new video demonstrating a battle between me, my escort, and an enemy NPC. I veered away from attacking close range because right now my friend would just shoot me in the back!
http://screencast.com/t/5k4g2hyBgQS
In case you are wondering why the screen goes black, it's because I took a nasty hit from the enemy, and died :p You can't see the death screen because the video is in the wrong bit of the screen.

If you are of sufficient standing, you can now ask an NPC to join you. If he accepts, he'll follow you around, and battle any enemies that he sees. It's actually possible to get an NPC from opposing sides to follow you, but the two won't be happy when they meet :p You'll probably be down a teammate should that occur!

NPC's don't only attack enemies when in escort mode, which means that it's entirely possible for the entire evil team to battle the good team in an epic-scale fight! ^^.

Download is coming soon, just gotta iron out a few bugs and also re-add arena mode. (It got trashed when I deleted all the AI, just as well because I've updated so much of the AI's main routines I'd have to rewrite from scratch it anyway)

Alucard94
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Posted: 30th Sep 2008 08:28
That looks very awesome indeed, very innovative idea, can't wait for what's to come!


Alucard94, the member of the future of the past.

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