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About this blog

Development blog for the 2.5D dungeon crawler game "The Fire of Ardor"

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The Fire of Ardor - Post Mortem (Dungeon Crawler Challenge))

This is the post-mortem for the dungeon crawler challenge submission The Fire of Ardor. You can find the project here: It is done. The last two months have been exciting, as well as exhausting. I took the challenge as an opportunity to push the development of the raycasting game engine I started years ago. I wanted to create a game in order to be forced to implement engine features as they are needed by the game. I always wanted to create an RPG-style game. In order to be realistic according to the time schedule, I cut many of my ideas: There should be three small dungeon levels with different enemy types per level and only few NPCs and items. However, finally, I had to further cut down my goals in order to hold the deadline. Engine Programming vs. Game Programming Using the game as a driver for engine development worked out well. The positive effect of the deadline is that I had to focus on important aspects and I didn't have the comfort to defer the implementation of inconvenient tasks. When I started the development of the game in the end of December, many of the engine features weren't finished. There was no collision detection, no animated sprites and no UI elements, just to name a few. In fact, I spent most of the time in developing engine features, fixing bugs and developing tools. I didn't have any level editor, so I had to edit the level in a hex editor. The level editor I have now is far from being complete. Since I only implemented UI elements that were necessary for the game, the editor contains almost no UI and is controlled by a bunch of keyboard shortcuts. Although I had to cut my expectations during development in order to ship a full game and to meet the requirements, I am very satisfied with the end result. There is only one dungeon level, only three different enemy types and only one non-enemy NPC. Nevertheless, I implemented sword fighting, fireball spells, a simple conversation system for talking to the NPC and reading books. I have a couple of items and a win and lose condition. All in all, I would say that the game is far from perfect, but a very well-rounded thing, also considering the fact that I only had time for development after work and after my little daughter was sleeping. What was bad I spent a lot of time on the collision detection code in the engine. In theory, collision detection in 2D space is relatively easy to implement - and in fact it was easy to detect collisions. The difficult part was to move the player without suddenly stopping on a collision (i.e. adjust the movement vector so that the player slides along a wall instead of getting stuck). The current code works, but it is not perfect, since it can glitch in some rare cases (no time to fix that though). The UI code also swallowed a lot of time, although it was only needed for the menu and the inventory screen. I came up with the idea of different automatic widget layout containers -- they are roughly implemented, but in some combinations (those which I don't use in the game) the layout is simply wrong. While the engine code is still pretty okay-ish, at some point the game code started to get messier and messier. Before continue developing this project (more levels, features), I will have to invest some weeks of refactoring. It felt a little bit like the effect that you have on a game jam (I also participated in the Global Game Jam this year and it was very hard to switch to another project for a weekend, knowing that so many things were undone). Building C - Python Extensions on Windows is a pain (Cython works really well for me on Linux). I didn't manage to create a Windows executable, yet. That means that the game is currently Linux only. Sorry Windows guys, I'll keep on digging into that (different compilers, different architectures, 32 and 64 bit libs) and deliver a Windows build as soon as possible. What was good Having a goal with a fixed deadline was motivating. I never worked that steadily on a hobby project. That effect was even enhanced when I decided to write blog posts about the development -- now I was not the only one who knew that I was developing something and I wanted to show that I would be able to complete the project. Having the deadline in mind, I also learned to cut features that would not contribute to the end product in an important manner. For example I cut an almost finished lantern that could be used to light a dark dungeon level, because other things were more important (for instance spending money for buying potions). While cutting down features, I still kept an eye on the features I implemented, like the sliding animations in the menu and health bar, the sounds in the inventory, etc. For the entities in the game I used an ECS approach. This one turned out to be very flexible. It was easy to add new items enemy types without or with only little coding. I also like the tools I used. I used Gimp for drawing sprites and textures, Blender for pre-rendering some of the sprites and audacity for editing sounds. The music tracks are CC0-licensed pieces from opengameart, the sounds are also CC0 licensed files from freesound and opengameart which I edited to fit to the game. All in all, I think that the game has a reasonably consistent art style (although the level of detail tends to differ from sprite to sprite). Conclusion I am satisfied with the end result, although I achieved less than I originally planned. I want to thank my wife who has been very patient with me the last couple of weeks. I am looking forward for you guys playing the game and giving feedback. Thank you for reading. Carsten
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The Fire of Ardor - Dungeon Crawler: Menu and Inventory

Hi again, this time I'm posting a little status update video. First of all, there is a main menu (with only two options yet, I'll add options and load/save game if time will allow me). Further, there is an in-game menu which allows the player to go back to the main menu (challenge requirement). The interesting part is the new inventory UI. Items can now be collected and consumed. The UI shows some description texts of the items on mouse hover. The inventory layout is inspired by the Gothic RPG games. Finally, the video shows what will be the entrance to the dungeons and the gargoyles from different angles.  
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The Fire of Ardor - Dungeon Crawler (Small Update)

Hi, here is a small update on the development status of The Fire of Ardor. The biggest change regards the engine. I introduced the Entity-Component-System (ECS) pattern for the renderers (UI and raycaster). This means that renderers (which were treated differently before) are now usual systems. There are several articles about the ECS pattern on Gamedev.net for further reading [1]. A visible change is that there are new sprites (see screenshots below): The meat will be dropped by defeated rats. The player is now able to collect items (currently health potions, mana potions and meat). After playing a sound, the item disappears from the level and it is stored inside the player's inventory (which doesn't have a UI yet and thus it's not visible). The gargoyle sprites are renderings from an old Blender model I created several years ago. I edited the Blender render output in Gimp so that it fits the overall pixelated style of the game, although some additional work might be necessary in order to reduce black pixel artifacts. The gargoyles look different from certain view angles. They consist of 16 single sprites. The correct sprite is determined by the relative position and rotation between the camera and the entity. The next steps will be implementing a conversation system (a text box is already shown in the first screenshot), as well as  creating a UI for the inventory in order to view and use the collected items. Thank you for reading!   --- [1] Articles about the ECS pattern (random order, more or less random selection) ↩︎  
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The Fire of Ardor - Developing a Dungeon Crawler Challenge Submission

Hi, this is my first blog entry here and also the first time that I actively participate in Gamedev.net. I am a software developer who develops application software at work. At home, I develop games in my spare time. I used to read Gamedev.net articles and blog posts for inspiration and motivation. Since I have the RSS feed subscribed on my phone, I read about the Gamedev.net Frogger challenge and I thought that I'm not interested in Frogger, but that I liked the idea of the community challenges. When the Frogger challenge was over, I read about the dungeon crawler challenge and I thought: "Okay guys, now you've got me!". I always wanted to create an old-school RPG in the style of Daggerfall or Ultima Underworld with modern controls (although I never really played them). More than 10 years ago, I started to write a small raycasting renderer in C++. Raycasting is the rendering technique that was used by the first person shooters of the early 90's (see also [1]). I never really finished that renderer and put the project ad acta, until, some years later, I stumbled across the old code and started porting it to Cython[2] in order to be able to use it with the Python programming language[3]. After some time, I was able to render level geometry (walls, floor, ceilings and sky), as well as sprites. After solving the biggest problems, I lost interest in the project again -- until now. I thought the dungeon crawler challange was a great opportunity for motivating myself to work on the engine. At the same time I would create a game to actually prove that the engine was ready to be used. I started to draw some textures in Gimp[4] in order to get myself in the right mood. Then I started to work on unfinished engine features. The following list shows features that were missing end of December 2018: Level editor Hit tests for mouse clicks Processing mouse scroll events Writing modified level files to disc (for the editor) UI Text Buttons Images Containers (layouting child widgets in particular) Scheduling tasks (async jobs that are run at every frame) Collision detection for sprite entities Collision detection for level geometry (walls) Music playback Fullscreen toggle Animated sprites Directional sprites (sprites look different depending on the view angle) Scaling sprites Refactorings / cleaning up code Documentation & tutorials Fixing tons of bugs Luckily, many of the above features are implemented right now (middle of January 2019) and I can start focusing on the game itself (see screenshots below; all sprites, textures and UI are hand-drawn using Gimp[4] and Inkscape[5]).   The game takes place in a world which is infested by the curse of the daemon lord Ardor. Burning like a fire and spreading like a plague, the curse causes people to become greedy and grudging, some of them even turn into bloodthirsty monsters. By reaching out to reign supreme, the fire of Ardor burns its way into our world. The player is a nameless warrior who crested the silver mountain in order to enter Ardor's world and defeat him. To open the dimension gate, the player has to defeat tree dungeons and obtain three soul stones from the daemon's guardians.   The following videos show some progress: First attempt: Rendering level geometry and sprites; testing textures; navigating through doors (fade-in and out effects)   First update: Adding a lantern to light up the dungeon:   Second update: Rendering directional sprites and animations   Raycasting (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting ↩︎ Cython: https://cython.org/ ↩︎ Python: https://www.python.org/ ↩︎ Gimp: https://www.gimp.org/ ↩︎ Inkscape: https://www.inkscape.org/ ↩︎
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