[RTC] New Dungeon:Castle Lynchegate

[Seriously Unserious]

I'm working on a new custom dungeon, Castle Lynchegate.

Castle Lynchegate, located near Banville, was the stronghold of one of Lord Chaos' most powerful minions, a necromancer by the name of Lynche. It is now 3 years after the end of the Chaos Wars (the time of Chaos Strikes Back), but the world is still experiencing many hardships and strife. Lord Chaos may have been defeated at least, by the Grey Lord's 4 brave champions 3 year ago, but many of his minions still roam the lands, stirring up wars, and strife wherever they are. Although The Grey Lord and Lord Theron are doing all they can to stamp out these pockets of chaos, there are simply too many of them, and some of Chaos' minions are growing in power, frighteningly fast and may even rise to become a new Lord Chaos if left unchecked. To stop this before it comes to pass, The Grey Lord, calls ones again upon his champions of the Chaos Wars to defeat these many threats.

Castle Lynchegate is meant to be the first of many new adventures about the struggle to end the last of Lord Chaos' minions and truly restore balance to the lands.

The mighty Lord Lynche, ruler of Castle Lynchegate was defeated and slain near the end of the Chaos Wars, when an army led by Duke Zed of Banville and the mighty Wizard Gothmog, along with 24 mighty heroes, stormed the castle and slew Lynche, but the 24 heroes died in the battle, Duke Zed, and Gothmog were the only survivors of the battle with the necromancer, Lynche. After the battle, Duke Zed commissioned Gothmog to build a crypt and shrine for the 24 heroes, on the border between Lynchegate and Banville. Once completed, the 24 heroes were interred in the mausoleum in mirrors, much like the champions of Lord Order during the Chaos Wars.

New Banville is on the verge of war, as the evil Barron Trathe, once a general in Lord Chaos' armies, prepares to invade Banville and claim it for himself, and what's worse, is there are reports of strange activities around Castle Lynchegate, and some people in the area have even gone missing, even guards paroling the area have gone missing! Due to the coming invasion, Duke Zed can't spare anyone to reinforce Lynchegate or investigate the disappearances. Instead he has ordered the Lynchegate evacuated and all roads into the castle's lands closed. Duke Zed has sent for Gothmog to help with investigating Lynchegate, but Gothmog is busy with an important mission of his own, for Lord Theron, but could spare enough time to revive 4 heroes from the crypt and send them to investigate the castle and find out what's happening, and find the missing people, if possible.

Download Links:
Download this dungeon from this Shared OneDrive (in the 'Custom Dungeons' folder)

[RAF68]

when your game will be released ???

[Seriously Unserious]

Not sure yet, but probably within a couple of months. I've almost finished the hardest part, which took me months of alternately experimenting and giving up for a while to finally get through. I am have finished a design for a system that should produce fully random weather for the outdoor portions of my adventure. I just need to test it now to make sure it works, and in the meanwhile, I've also gotten much of the early part of the dungeon designed and just need to add traps, tricks, puzzles and monsters to it. I've also completed a new set of 24 fully original characters, which for me was quite a challenge, since graphics are not my strong suit.

Thanks for your interest, that will definitely motivate me to work harder on finishing this knowing people are eagerly waiting for a finished dungeon.

[Gambit37]

Random weather, interesting.... is this in RTC or DSB?

[beowuuf]

Once I know the engine I can putv a WIP line in the dungeon list. You can edit it in to the subject line too!

[Seriously Unserious]

Random weather, interesting.... is this in RTC or DSB?

it's in rtc.

Once I know the engine I can putv a WIP line in the dungeon list. You can edit it in to the subject line too!

Thanks. My intentions are to share this system with the community when it's working. I just finished testing it and ran into another problem, well actually it's the same problem I keep running into and its beginning to take on that banging my head into a brick wall feel now. Every time I think I've found a solution to it, it rears its ugly head again.

Basically what I'm trying to create is a branching event chain where only 1 of several possibilities can ever be active at once, but I think it would be better to post a separate thread on this issue so I'll be more likely to get my call for help noticed.

[Gambit37]

You could try posting any problems in the RTC editing forums, though I'm not sure who here is still using the engine. I'm afraid I can't help you on that as I'm now using DSB and have pretty much forgotten most of RTCs mechanics!

[Seriously Unserious]

Good news!

I believe I have gotten the major bugs sorted out of the random weather model, and this will probably turn out to be by far the most difficult part of the dungeon, so I should be able to progress nicely from this point on.

[RAF68]

we await your dungeon

[Seriously Unserious]

Thank you. I am making steady progress so far. One thing that's really slowing me down though is every now and then I come up with something to add to my adventure that requires new graphics, which isn't my strong suit.

If anyone on this board is willing and able to contribute some graphics work I'd be very grateful, just post here that you're interested and I'll PM you with the details of what I need. For the graphically inclined what I'm looking for should be pretty simple. You would, of course, get full credit for your contributions.

[Seriously Unserious]

Just a quick update:

I am still working on this dungeon, building events and developing the setting. It's slow going getting some of the events set up the way I want, as some of them require a lot of objects to make them work right, and there's a lot of grunt work in getting them all in place and set up. I'll post progress reports to let anyone who's interested in this dungeon know I'm still working on it. Of course, words of encouragement, suggestions or expressions of interest will let me know that there are people out there looking to give this a try and can only serve to motivate me to work that much harder to get this out sooner.

[the master]

Dont worry we are all waiting with baited breath for a new dungeon to appear on the forum.

[Gambit37]

I'm sort of the opposite. I take my sweet time over things and if people ask me when it'll be released I get all hot and stressed.

[cocoetnono]

we are waiting for sure!

[RAF68]

yes I also expect your new dungeon

[Seriously Unserious]

Thanks for the words of encouragement. Don't worry, I will finish this and release it but progress has slowed a bit as I'm currently taking some college classes and don't have as much time for designing this dungeon as I'd like.

[Chaos-Shaman]

great work SU.... i'll help ya out, sounds like you have everything under control. i love the reintroduction of the original story. i wrote a story too, never made use of it. similar it is to what you have, you have left over minions, in my version Essence of Chaos, Chaos's essence lingured after the fusing spawning Chaos once again.
you have all my support SU. you have great talent on story telling dude. nice job, i need to have at look at it.

[Seriously Unserious]

Thanks. I also appreciate you're helping me out with debugging that problem I was having with one of the sections of the game, and the graphics contributions you're currently working on.

For those still waiting with baited breath, one thing I will say about this game is it's shaping up to be very different from your standard DM-style dungeon crawler. It makes the development much slower then if I were to just throw in some hostile monsters to kill or avoid and a few traps, puzzles and secrets but I think the mood and setting building will be well worth the extra wait.

[beowuuf]

That is indeed weorth the extra time - keep at it!

[Chaos-Shaman]

i imagine it will be stunning with cut scenes with info storyline, changing monster moods, guards who fight along with you as you go. i'm looking forward to the story.

[Seriously Unserious]

There will also be monsters (NPC's) that you can talk with, or question/interrogate for information, and as you do so the story will unravel and you will begin to develop a better idea of what's happening and what you must do about it.

[Chaos-Shaman]

when will it be finished? , no rush just curious

[Seriously Unserious]

Not sure yet. Right now I'm working on upgrading the NPC speech system. I started out using the "Speech" wallitem, but I don't really have the kind of control over the speed the game scrolls the text which makes it hard to read it all, and there are many areas where this text is important to the party's overall progress through the game, and provides important clues so the user knows what to do. Right now I'm still so early in the development process that I wouldn't want to hazard a guess.

I am considering releasing a playable demo that will cover the early part of the game when I have enough done.

[Seriously Unserious]

I have a playable demo available now, check the first post for a download link. Please feel free to comment on what you like, don't like, or any bugs you see.

@beowuuf: can you also post an alternate link as well?

Thanks

[Sophia]

Things I've noticed so far:

Spoiler

When you're initially limited to just one party member, it's weird how you as soon as the next one joins the one leaves. Maybe this is a limitation of RTC's mechanics, but it seems really clunky. To be honest, to get this limitation and then have it removed a few minutes later seems silly to even bother with it anyway.

Spoiler

Trying to click on the guards with the Duke's Commission doesn't work. It throws it at them which they take as an attack and then kill you. This is the same problem DM2 shopkeepers had.

Spoiler

On the other hand, talking to the guards in the barracks is accomplished by clicking on them. This feels inconsistent with the action-based way of interacting with them that was shown before.

Spoiler

"Requasition"

Spoiler

The insides of buildings have windows, but the outsides show solid walls. This is... odd.

Spoiler

The one-frame cutting back to the main screen in between full-screen dialogue screens is rather grating, in my opinion.

Spoiler

If you have something already in the mouse hand, you don't get the potion from Sister Alisia.

Spoiler

If you accidentally throw something at Sister Alisia, it's stuck at her feet and you can't get it back.

Spoiler

The combination of the lack of any sort of semi-random wall decorations, the fact that the walls don't flip with each step like in DM, and the rain reducing visibility makes the forest regions very monotonous and somewhat overly difficult to navigate.

[Seriously Unserious]

Spoiler

When you're initially limited to just one party member, it's weird how you as soon as the next one joins the one leaves. Maybe this is a limitation of RTC's mechanics, but it seems really clunky. To be honest, to get this limitation and then have it removed a few minutes later seems silly to even bother with it anyway.

Spoiler

I did it this way as a story element. I am planning on a game intro in the future that will explain things like this in more detail, but here's the short version of it, you start out as Gothmog in astral form reviving a single character, which is all he can handle in this form (he's not the Grey Lord after all) but does have a way of granting that party member the power to revive the rest of the party. This is also a prototype of this mechanic so I didn't want to make it too important to the story until I knew it would work.

Spoiler

Trying to click on the guards with the Duke's Commission doesn't work. It throws it at them which they take as an attack and then kill you. This is the same problem DM2 shopkeepers had.

Spoiler

Try putting the Commission in someone's action hand.

Spoiler

On the other hand, talking to the guards in the barracks is accomplished by clicking on them. This feels inconsistent with the action-based way of interacting with them that was shown before.

Spoiler

The logic behind this is you are not using an item, you are starting a conversation, with the guards in the barracks, whereas with the guards on duty, you are using an item they need to see in order to let you through.

"Requasition"

Thanks for catching that, I'll fix it for the next version.

Spoiler

The insides of buildings have windows, but the outsides show solid walls. This is... odd.

Spoiler

It is. I just need a suitable graphic to fix that. I can see if Chaos-Shaman, who's been working on new graphics for Castle Lynchgate can whip something up for that.

The one-frame cutting back to the main screen in between full-screen dialogue screens is rather grating, in my opinion.

Unfortunately I don't know how to fix that. I tried several methods of fixing that problem but when I remove that one-frame cutting the game skips to the last info screen. I'm not sure if that's to do with one of the unresolved bugs or if there's something I'm missing here.

Spoiler

If you have something already in the mouse hand, you don't get the potion from Sister Alisia.

Spoiler

Interesting, I'll have to add a fix for that, should be a fairly simple fix though.

The combination of the lack of any sort of semi-random wall decorations, the fact that the walls don't flip with each step like in DM, and the rain reducing visibility makes the forest regions very monotonous and somewhat overly difficult to navigate.

I've discussed several options for better outdoor wallsets with Chaos-Shaman, who's doing many of the graphics for this game, so by the time the main game comes out I should have a new wallset that really looks good. I'm also still working on more scenery items to add in as well.

This is still very much early in development so many changes are possible and likely before this dungeon is done. I made this demo to give people a chance to see some of the basics of what I'm working on here, and to see what people might like done differently.

Thank you for trying this out, and for your feedback, it'll definitely shape how I progress in developing this dungeon.

[beowuuf]

Oooooh, demo! Noooo, Manchester trip then comic-con!

I'm actually away this weekend and need to prepare for that tonight. Will try to get an alternate link up at sometime, but not get the chance to play this until after comic-con Didn't get back to CS's demo yet to finish it either!


But yay!

[Chaos-Shaman]

Unfortunately I don't know how to fix that. I tried several methods of fixing that problem but when I remove that one-frame cutting the game skips to the last info screen. I'm not sure if that's to do with one of the unresolved bugs or if there's something I'm missing here.

have a look at my old EoC SU, you'll see i solved that problem in an unusual way, but i don't mind the little flicker, no big deal

[Chaos-Shaman]

If you accidentally throw something at Sister Alisia, it's stuck at her feet and you can't get it back.

already solved with simple solution

I just need a suitable graphic to fix that. I can see if Chaos-Shaman, who's been working on new graphics for Castle Lynchgate can whip something up for that.

shouldn't be too difficult SU

[Chaos-Shaman]

SU will provide instructions that will better explain RTCs mechanics, how on our right side of monsters is the ACTION side and the left side is for throwing and placing items on floor, i thought GG did a splendid job of allowing the option rather than a straight action, too much straight line thinking here that can hinder progress. must think outside the norm on this one. good demo SU