Dungeon Master Forum

Heyho, you dungeon masters!
Hope you're all well

I'd love to make a short dungeon crawler as a side project, however, I'm an artist with only very little coding experience.
For the most part, I'd be happy with DM's standard features, I'd just like to replace the graphics with higher resolution ones and insert a fullscreen picture with text in certain spots to have a bit of story (think the story encounters in Eye of the Beholder, just without the choices).
And of course design new dungeons.

From your experience with DSB, would someone like me be able to achieve that? Or is it a tool aimed at more experienced coders?

Thank you,
Dez

You can make a perfectly good dungeon in DSB with little or no coding experience. I know, because I made one myself.
ESB can handle a lot of what you need to do.
Using new graphics was fairly simple... and after you've done it once, it's like shelling peas (I should point out that I only did monsters, objects, and a couple of full screens... no wallsets).
Also, Sophia helped me out a lot.

Hello Dezue, and welcome!

I've been tinkering with DSB for many years. I've never released anything "finished", but I've had a lot of fun experimenting. I'm a mix of designer and developer and I love that DSB gives me an engine where I can use both sets of skills. I'm not a hard-core coder, but have picked up enough stuff to be dangerous But if you don't know any coding, that's fine: If there's one thing I've learned with DSB is that it can be as simple or complex as you decide to make it

Everything you want to do can be done reasonably simply, even if you've not done much coding before. The way of changing or adding graphics is quite easy. I found the best way to understand how graphics work, is to open objects.lua and graphics.lua in DSBs /base/ folder and see how the graphics are defined and then used by objects.

Fullscreen story images are fairly easy to do. You can set them up in code, attached to a custom function, then in the dungeon editor (ESB) you create some kind of trigger that will run that function. So you can generate story screens in response to player input in the dungeon.

If you've not already found it, there's an (incomplete) wiki for DSB here:
https://dmwiki.atomas.com/wiki/DSB

Information about fullscreen functions is here:
https://dmwiki.atomas.com/wiki/DSB/Expo ... Fullscreen

I would also suggest having a search of this forum using keywords you're interested in. I've asked tons of questions over the years and Sophia has been kind enough to answer them with comprehensive answers. In particular, you might want to check the "Questions about DSB/ESB" thread which is spread over many pages but contains tons of useful info. (Some of it may be outdated now with newer versions of DSB). That thread is here: viewtopic.php?f=53&t=28859

The easiest thing to do is just start experimenting. And if you want help, just ask. I've recently returned to DSB editing, working on my own hobby project to update the original DM/CSB with new graphics and features. So I'm looking at the forum a lot. And Sophia, creator of DSB, does also answer any questions too.

Good luck and have fun!

Hello @Saumun and @Gambit37!
Thank you for your answers, they were very helpful! Your advice is great, I guess I'll dive right into DSB and see what I can do

Stay funky,
Dez

Here's an example of something I built using DSB. It's an animated intro and a champion selection screen and should give you some idea of what DSB is capable of (If you don't have a DropBox account, just dismiss the sign-up popup to view the video)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/krfuh57fjgfs1 ... o.mp4?dl=0

Wow, that's really cool! \OoO/ Thanks for sharing, man!