Since I was a kid I have tried to make games based on Dungeons & Dragons and have always given up somewhere into the process.
Like many people, I think the imagination part of it is the most fun, and when things get tricky I find something to distract myself.
This time around though I really want to see things through.
A lot of life stuff got in the way so the project sat stale for months, but I would really like to get this into people's hands so I have giving it another shot.
The screenshot above shows the Commodore 64 version but the code I am putting most of the work into is in fact cross-platform across a whole bunch of retro computers from the early days of the microcomputer:
Yes, I am probably setting myself up to fail by being ambitious, but the goal is to have a game or demo running on every computer and console in my collection of retro gaming systems.
There are a whole bunch of adventure-style games nowadays.
Back when I was a kid starting out on my vic 20 there were a couple of game styles:
Those were served both with commercial releases and even type-in games.
Once the Spectrum and C64 became the most popular systems, a couple of variations were added.
The 16-bit era brought new opportunities for sound and vision, with Amiga and ST having many richly immersive titles and the Nintendo and Megadrive making popular the Zelda style cute action RPG.
We are spoiled for choice now, but games like Ultima, Might and Magic, Dungeon Master, Guild of Thieves, all broke new ground.
Games such as Warcraft, Dungeon Keeper, various Tower Defense games and Diabalo all drew on roleplaying tropes for ideas of course.
One of the places games have been able to excel is rich storytelling. One of my favourite games producers was Lucasarts, with Day of the Tentacle and Monkey Island standing out.
Interestingly, a lot of games started to push back on having a defined plot, and instead focus more on exploring an open world or procedurally generating.
My guess is that people would rather have re-play over a narrative?
Many games of the retro era started out, as mentioned, with the traditional dungeon crawl - fight baddies, collect loot, kill the big bad evil dude.
But they pivoted to more puzzle solving with the platform adventures and especially the isometric variety. Moving things into position and triggering switches were more important than your hit points.
With combat though we see card games based around just that mechanic. When Magic the Gathering came out I was the wrong age group to get a chance to play amongst my circle, the whole field passed me by. Lately I have tried the Magic phone app and purchased some deck building games to see if I can play solo to get a sense of if I like the field or not.
"Resource" games sprung up too, where you have to balance money and other resources to build things.
Player to Player and Player to NPC Interaction has always been limited. The same thing is true of solitaire adventure games now.
As modems became a little more popular, it was possible to play online, first with bulletin boards and then Multi-User Dungeons. I enjoyed exploring one based on Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.
These were, as expected, primitive graphically, but it was only with the advent of the web that it truly became accessible to the masses, and then powerful PCs allowed Massively Multiplayer experiences.
All the interaction, outside of chat, always comes down to kill, trade/barter, or very rigidly defined options.
Once your character is created, the roleplaying part of RPG games seems to go away.
I am not sure I have answers for what kind of game I want to make. Perhaps I need to try a few.
While I did build a text adventure engine, after solving the technical problem I gave up on the build. Dungeon Crawlers are something I have built proof of concepts of before but not procedurally generated.
What do you enjoy in a computer RPG? Are there any you play often?
