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Skullstone - an old style dungeon crawler with 3D graphics


FrozenShade

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A lot of time has passed since my last visit here and there is a great progress in my project so I decided to abandon my old topic and start with new one.
And the project is longer called 'untitled...', we named it Skullstone.

Okay, progress and changes one by one:


- Improved rendering

The engine, JME 3.0 have only forward rendering pipeline, which is ok, if there are only 1 or 2 lights in the scene. Because Skullstone is placed in dungeons, we must have a lot of shadows, torches and other point lights. With 10 lights on a complex scene my old graphics card was dying.
We reworked all engine's rendering pipeline and replaced forward rendering with deferred shading. FPS increased significantly.

Later we added effects like 'blue night' and moved all color's calculation into linear space.:
untitled00208.jpguntitled00209.jpg

We also added SSAO:
ssao_e.jpg



- GUI

Look again at above screens, there were few steps with GUI.
The placeholders you saw in the video in previous topic were replaced with something decent. After some time we changed it again to those round ones.
gui.jpggui2.jpg map3.jpg


- Monsters

Dungeons aren't empty! There are monsters to fight.

We started with something simple, just to test the animations and AI:
untitled00171.jpg

Our first 'true' mob, Spider:
untitled00243.jpg

Few days ago we made new ones:
ssao_p12_golem_2.jpg ghoul_dark.jpg
 


Soon we will have more of them!


- Skills, Abilities and Magic

The first thing I must say is that our characters does not have any 'class'. Everyone is unique - have it's own combination of skills and abilities.

Abilities:
They basically reflect how well the character is trained in a given domain. These domains are: using different kinds of weapons and armor, schools of magic, blocking, dodging etc. When gaining a level, characters get points that can be spent to develop their abilities.
ability.jpg
Some abilities are always active, some other requires an item to become active. A shield for example.

Skills:
From the very beginning, each character will have 3 special combat-related skills. When activated, skills will give to the caster (or to entire party) considerable bonuses. E.g. greater attack power, faster attacks, mana regeneration, but can also give penalties, e.g. lower defense, inability to move, hit point loss.

Skills can be divided into three groups, according to the way they work:

  • timed: The effect lasts for a fixed amount of time. When it’s gone, you have to wait to be able to reuse the skill. 
  • toggle: You can turn the effect on/off anytime. When it’s on, the skill will use up your character’s mana/hit points, so use it wisely!
  • idle: If you use the skill, its effect will last until the nearest successful attack. After the attack is executed, the skills’s cooldown period will begin.

 

Magic:

We decided to make it simple. There are no runes, gestures or anything else that could make spellcasing characters hard to use in dynamic combat.
To cast spell character needs an special item placed in hand, a proper ability and some mana. Click on item to cast a spell, that's all.


- Monster's skills

Yes, monsters have skills too, they are not limited to melee/range attack.
To improve their fighting abilities they can buff themselves, increasing attack, speed, armor and so on. They can also heal their wounds. Here is a screen with buffed mob:
untitled00252.jpg

Mobs can also cast debuff on player, and they have lots of them to cast: poison, disease, negative bonuses and the worst ones: slow, web, root or petrification.

The main disadvantage of combat in grid based games is possibility to dance around enemy. Hit, move, hit, move and so on... Immobilizing debuffs should solve the problem, bub mobs have one more thing to use: an area-of-effect attack. So be careful...



Ok, thats all for now, of course I'll write a post every time we make something new to keep you informed.

Visit our FB profile, there are some comics about dungeon crawling.

And watch our videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGEHc3p4Fjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUhi5vpfB1A

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  • 7 months later...

Hi guys,

 

We're constantly working on our game - Skullstone - and we've made a lot of progress. A lot of work was done during last months!

 

We've completed most of the characters. There's 20 of them and each has a different set of skills and abilities. It's up to you to choose the team of adventurers best suiting your playstyle!

 

Food system - nearly done. It's based on our own decisions and assumptions as we wanted to further differentiate Skullstone from other dungeon crawlers in development and on the market.

 

There will be quite a few kinds of food, but don't think you can find the highest quality products in the dungeon. These will only be available as a reward. Your character will be eating nasty stuff mostly. Such as the mushrooms shown on the screenshot below. Bon appétit!


skullstone_polypore.jpg

 

Speaking of screenshots, we would love to present you more of them. You can see a lot of stuff: monsters, items, decors, second visual style of dungeon levels. At this very moment we are focused on creating assets. There's still a lot to do and we hope you like what we did so far. You can see more of our work at Skullstone facebook page. Please visit if you wanna learn more about the game, as what's written here is only a summary of just the most recent things. And now, more screenshots.

 

skullstone_armour_set.jpgskullstone_barham.jpg
fsnake2.pngfsnake4.png
skullstone_scr_img7.jpguntitled00418.png
skullstone_scr_img11.jpgskullstone_scr_img13.jpg
skullstone_scr_img15.jpgskullstone_erlina.jpg

 

Enough. :P More screenshots can be found on our facebook page.

 

What do you think about the project? Please share your opinion with us. We will greatly appreciate it :)

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