Secrets of Castle Madness - Grid based dungeon crawler

[kingius]

Here is what I've been working on since my wife picked me up a Spectrum +2A for my birthday: a brand new grid based dungeon crawler called The Secrets of Castle Madness.

This is an early shot of the exploration side of the game, where you wander the halls in first person view.


This is an early shot of the fighting, from where I was going to make the battles turn based. However now I have them running in real time, so the fighting is much more dynamic!


Here is an early shot of my work on the inventory/character screens. This is still not far progressed from this point in my most current build.


The game progress is such that the player can walk around a level and interact with various things, fight a single monster (and defeat it or be defeated) and view the inventory of each character in the party. Still quite a lot of work to do yet. The game is being built for the DivMMC expansion and will therefore run off an SD Card. I'm just a guy making this in my spare time, so if you like the progress so far then feel free to leave a like or a comment.

[flatduckrecords]

This looks great @kingius, thanks for sharing. Looking forward to hearing more about it!

Are you still developing directly on your Spectrum? How is that going?

[MtM]

Your game looks great in its early stages! It looks like exactly my kind of party rpg in the first person
of sorts, you just don't get them anymore, I don't like isometric perspective rpgs. Are you going to
crowdfund it or sell it on itchio etc? I would buy it as it stands now. Any chance of 6 chars in
the main party instead of just 4? There are so few games like this around now let alone on the Speccy.

Good luck with it anyway, what are you writing it in, surely not Speccy basic? Keep us updated with it!

[kingius]

This looks great @kingius, thanks for sharing. Looking forward to hearing more about it!

Are you still developing directly on your Spectrum? How is that going?

Thanks for the comments, appreciated!

Yes I'm still developing directly on the Spectrum itself. Development is going well I think. My process is to work a little on it every day and build towards a demo on a Friday evening. At that point my wife has a look at what I've done, gives it an actual playtest to see that it's working and finally feeds back on the progress. Often the weekly build is just showing some small new feature, but sometimes it's a revision of what came before to improve it. For example, we felt that the combat didn't give clear enough visual indications of what was happening so the goal for the following week's build was to sort that out problem specifically.

[kingius]

Your game looks great in its early stages! It looks like exactly my kind of party rpg in the first person
of sorts, you just don't get them anymore, I don't like isometric perspective rpgs. Are you going to
crowdfund it or sell it on itchio etc? I would buy it as it stands now. Any chance of 6 chars in
the main party instead of just 4? There are so few games like this around now let alone on the Speccy.

Good luck with it anyway, what are you writing it in, surely not Speccy basic? Keep us updated with it!

Thanks and you are right, this kind of game is getting quite rare. I wasn't planning on crowd funding and I don't really know about itchio, I may be a little out of touch with the indie gaming scene! You might have to explain a bit about that to me.

On the number of characters, I was originally going to go for six, but then settled back on four due to being able to use fewer character classes and therefore less memory on that aspect of the game. Everything is constantly a battle for space, the Spectrum's memory is so small for this kind of game, you have to be a little clever in how you use it.

The game runs as compiled machine code and is nice and snappy. I only update areas of the screen I need to as well so first person exploring runs pretty quickly. BASIC is way too slow for this kind of thing.

[Ralf]

It's good and bad that you are developing on real Spectrum.

Good because it's a great experience.
Bad because it's much less comfortable and history shows that guys who
code on real Spectrums don't finish their projects.

I would strongly advise you to develop on PC and just do the testing on Spectrum.
But it's your free time of course

[dpllzz]

Any news on this? Game looks fantastic!

[Wall_Axe]

How would you handle labels if programming on the spectrum itself?

[PeterJ]

How would you handle labels if programming on the spectrum itself?

I'm not sure I understand the question. Assemblers that run on the Spectrum handle labels. Could you clarify the question?

[+3code]

How would you handle labels if programming on the spectrum itself?

Mean you entry points from conditional/unconditional jumps (like "goto x")?

[Wall_Axe]

Yeah if people enter ASM commands as data statements they'd have to manage labels themselves, but I presume the OP is using an actual assembler. Seen as he is using a 128k computer.

As in if someone uses the 48k spectrum itself they might have to actually enter memory addresses instead of label names...if they want to use as much space as possible.

[ANDREWRYALS]

Just my sort of game, good luck with the development.

[+3code]

As in if someone uses the 48k spectrum itself they might have to actually enter memory addresses instead of label names...if they want to use as much space as possible.

AFAIK, native assemblers allow you to use labels.

[Ralf]

I suppose the truth is somewhere in-between here
Yes, you can use labels (and comments) in native Spectrum assemblers but they use up memory very quickly.

Assembler code always takes much more memory than compiled machine code,so if you want to make a game occupying
all Spectrum memory then you have to break your code into several modules and compile them one by one
and then join the code together

I've never done it that way and I'm happy that I didn't have to.

And even if you break your code unto several modules, then your memory is still tight. So if you use labels, then they
will be usually short and "meaningless".
You won't use labels like "ClearBackgroundBuffer", it will have to be "CBB" or so. And after some time you won't
remember what you meant by "CBB".

Writing code on real Spectrum is by modern standards a very crappy job. Unless you are one of these 5 people in the world
who actually enjoy it