3D Dungeon Crawler engine for 68K Macs

[BacioiuC]

Hi everyone!

 

As I mentioned in a few of my posts I'm looking to develop and release a couple of games for 68K Macs this year. This thread will serve as a purpose of documenting the journey, possibly asking for help regarding obscure 68K issues and keeping the community up to date (if interested) in my work. The end goal of this effort is to release a first person dungeon crawler (possibly a port of one of my other games) and make it available to anyone, who owns at least a Macintosh Plus, in both digital and physical form. And while I'm at it, I'm doing this shareware style because what the heck, might as well pretend it's the late 80's and early 90's :).

 

Featured in the video:

- early 3D Raycasting

- scrolling backgrounds

- sprite scaling and rendering

- sprite atlasing

 

 

So far the engine supports importing of levels (designed with a really crude editor I did a few months back - a new one is on my list), can render at about 10-15 frames/s on a 020 processor in real-time mode (and a tad more performance can and will be squeezed out of it) and has support for texture mapping (though it doesn't run at > 1 fps on anything bellow an 040). The plan going forward is to design a new level editor that can take into account sprite placement and details / cell, settle down on a battle system (real-time battles or turn-based on a separate screen) and implementing needed game mechanics (dialogue system, object interactions, quest, entities).

 

I'm targeting an 030 as a required processor but a Plus can run it at lower graphical details (same resolution but with pixel doubling and lower rendering distance). Color is supported but not fully for the first game, mostly to keep costs down and to make sure I can focus on delivering the best performance for your B&W Compact Macs. Attached a couple more screenshots. Here's a video showing rendering happening in real-time as opposed to 1 / frame.

 

As for the release date, I'm targeting July/August. Once the game is out and going, using the engine to develop other games should be a breeze (scrolling background + 3D sprites can used for a Stellar7 clone with a lot of ease). It will be released as shareware and made available on the forums (with permission), bbs's and itch.io as well as a fully physical release with a Box, manual and 800K disks (might end up having to partner with a distribution company for this). Source will be shipped with the game on-release with a pretty permissive license.

 

 

[cheesestraws]

This is so cool.

[olePigeon]

Sweet!  Just like Bard's Tale.

[BacioiuC]

3 hours ago, cheesestraws said:

This is so cool.

 

Thanks :)! I've been playing a ton of games on SE/30 and I think it's due for some new releases!

3 hours ago, olePigeon said:

Sweet!  Just like Bard's Tale.

Not really, more closer to Wolfenstein 3D. Bard's tale (at least the 1st one) renders 2D Image at various scales to mimic 3D depth. This engine actually does 3D rendering. The benefit of Bard's Tale is that it can render graphics really fast but it's constrained to a first person perspective and on a grid. The upside of my engine is that you can do non-grid based movement, different heights and even use rudimentary 3D models at the cost of performance. Bard's tale rendering method is something I plan to explore in the future myself for other games. 

 

This is an example of how Bard's stale graphics are done and stored:

http://ludumdare.com/compo/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/full-wallset-template.png

 

It basically splits the screen into different regions and uses different image for the left side, one for the middle and one for the right side in different layers to simulate depth.

Edited January 12 by BacioiuC

[maceffects]

Following!

[olePigeon]

Ooo.  Could also see a sequel to Super Maze Wars. :o  Supra Maze Wars?