Thieves and Warriors

August 17, 2009

Here's a little preview of a game I'm working on, called "Thieves and Warriors". I've mentioned it before.

(all the screenshots can be clicked on for full size view)

The game is somewhat inspired by old RPG games like Phantasie 3 (oh, and Pirates! as well, obviously), but even more inspired by oldschool pen and paper RPG's. Ther'll be lots of stats and numbers, none of it hidden away. And not so much animations or effects - more static screens and menus.

You control a party of adventurers. I won't have a limit on how many, but eventually it will become difficult for you to manage, I guess.

The game starts off in a town, and you will also be returning to the town after completing quests. When in the town, you'll be able to visit the market or tavern.

The tavern is where you get your quests. The quests will be auto-generated, but quite simple to their nature.

To get where you're going, there will be one or more days of journey, where you can be beset by foul weather, food shortage and more.

You can also be attacked, and I'm not quite done with how that will work yet - thinking of having it like a game board with abstract pieces.

When you reach your destination, which is inevitably some sort of dungeon (keeping it classic, remember), which I haven't even started to visualize yet - it will be auto-generated, but apart from that I don't know. I'm considering a "doodles on graph paper" kind of look, but need to experiment some more.

Making the background pictures have been quite a challenge for me - have never used Poser to this extent before, and I'm really quite happy with the result :-)

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Comments

Robinson Mason

2009-09-03 19:14:48

This looks great as I just covered Phantasie I and II on my blog - one suggestion on the battles - since you have such great graphics elsewhere it would seem a pity to have the Parcheesi like tokens as characters - could you shrink down some of the existing art and make them into character icons instead? Also, the actual Phantasie 1 and 2 battles are pretty straightforward with enemies in 1-3 rows, with only thieves having the ability to sneak and melee attack the 2nd and 3rd row. Now, to try out the Escape from the Dungeon game demo! It looks like your board might be more like an Ultima 3 style. Keep up the good work.

Mattias

2009-09-13 08:32:17

Well, the thing is, I want this game to have a huge variety when it comes to character types and enemies - way more than I could ever make individual art for. The graphics I have are more mood-setting pieces: you don't actually play the characters portrayed on the images.

I'm struggling a bit with how to keep the abstractedness from P&P roleplaying and still make something as visual as a computer game... I'll be giving this more thought, I think...

Robinson Mason

2009-09-16 06:33:06

Mattias - OK, I understand. I like the idea of a ton of characters, too. How about instead of Parcheesi, they look like abstract Monopoly tokens instead? A hero could choose a simply rendered sword, a shield, a holy symbol, a crystal ball, a wizard's hat, a bow, or other items that look like little plastic or die cast tokens with next to no detail (like 3d models in primary colors with no texturing) but a distinctness from one another. Monsters could be represented by an angry demon-like face, distinguished by different colors, etc.

Mattias

2009-09-29 09:57:54

Yeah, I see your point - I did some tests, but at the scale I need for this, I'm struggling to make tokens of that type which looks nice - it just looks messy.

I'll give it some more thoughts though, maybe try making something like gems or glass beads. I do agree that the parcheesi style markers I have now doesn't quite fit the concept.

Verious

2010-04-08 07:37:37

Mattias, have you made any further progress on Thieves and Warriors?

Mattias

2010-04-08 12:16:59

Actually, I've made quite a bit of progress - but not on the coding or art side of it.

I realised that I needed to take a step back with this, and sit down and plan out what I was actually going to do. So really, all the progress I've had recently have been using pen&paper - getting some good design decisions locked down.

I'm not quite sure when I'll get back to coding though - time will tell :-)

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