Note: treasure can drop +/-3 levels, on a bell curve % chance (5,10,20,30,20,10,5). So if you place a level 4 treasure, there's a 5% chance of getting a level 1 treasure and a 10% chance of getting a level 6 treasure.
Followup-Note: if the treasure roll determines a treasure of level 0 or below, no treasure is given.
Creatures drop loot based on their creature level, same bell curve math applies. But each creature has a % chance of dropping loot at all, whereas map events always drop treasure as specified.
At some point I will add Powers and Enemy Spawns to events. So a trap room might spawn a load of zombies, or a trap tile might shoot a poison dart at you.
I like the spitters too! Essentially, under the hood, they're the same as skeleton archers or goblin spearmen. It's a plain missile. But it's funny how just a few variable tweaks and new art can make something so vicious! Hint though: fire resist gear really helps. It rounds in your favor, so even 1% fire resistance will reduce fire damage by 1 point.
I think antlions or zombies that start behind cave walls is perfectly okay. Used smartly/sparingly anyway.
On those tiny dead-end rooms I might put some chests or other containers. If you can figure out how the container events work feel free to add them, otherwise I'll go ahead and add those after.
Tip: I suggest having a copy of the cave map open in Tiled and using the mouse cursor + status bar to see coordinates, to place enemies.
Random aiming would be great, I like that as a possible post-effect.
If you want to take a crack at populating the cave map, go for it! It's one of the final things remaining for the 0.11 release. Adding existing creatures is easy enough.
I wanted the cave to have slightly tougher creatures than the dungeon area, maybe enemy level 5-8. You'll see I made three new Antlions for the caves: spitter, blinker, burster. I need to make a few more creature variations for the Caves (at least some goblins and minotaurs). If you have ideas or want to take a crack at making them, lemme know.
If you really want to make new monsters, try this out. https://code.google.com/p/flare-engine/wiki/MonsterLevels It's untested, just a first stab at how monsters might scale. Some existing monsters need to be edited. All of it will be tested (and probably changed drastically).
If you're interested with helping with documentation instead, that would be great too. The main need is to document the file formats. If you want to do this, I'm happy to answer all questions. We can put the resulting docs in the wiki. The documents aren't really time-sensitive or tied to the regular releases. I plan to get around to it eventually... maybe in the break between v0.11 and .12, especially now that there's a lot to play around with.
I definitely plan on having only a few base spells, typically defined by the "motion" of the spell.
Current Base Types:
Effect (a non-moving power. It can have a centerpoint and radius, or just apply static effects to target or self).
Missile (single animation flies in a direction. E.g. shock, enemy ice and fireballs, arrows)
A few temporary types
And I'll be adding
Ray (creates multiple animations in a straight line. This is what Freeze is. I could also use this to make laser spells if I don't have the delay on each section).
Enchantment (a buff/debuff with attached visual effect. Shield will use this type. One part of Vengeance will be this type, and the other part will be an Effect melee swing that consumes/requires a Vengeance enchantment).
I'll also add a MissileCount and MissileAngle to the Missile spell so that it's easy to do Multishot. Then it'll be easy to give bosses an 8-direction missile.
I will add an "auto-aim" option to spells that just aims at the nearest valid target -- that's probably how I'll do the post-effect to achieve Chain Lightning.
You're thinking along the right lines. Plenty of good ideas here. I definitely need to get 0.11 out the door.
I was hoping someone would experiment with this stuff, as there are obviously weird combos that I wouldn't have thought of.
The idea of post_power is to have some effect happen when a spell lands, usually just a non-hazard graphical effect. I plan on adding a pre_power as well so that interesting graphical things can happen. This is obviously to accomplish things like blood spurts or sparks, but it definitely opens up some fun things...
I'll check on that Heal post-power effect. It might be doing something bad like dividing by zero. Obviously not a combo I anticipated.
I'll also check on that Teleport post-power. Probably the "Teleport Target (x,y)" isn't set, so it might be porting to random/garbage int which will almost always be way off the map.
I can add static damage (instead of weapon-based damage) to spells. I also plan to add a multiplier option to damage e.g. does 150% of weapon damage, or 50% of weapon damage.
I have plenty more to do for powers.
Multishot, Vengeance, and Freeze are still hard-coded (they have unique mechanics that will require new base spell types).
Right now the spell tree is the same as the first 20 IDs. Instead this will be moved to config file.
I haven't given much thought to the "source" of post-powers. I'll probably expand on this in a later release.
Chain Lightning and Vampiric effects will be added eventually.
I'll find a cut-off point and release what I have soon!
Dimensions vary by engine, but most at least stick to powers-of-two. E.g. my engine uses 64px by 32px base tiles.
Some engines use two floor layers, with the uppermost using alpha transparency to easily blend different tile types. My engine uses simple transition tiles (I use a hard map load between major areas, so I don't need many transitions within one tileset).
Normal and spec maps aren't used during runtime in typical 2D isometric games. If a particular tile only looks good with its normal/spec map, it's better to render it isometric in Blender
I think the proportions could use some tweaking. Most centaurs are proportioned as if a regular human was stitched to a regular horse. You'd have to make the horse body much larger (or the human part much smaller) to fit those dimensions. As it is now, it looks like a human torso attached to a pony.
Tartos is correct.
Note: treasure can drop +/-3 levels, on a bell curve % chance (5,10,20,30,20,10,5). So if you place a level 4 treasure, there's a 5% chance of getting a level 1 treasure and a 10% chance of getting a level 6 treasure.
Followup-Note: if the treasure roll determines a treasure of level 0 or below, no treasure is given.
Creatures drop loot based on their creature level, same bell curve math applies. But each creature has a % chance of dropping loot at all, whereas map events always drop treasure as specified.
At some point I will add Powers and Enemy Spawns to events. So a trap room might spawn a load of zombies, or a trap tile might shoot a poison dart at you.
All,
https://code.google.com/p/flare-engine/wiki/PowerDefinitions
A hastily-thrown-together help page for the powers.txt file.
Tartos,
Here's the current Powers definition file
https://code.google.com/p/flare-engine/source/browse/trunk/resources/pow...
I'm using a primitive "ini" format for most of my config files. I'm open to the idea of moving to something more standard at some point.
I like the spitters too! Essentially, under the hood, they're the same as skeleton archers or goblin spearmen. It's a plain missile. But it's funny how just a few variable tweaks and new art can make something so vicious! Hint though: fire resist gear really helps. It rounds in your favor, so even 1% fire resistance will reduce fire damage by 1 point.
I think antlions or zombies that start behind cave walls is perfectly okay. Used smartly/sparingly anyway.
On those tiny dead-end rooms I might put some chests or other containers. If you can figure out how the container events work feel free to add them, otherwise I'll go ahead and add those after.
Tip: I suggest having a copy of the cave map open in Tiled and using the mouse cursor + status bar to see coordinates, to place enemies.
Two nice entries for this challenge!
http://opengameart.org/category/art-tags/starter-set
Please vote by clicking "Add to Favorites" where appropriate
Random aiming would be great, I like that as a possible post-effect.
If you want to take a crack at populating the cave map, go for it! It's one of the final things remaining for the 0.11 release. Adding existing creatures is easy enough.
I wanted the cave to have slightly tougher creatures than the dungeon area, maybe enemy level 5-8. You'll see I made three new Antlions for the caves: spitter, blinker, burster. I need to make a few more creature variations for the Caves (at least some goblins and minotaurs). If you have ideas or want to take a crack at making them, lemme know.
If you really want to make new monsters, try this out. https://code.google.com/p/flare-engine/wiki/MonsterLevels It's untested, just a first stab at how monsters might scale. Some existing monsters need to be edited. All of it will be tested (and probably changed drastically).
If you're interested with helping with documentation instead, that would be great too. The main need is to document the file formats. If you want to do this, I'm happy to answer all questions. We can put the resulting docs in the wiki. The documents aren't really time-sensitive or tied to the regular releases. I plan to get around to it eventually... maybe in the break between v0.11 and .12, especially now that there's a lot to play around with.
I definitely plan on having only a few base spells, typically defined by the "motion" of the spell.
Current Base Types:
And I'll be adding
I'll also add a MissileCount and MissileAngle to the Missile spell so that it's easy to do Multishot. Then it'll be easy to give bosses an 8-direction missile.
I will add an "auto-aim" option to spells that just aims at the nearest valid target -- that's probably how I'll do the post-effect to achieve Chain Lightning.
You're thinking along the right lines. Plenty of good ideas here. I definitely need to get 0.11 out the door.
This is hilarious!
I was hoping someone would experiment with this stuff, as there are obviously weird combos that I wouldn't have thought of.
The idea of post_power is to have some effect happen when a spell lands, usually just a non-hazard graphical effect. I plan on adding a pre_power as well so that interesting graphical things can happen. This is obviously to accomplish things like blood spurts or sparks, but it definitely opens up some fun things...
I'll check on that Heal post-power effect. It might be doing something bad like dividing by zero. Obviously not a combo I anticipated.
I'll also check on that Teleport post-power. Probably the "Teleport Target (x,y)" isn't set, so it might be porting to random/garbage int which will almost always be way off the map.
I can add static damage (instead of weapon-based damage) to spells. I also plan to add a multiplier option to damage e.g. does 150% of weapon damage, or 50% of weapon damage.
I have plenty more to do for powers.
I'll find a cut-off point and release what I have soon!
p0ss,
I think the proportions could use some tweaking. Most centaurs are proportioned as if a regular human was stitched to a regular horse. You'd have to make the horse body much larger (or the human part much smaller) to fit those dimensions. As it is now, it looks like a human torso attached to a pony.
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