Hey all,
I’ve been doing a bit of research trying to find an engine that suits my learning and end game goals. I’m enjoying my time in Defold and I’m 99% sure it’ll tick all the boxes I’m looking at getting checked.
How capable is the engine towards making games like the Eye of The Beholder, Etrian Oddsey, Might and Magic, etc?
First of all: I love the genre of game you’re going for! There’s not enough old school dungeon crawling nowadays.
And to answer your question: I do not see any immediate issues with Defold for that kind of game.
How do you plan to represent the dungeon? You could use a perspective camera and a 3D world and move on a fixed grid. There’s inspiration to be had with what @d954mas has done: Noname 2.5 Shooter (Open source). You could also use a normal orthographic camera and use wall sections with the correct perspective like in the original games.
You can make such game in defold. It is not difficult.You can use sprites or models and perspective camera.
The main difficult that you need to make a level editor, because defold editor not suitable for such levels. You can try some 3rd-party for example tiled or make your own.
Thank you!
I didnt think there would be much of an issue, but its the the presenting the dungeon, camera angle I’m having trouble wrapping my head around at the moment. I come from an RPG Maker/Modding background wanting to move into working in an engine that gives me more freedom and doesnt lock me down too much. So while I have the ideas, I’m still going to be a long way off from producing any sort of workable prototype.
@d954mas ,
Did you used TileD for your shooter that you worked on? This was the other main issue I was trying to figure out how to do in Defold.
I’ve actually been working on an engine like this in the past few days! I’m having troubles with the side walls, though. I may have to figure out a simple shader to skew the texture, but turns out there’s no such thing as simple when it comes to shaders.
Yes I use tiled. I export level from it as json. Then I post process them. I need post process to make validations:level have spawn point, all doors have keys, monsters only in monster layer etc. Also to parse data from object layers.
I just finished most of the engine I mentioned:
It took me a while, mostly because I took a lot of dead ends. It’s a step beyond the old-school dungeon crawlers you mentioned, but a leap behind what @d954mas pulled off. There are some small graphical glitches (such as the wall texture being deformed on the sides) and pecularities (each texture has to be its own atlas), but overall I’m happy with how it turned out.
From what I learned, the way to go is probably to either make it much simpler like the old dungeon games (if you can’t ever see side walls that are not a part of the corridor you’re in, you can get away with a pre-skewed texture) or just use perspective camera and an actual 3d world. What I did is a weird hybrid that’s not really great, but good enough for my purposes.
Awesome! I remembered I made a more “classical” old school version on Livecoding a few years back. Unfortunately the whole series doesnt seem to be there though 