LÖVE

Who are you?
I'm Dene Carter - I was one of the creators of Fable, one of the core team on Dungeon Keeper and the guy who made Spellrazor with Love a few years ago.

What do you want? I'm busy!
I've been working on a retro-neon turn-based RPG inspired by the old Ultima games and my love of old 1980s arcade games. mixed with things I loved when I was creating the world and lore of Fable.
The world map is vast, and fixed with towns and villages, and traders moving from place to place plying their wares, monsters, weather patterns and the mysterious fog known as 'Amber'.
There are, of course, deep, dark dungeons to explore (which are randomly generated using the same awesome algorithm as Unexplored).
I am currently building up the content, and a large, complex story to present it all.
There are *no* quests, only rumours and information you can pick up by talking to people. What you do is up to you. Will you merely become a trader, or attempt to overthrow the current Archon?

Am I going to enjoy it?
If you like games from the early 80s, and really loved Ultima III, IV or V (but go 'ugh' when you try to go back and play them) then this is the game for you. It's a retro game with modern design sensibilities and a friendly keyboard-centric interface.

Are you doing anything interesting with Love?
This is the largest project I've ever made, solo. There's over 100 000 lines of code already. I am using shaders to do cool recolouring stuff, I am using the SFXR library (which I have debugged and extended), and all the music is in the form of offline .mod files you can download from inside the game to keep the .love filesize down. I am using complex navigation via A*, and a ton of other cool things... well, I think they're cool, anyway.

What now?
This project is *large*. I've already released over 460 builds in the last year or so, and I'm at a stage where I'd like to get more eyes on it.
It is not finished. The actual content creation stage has only just begun, but the first dungeon gives a great taste of what is to come.
I've started a nice, little community of folks over on Discord who are popping in to share their ideas and suggestions. If this seems like an appealing project, and you want to see what a madman is doing with Love2d then please come and say 'hi' and give a build a whirl.

You folks were amazingly supportive during Spellrazor's development, and I'm really happy to share this with you, too.

Discord: https://discord.gg/tYfHgXc
Game: https://www.mediafire.com/file/s0xzciqc ... e.zip/file

Edit: Version 0.0.464 is now available
Edit: Version 0.0.465 is now available


- Dene

Woah. But for real looks awesome though will it be released/runnable on android. I doubt but it will be way better for the game to if so.

Nope. No Android here, I'm afraid. Too much reliance on shaders. Too much thrashing of memory. Too much reliance on keyboard! I'm sure it's possiblt, but getting a game this size FINISHED is difficult enough!

Madrayken wrote: ↑Wed Dec 16, 2020 12:21 am ... Too much reliance on keyboard! ...

Definitely, I feel like the game should support controllers as well. Maybe with a radial menu to select the actions or something like that
But yeah, great work so far.. looks and feels really good.

Thanks for the feedback!

I think it'll be pretty tough to make it controller-focused when the entire conversation interface with NPCs involves typing dialogue!
I think the only things you'd get out of it would be:
- Movement on the joystick
- UI navigation on the joystick
- Specific keys mapped to a couple of the - say - 6 buttons of the controller
- Shortcuts to the skills you choose on user-defined buttons?

Is Controller support something you guys would expect in a classic roguelike or Ultima game?

Yeah, I think the keyboard is enough especially because of the dialogue part. But you type to reply to dialogue? Isn't that hard ,do you use text recognition(zork like maybe) or just like type yes.

Madrayken wrote: ↑Wed Dec 16, 2020 11:26 pm Is Controller support something you guys would expect in a classic roguelike or Ultima game?

I'm not the best person to judge since I've never played an Ultima game in my life and I just figured out how the dialog-system works - so I can't say if I would expect it in this type of games. Depending on the amount of possible keywords it seems feasible to select highlighted keywords with a controller or have a small selection element like [ < "Balance" > ] below the dialog window where options could be selected with navigating left and right or something like that. If there is a mechanic that keywords need to be discovered by the player, then you're right, a controller wouldn't be a real option here. btw this is coming from a person who prefers a simplified controller control scheme over arrow keys and a bunch of shortcut keys at all times, keyboard controls are a pain for me in games. Especially when games are utilizing Z or Y for something because of different keyboard layouts (QWERTY, QWERTZ) .

Also regarding controller support, I guess just mapping key shortcuts to controller buttons wouldn't be enough. To support controllers it would help to develop some sort of radial menu for actions like talk, shoot, slash etc and also add selection elements like stated above and maybe some other stuff I can't think of atm. The movement and menu navigation shouldn't be a problem at all.

I think even if the game is meant to be an old-school like game, having more modern control options wouldn't hurt the feel of the game gameplay wise. Sure, ppl who've grown up playing these old-school games on C64, Amiga, whatever might not be interested in this since it "doesn't feel like playing the game in the old days", but for players who never played these games before but want to try it, there is no nostalgic feel of the game to be kept and they may profit of an easier to learn control system using a controller.

I like retro games, but most of them where either played with an old fashioned joystick with just two buttons or primarily using the mouse.

Some more notes from a player who has no experience with that sort of game:

• I read that there were some common keywords in Ultima games like job, name or health, but in Moonring I can't find working keywords other then the highlighted words in the dialog text. Are there any common keywords which result in an answer?
• Not sure if it was a bug or intentional but I had a moment were the gameplay was speed up and everyone moved much quicker then usual after ending an dialog with a stranger. Not sure what caused it though. Right before it happend I tried out the dialog system and typed all sorts of stuff.

Madrayken wrote: ↑Wed Dec 16, 2020 11:26 pmbtw this is coming from a person who prefers a simplified controller control scheme over arrow keys and a bunch of shortcut keys at all times, keyboard controls are a pain for me in games. Especially when games are utilizing Z or Y for something because of different keyboard layouts (QWERTY, QWERTZ) .

It's a good thing löve has the ability to sidestep that issue with using scancodes instead of keyconstants, yeah?

Thanks for the lengthy response! That's a lot to think about.

MadByte wrote: ↑Thu Dec 17, 2020 9:30 pm
Some more notes from a player who has no experience with that sort of game:

I read that there were some common keywords in Ultima games like job, name or health, but in Moonring I can't find working keywords other then the highlighted words in the dialog text. Are there any common keywords which result in an answer?

Not in this game. I actually hated that aspect of the Ultimas. In Moonring, everything you need you see in the context of the conversation... apart from secrets. I'm currently using 'follow' and 'leave' as hacky methods of getting villagers to follow you into dungeons... and annoy their entire village if they die.

MadByte wrote: ↑Thu Dec 17, 2020 9:30 pm Not sure if it was a bug or intentional but I had a moment were the gameplay was speed up and everyone moved much quicker then usual after ending an dialog with a stranger. Not sure what caused it though. Right before it happend I tried out the dialog system and typed all sorts of stuff.[/list]

Nope. Bug. I'm assuming an issue with my fixed-time-frame code. Believe it or not, the game is actually 'realtime'. I made it this way so you could do things like 'dodge arrows fired from a distance' which is normally impossible in turn-based games.

Gunroar:Cannon() wrote: ↑Thu Dec 17, 2020 10:03 am Yeah, I think the keyboard is enough especially because of the dialogue part. But you type to reply to dialogue? Isn't that hard ,do you use text recognition(zork like maybe) or just like type yes.

The game hilights words you've come across in conversation. You can use Tab to auto-complete words, so you rarely have to type more than a letter or two. It also gets you back to topics you may have forgotten about, so if someone once said something about 'Ned' you can just type 'Ned' to get back to that segment of the conversation again... presuming you've not done anything to kill that conversation.

NPC: "I like red berries. They are magical."
Type: "Be" (Tab) -> "Berries" + return
NPC: "They are so tasty and good for you, yes?"
Type: "No"
NPC: "Hmm... aren't we disagreeable."
etc.