Dungeon Master Forum

(this is a follow up to the Escape from Dragon Mountain thread, so much has changed so I thought it was better to start a new thread)

This is more or less a formal announcement for our new DM inspired game in development. The idea of the project is to combine the atmosphere and spirit of classics like DM with today's gameplay innovations, techonology and visuals, and we're really happy how it's taking shape. We're a small independent game studio so we can't afford huge marketing budgets. So if you'd like to play this game on your iOS device, PC or Mac, please support us by spreading the word and liking us on Facebook. We're in this for real, so any help is much appreciated!

We'd also like to hear any feedback you might have: what sort of game play you would like to see, what platforms you would like to play the game on, etc. Anything else on your mind? We'll try to take eveybody's ideas and comments into account. However please note that we're not interested in merely creating a clone, so there will be no monsters, items, levels or anything straight from DM.

We just released a first batch of screen shots today. Here's one of them for you. Hope you like it! Check out our blog for the rest:
http://www.grimrock.net

Oohooooooooooooh!! This is looking wonderful! Really, really good, exactly what I've been waiting for in a DM clone. Seems to have the right balance of modern atmosphere and old-school charm (I love the hand-drawn items and portraits).

How does movement work? You have the 6 arrows which suggests you're sticking to step movement, but the viewport is rotated a bit, which suggests free movement in any direction?

Heheh, thanks Gambit! That made my day!

Movement & turning is tile based but we have an experimental free look feature. It really helps with picking up items from the floor, looking into pits, etc. We're still testing it out but it seems to work well.

Cool, I just went back to your blog and saw you'd answered the movement question, sorry for asking again! I'm really looking forward to this. Of course, you realise now that we're constantly going to be asking you "When is there a demo?"

Do you want us to comment here, or would you prefer people to comment on the blog?

Heh, no prob! We hope to release a demo soon but can't give a release date for it yet, sorry! There are some rough corners we need to work on before it can happen, and the first demo will quite likely be just a short level with a single monster or something like that.

Please feel free to comment anywhere you like, although the blog will be our primary information channel and we'll be more likely to answer your questions there.

Perfection.

No other word comes to my mind.

Yeah. It all looks awesome - the walls, the torch + light + smoke, etc.

I've noticed that each character has only two status bars (red and blue). Which one of the DM three ones is missing?

Thanks! Champion statistics are pretty much still work in progress. The bars are currently health and magic power / mana. Generally we're trying to have a streamlined set of statistics that are simple to understand but still provide enough game play variety.

*jump like a child waiting for Christmas gifts*

me have questions !
- how many people are working on Grimrock ? It looks soooo advanced.
- do you plan having outdoors levels (like Ishar series for example) ?
- how might work magic spells ? runes combination or direct cast or scroll or all of them ?
- do you think about providing an editor / scripting language ?
- on the 3rd screenshot, it looks like you cropped/resized the dungeon view so that we can have inventory on the right. that is just an excellent feature !
- are you aware that, despite that you don't want any DM material, it is THE "Dungeon Master Forever" we've been waiting for years ?

linflas wrote:*jump like a child waiting for Christmas gifts*

We'll do our best so that you don't have to wait until the next Christmas!

linflas wrote:- how many people are working on Grimrock ? It looks soooo advanced.

There's me (Petri) in charge of the coding, Olli is doing all the animations for the monsters and various dungeon pieces, Juho is modeling the monsters and most of the dungeon pieces, Antti is our multitalent guy doing all the item graphics and sound effects while acting as a technical artist at the same time. On top of this we have a company to run! That may seem like a lot for a 4 man team (and it is!) but luckily everybody is super excited about the project and have multiple years of experience in the games industry.

linflas wrote:- do you plan having outdoors levels (like Ishar series for example) ?

We're currently concentrating on pure dungeon game mechanics. Creating good looking outdoor environments would increase the workload tremendously, and with 4 team members we would not be able to make a game visually as good as we would like. Also there are some deep problems with tile based movement model and realistic unrestricted environments. Maybe in the sequel...

linflas wrote:- how might work magic spells ? runes combination or direct cast or scroll or all of them ?

This is something we haven't decided yet but we have an idea for a new kind of magic system. Sorry to be so mysterious but we don't want to reveal all secrets yet I can promise though that it's going to be something much more cooler than selecting a spell from a list!

linflas wrote:- do you think about providing an editor / scripting language ?

Maybe. The engine is fully Lua scriptable so it's definitely a possibility.

linflas wrote:- on the 3rd screenshot, it looks like you cropped/resized the dungeon view so that we can have inventory on the right. that is just an excellent feature !

Yep, we think it works great! It's really useful, especially when picking up and dropping lots of items, or throwing everything you have at an advancing Goromorg that's going to blast your head off.

linflas wrote:- are you aware that, despite that you don't want any DM material, it is THE "Dungeon Master Forever" we've been waiting for years ?

I take that as a compliment, thank you!

I am really impressed! You guys have done a great job! I get really inspired watching those screenshoots! Keep them comming, can't wait to try the game out

I just wish you that the business part runs that well, that you'll have the time left to realize the project this time.
Good that old loves die hard

Looks great! I look forward to trying it out

Inspiring!

Hey guys, we just updated the blog with new material and a teaser video! Hope you like it!

http://www.grimrock.net/2011/07/15/lege ... ck-teaser/

ahah ! nice little frightening scene ! me wanna see more

Woooooo...cooool . The movement style reminds me of Stonekeep. And the scary scary spoidas look cool...somehow I'm reminded of the first room of CSB as well .

Thanks Ameena and Linflas!

btw. if there's something you'd definitely love or hate to have in the game, now's your chance to speak up! We're listening to the audience... *wink wink nudge nudge*

Once again, GREAT work!
As no one here has tried out the game I guess it is hard for us to give comments about the gameengine.. So instead I have some more questions..
- If you would have categorize the monster AI, is it like Dungeon Keeper 2, Dungeon Master 2 or Dungeon Master 1? Is there good and bad monsters?
- I think I read something about just having attackpower, defence etc. keeping it simple.. Does this mean damage and armour can be caluclated as in the Diablo games? I'm just wondering how simple you will keep it.. Will some item have special powers, like magical items?

I guess this is the questions I have for now, I have a million questions about the graphic engine, but this may not the place to get too technical

PetriH wrote:Thanks Ameena and Linflas!

btw. if there's something you'd definitely love or hate to have in the game, now's your chance to speak up! We're listening to the audience... *wink wink nudge nudge*

There's one thing you should really discuss a lot in early stage of the project - it's the mapping.
I didn't like to have no maps at all in DM - but manual paper mapping was fun. But I do think you won't have such small dungeons. The magical map of DM2 - didn't like that too - size, information, no 'fog of war' etc. Any automated map has one weak point - if you get teleported, or step in a pit or by stairs - you'll immediately know where the area you explore is now - related to the already known things. What - if you have just pieces of explored areas and have to put them together by some kind of grid editor. This could work that way: everytime you use a non-linear movement, a new piece of map is generated that grows by every step you do (with all visited grid-rectangles marked clear, and all visible but not visited positions somehow shaded). It may now happen that you get different pieces of the map that may overlap - you need that, to really puzzle them together to a bigger map in that editor (even avoid it that those pieces are all north-oriented - let them be turned by the player!) I think in this genre mapping is a very very important feature that makes a game good or not.
Another thing would be the item 'generation - connected to a good buy/sell/availability-system as well'. I really would suggest you to spy a bit in Might&Magic's system. That wasn't that bad (even with those funny long names of an item then).

Rasmus wrote:Once again, GREAT work!
As no one here has tried out the game I guess it is hard for us to give comments about the gameengine.. So instead I have some more questions..

I was out of town so I'm sorry it took a little time to get back to you. It's perfectly understandable that it's hard to give concrete comments until the demo version is out.

Rasmus wrote:- If you would have categorize the monster AI, is it like Dungeon Keeper 2, Dungeon Master 2 or Dungeon Master 1? Is there good and bad monsters?
- I think I read something about just having attackpower, defence etc. keeping it simple.. Does this mean damage and armour can be caluclated as in the Diablo games? I'm just wondering how simple you will keep it.. Will some item have special powers, like magical items?

These are a little bit difficult to answer at the moment. The current version of AI is already pretty efficient at close combat (ranged combat is work in progress). We have some nice ideas how to extend this further, for example, by teaching certain monsters special tricks, somewhat similar to some creatures in DM2. It's hard to judge which AI is most advanced at this point... and a bit unfair comparison because so much is still work in progress.

Regarding damage and armor we have a pretty nice system already that simulates attacks targeting individual body parts. For example, if a character is wearing full body platemail and boots but no helmet, the armor makes it very hard to damage the character unless the attack is targeted at his head in which case he's hit with full damage. Unless of course he's holding a shield which has a chance of blocking the attack altogether (0 damage). Items have special and magical abilities. Attack power and protection values are just abstractions meant as aids for the novice player so he can determine the relative efficiency of items in general terms. For veterans those simplified values are not the full truth because things like a Heavy Shield blocking physical attacks with a 20% chance, the fact that a helmet only protects the head, or a Sword of Nex allowing seasoned fighters to do deadly Triple Attacks are not factored into the simplified stats.

Rasmus wrote:I guess this is the questions I have for now, I have a million questions about the graphic engine, but this may not the place to get too technical

Here are some features of the PC graphics engine from the top of my head:
- light prepass renderer
- HDR lighting
- normal mapping
- dynamic soft shadows (for point lights and spotlights)
- good quality screen space ambient occlusion
- fxaa antialiasing
- particle systems (with support for texture animations and skinned mesh particle emitters)
- plus the others I forgot...

Bit wrote:There's one thing you should really discuss a lot in early stage of the project - it's the mapping.
I didn't like to have no maps at all in DM - but manual paper mapping was fun. But I do think you won't have such small dungeons. The magical map of DM2 - didn't like that too - size, information, no 'fog of war' etc. Any automated map has one weak point - if you get teleported, or step in a pit or by stairs - you'll immediately know where the area you explore is now - related to the already known things. What - if you have just pieces of explored areas and have to put them together by some kind of grid editor. This could work that way: everytime you use a non-linear movement, a new piece of map is generated that grows by every step you do (with all visited grid-rectangles marked clear, and all visible but not visited positions somehow shaded). It may now happen that you get different pieces of the map that may overlap - you need that, to really puzzle them together to a bigger map in that editor (even avoid it that those pieces are all north-oriented - let them be turned by the player!) I think in this genre mapping is a very very important feature that makes a game good or not.

That's an interesting idea. I like the fact that mapping would be a mini-game itself. One problem with this is how to determine when non-linear movement is known to the player, that is when to start a new map fragment. For example, what if the player enters a teleporter repeatedly, would a new map fragment be created every time? Also mapping would be quite difficult for casual players who probably need the auto-map more than seasoned veterans.... Anyway thanks for the idea!

I like the idea of a map that maybe reveals as you go along (fog-of-war type thing), but I'm not keen on having the full map revealed from scratch - that means you can't necessarily tell where you've been and where you haven't. It also means there's one less thing to do and the game is made that much less easy. Having handy little markesr showing what and where everything is adds to this effect as well - if a map's gonna have markers, I'd say don't put them on there from the start - let markers only be available as player-added things. You know, player clicks on a spot to add a marker and label it themselves - maybe give the ability to do markers in different colours so people can mark similar things with the same colour marker.
Something like that, anyway (if you have a map feature at all) .

would a new map fragment be created every time?

Not every time, but to do a bit of confusion, one per source/destination pair - or just have the map as items, torn apart. Somehow magical with fog of war or whatever. That way you can decide to have a map in one dungeon, and no in the other. In that case the 'editor' is the more important thing. It could be like a desktop, perhaps with a markertype that can attach pieces (and as Ameena suggested - markers for remarks too). Perhaps think about some kind of table to handle such things. That's maybe also usable for mixing potions etc., and not everywhere available.

I like the fact that mapping would be a mini-game itself

Those little things made those programs great games.

Here are some features of the PC graphics engine from the top of my head:
- light prepass renderer
- HDR lighting
- normal mapping
- dynamic soft shadows (for point lights and spotlights)
- good quality screen space ambient occlusion
- fxaa antialiasing
- particle systems (with support for texture animations and skinned mesh particle emitters)
- plus the others I forgot...

These are rather powerful and advanced techniques, and I guess the hardest work is to optimize them so that they fit the game. Good work!
I found one technique specially interesting "fxaa antialiasing". I am reading a paper about it now.. Is it easy to use? I am using direct3D 9 that have support for ps/vs 3.0. I would like to implement this technique into my game because I let the GPU process alot of very high res textures as I am using deferred rendering. If I did, would it be alot of coding? (I know it is a blurry question )

One more question, the particle system.. Are it updated/sorted on the cpu or gpu? I am working on a GPU based particle system, and if you guys have any experience with this maybe you have some "heads up" when using it inside the accual game..

looking good, almost orgasmic there's goosebumps forming

Rasmus wrote:I found one technique specially interesting "fxaa antialiasing". I am reading a paper about it now.. Is it easy to use?

Did you check this out:
http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2011/ ... eased.html

Rasmus wrote:One more question, the particle system.. Are it updated/sorted on the cpu or gpu?

It's a CPU/GPU hybrid. Emission of particles is CPU driven but we calculate trajectories of individual particles using the GPU. We could push through more particles if we used GPU for everything on the PC but that wouldn't work on all our target platforms... We just sort particles by particle system, not individual particles.

Did you check this out:
http://timothylottes.blogspot.com/2011/ ... eased.html

Thanks for the link. I will put it on my todo list when I start the accual game rendering, still feels like I want to do some tests with it before I decide

About sorting the particle system in groups:
I have been thinking about this, but I was afraid it would become a problem if two system collides. I guess this could be fixed with mergesorting, but then I would have to use the cpu more.

I followed this tutorial:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2 ... system.php

Anyway, diffrent games requiers diffrent techniques, and I must say that you guys have really succeded

Will this be the game I'm hoping for since the times of DM, EOB, LOL and Stonekeep? Or will it just be another half-finished experiement? Eagerly awaiting Grimlock.

I consider "Escape From Dragon Mountain" (made by same guys) as a finished engine, not a simple experiment. The level is entirely playable.
Something also that makes me trust in Grimrock : the iOs port.