Help with Concept Art Desired For Simple Dungeons
Community Forums/Graphic Chat/Help with Concept Art Desired For Simple Dungeons
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| Hello All, I need some advice/assistance regarding some concept art for a game I am working on. WARNING - there is no money in this, (just thought I'd make that clear.) The game is a very simple one (you may have seen an early version of it here: http://blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=68071 .) As I mentioned in the other thread - the rooms are quite bland. I'd like to create some more interesting rooms but there are a few constraints. First - the rooms need to be relatively open, so I could cope with a few pillars or other obstacles but they should primarily be open - this would mean perhaps that any added detail would be symbols on the floor or grills/grates, perhaps some swaying tapestries on the walls or junk and bones in the corners. Blood stains and other detritus could litter the floor too. I'd like each room to feel like a generic dungeon room - in other words no purpose built rooms for things like kitchens/bedrooms/libraries or things like that. Although they would look good I feel they'd be totally out of place in this game - where the player simply fights through a series of rooms collecting treasure and gaining power until a conclusion is reached. These rooms would be recycled throughout the game session with different equipment and enemies present. Would any people be interested in drawing some concepts for how I could 'populate' rooms that look something like this currently (see below). Pencil/Paper/MSPAint sketches are more than acceptable to me as I only really need a guide / plan to work from . Perhaps, if anyone is willing, they could use the current images shown below as a base to add to and I will work on it from there. Sample rooms without decorations (and in dire need of redecorating/refurnishing) (these are scaled down from their full size of 1024x768 to 400x300)      |
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| Not got time myself but for prototypes (and maybe even the real thing) WorldCreator will help. In fact, from your screenshots you might already be using it. 1.5 is free, 2.5 is not but excellent. |
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| Thanks Tony, it looks quite useful |
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| something a bit like this? i loved games like this its quite quick to test ideas in cinema 4d which is nice.  ive got lots of ideas ill draw a few. |
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| I'm actually doing something very similar but in 3D...sort of what I'd like from a Diablo 3, but with my own setting. I'm working on a remake of an older FPS game as well, but the 3D RPG is turning out to be suprisingly easy to create for some reason... |
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| Hi Pete, that's something like what I am after. Here is another screenshot to give you some more idea: (I'm off to work now so won't be able to respond until about 7pm (GMT +10) - about 12 hrs from now.  |
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| your isometric angle its very high, im not sure how to reproduce that high angle on cinema 4d? ill ask Psionic he will porb know. anyway ill do a few sketches today and scan them in |
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| Hi Pete, The isometric angle is high so that the characters are easier to view when close to a wall that is high (I don't have to shrink the walls.) It is simply an orthographic camera which is rotated 45 degrees around the y axis and -45 degrees in the x-axis. Since you are interested in helping out I'll let you know what my thoughts were on the layouts and designs of the rooms intended for the game. It is a very simple game, as you may have noticed from playing it (did you try it?) Unlike most story based rpgs I am not interested in having specific rooms like 'kitchen' 'courtyard' 'bathroom/bedroom' etc etc. I am thinking more along the lines of a set of rooms which have the same look and feel (ie uniform/coherent) but which differ in their shape (for game play purposes) and their contents (ie skeletal remains, barrels, old shields, lumps of cloth and broken swords, bloodstains, worn tapestries fluttering in the breeze, torches on the walls) which are merely to reduce the repetitive nature of the gameplay. In the current game there are 6 different rooms, although the contents in terms of monster and equipment vary in their availability in each room - although not totally random. I feel that the current types of rooms ( T Corridor, X Corridor, 4 way Room, Long Room with multiple exits, Long room with 1 exit, Broad room with multiple exits) are the minimum I'd like to include in the game. I'd prefer to steer clear of 'single exit' rooms (the game is designed to only allow motion forwards into the dungeon not back to previously explored rooms - a bit like a Roguelike game). I'd also like to have the rooms be fairly open to allow for a lot of movement, as well as to not have too many obstacles in the main play area, although around the boundary is okay. Most of the 'detail objects' (ie eye candy) should sit around the edge of the room or in out of the way places so that the player and the monsters have a large play area. Out of interest Pete - where are you writing from, I don't really know what the time difference is between where we both are. I am in Melbourne, Australia and it is about 9:30pm right now. Thanks for your assistance with this, it is greatly appreciated, very much. Thanks, Matt EDIT - Making levels for this game of mine is pretty easy actually (the technical process). It simply requires minimum of 3 renders (or possibly 2). The first is the render of the scene, the second and third are renders of the scene with gradient texture applied (from rgb=0 to rgb=height of texture) using an orthographic camera projection from above with one of these renders having the entire scene rendered and the other having only the walkable regions rendered. To get an idea of how this works have a look in the tiles directory within the levels directory of the game folder. |
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| Hi Matty, im in the UK. Ok ill take a look at your levels and see if i can produce anything good. i know what you mean by keeping the eye candy stuff out of the way, ive played games where the backgrounds get in the way and its hard to se what your doing. id like to help you out because a long time ago you let me have some RTS code you did, which was alot of fun experimenting with. i never got very far with it but you where alot of help anyway. ive now got the correct camera setup in cinema 4d. so i can prob get something working for you. |
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| Hmm? Ive not done much 2d iso stuff so how does this gradient texture stuff work. i guess its for z ordering but ive no idea how it works or how to produce that effect |
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| Hi Pete, this is how I render the 'zmaps' for the level, I use XSI so it may differ from how to do it in Cinema 4d. After rendering the level as normal you do the following. 1. Set the material for all objects in the scene to 'constant' - we don't want any lighting affecting the colors on the zmaps. 2. Create another orthographic camera which is positioned above the level looking down onto it. 3. Apply the gradient texture (shown below) to all the objects in the scene using a 'projection' from the camera created in step 2. In other words we want the camera to act like a movie projector which projects the texture onto all the objects in the scene as if from the camera's viewpoint. 4.Render the scene from the original isometric camera view. This gives us our first zmap 'scenezmap'. 5.Remove all the objects from the scene except the floor (or walkable areas). 6.Render the scene again from the original isometric camera's view. This gives us our second zmap ('floorzmap') Here is a copy of the gradient texture:  Here is a view from the isometric camera:  Here is a view from the 'zmapcamera' (the one looking straight down):  Here is a view with the gradient texture applied (note that I have been lazy and not textured the objects within the room - normally they would be as well using the same process.)  |
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| can't say ive seen it done like that before, very cool ill have a go in the morning :O) |
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| Hi Pete - if you've downloaded my demo then you can test out if the level zmaps are done correctly by editing the data files, fairly easy to do. I'll give an example: Open the file level1.gme in the levels directory, it should look like this: Scene Settings backdropimage=Levels\Tiles\SceneColorMap1.png <--- Change this to the path to your new scene render gamesizex=1024 <--this must be the same size as your renders which should all be the same size gamesizey=768 <--as for gamesizex lightmap=Levels\Tiles\SceneLightMap1.png <--if you leave this blank the sprites are rendered full bright otherwise they are colored according to the color of the point where their 'feet' are on the lightmap. The lightmap can be at a lower resolution so in this case I think I used 256x192 backdropzbuffer=Levels\Tiles\SceneZMap1.png <--this is the zmap for the whole scene backdropfootzbuffer=Levels\Tiles\SceneFloorZMap1.png <--this is the zmap for the floor / walkable area zbufferbitdepth=4 <--leave this as 4. backdropwalkablearea=Levels\Tiles\SceneCollisionMap1.png <--this is the map which shows where the player can walk, 2 color white=walkable, black = impassable. Changing the above file will cause the first level to be changed, useful for testing. I do have an editor for placing things in the levels and may send it if you want it. Although I don't want to make use of this feature in this particular game it is possible to have animated backgrounds which also animate the zmap (such as when door swings/slides open so as to correctly occlude sprites when the background changes), animated lightmaps (such as when lighting changes in points on the scene), and animated collision maps (once again useful for things like doors or other points you may imagine. And these animations can be a small section of the scene if desired (usually so). |
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| sounds very good, must have taken a long time. ill give it a go when i get back from work. thanks for the scene settings and texure i should have any trouble but i may have some question later. |
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| Sounds like you have numerous ideas already but if you're trying to come up with ideas for "objects" to place in the rooms you may want to think of what the dungeon is currently used for by your inhabitants (if anything) or what it was used for in the past. For example: - Groups of tables and chairs with dishes/mugs, or messed up/knocked over - Beds, cupboards, bookcases, cabinets, etc. You could scatter these around without the rooms looking "specific" - Piles of disused/broken equipment, furniture, bodies - For floors/walls: Torn tapestries, ye olde maps, scrolls/documents, fire scorches, spilt flasks - Archery ranges, combat dummies |
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| Pete - forgot to say - the zmaps need to be rendered into a non-lossy format like png or bmp otherwise the z-ordering won't work as desired. The lightmap and main scene render can be any format (jpg,png,bmp). Leto - thanks for the suggestions, I've actually got a bunch of 'floor tiles' in cardboard format from various board games I've played over the years which have a lot of those sorts of things. Very useful suggestions though. Because it is kind of an endless dungeon hack like the Roguelike games I am trying to steer clear of making the rooms too 'specific' in function - especially as the rooms are moved through in a semi-random order. |
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| im not sure where you want to take this game whats the goal of the main character? |
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| Hi Pete, there is no 'end golal' for the player, it is kind of an old style arcade game (pacman/tetris/gauntlet) in which the player is trying to get as high a score as possible. There is no back story... The game is really just a fairly simple one. |
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| Just a good hack and slash, alot like gauntlet but with no exit to the level just room after room you may want to add some other attacks and maybe magic spells to brake up the slashing. you could make it so that magic uses up points, so you should only use magic when your really going to get you butt kicked. |
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| I possibly will do that, add a bit more to the gameplay - currently the player is a little underpowered I think, there should be times when the player is able to feel quite powerful so I may add some kind of magic ability or additional attacks. In particular there are some rooms which have loads of creatures which currently the player is better off running away from rather than fighting - I should probably make the character able to take on the enemies in these rooms more easily. EDIT - I may make it so that rather than using up the player's score a magical attack mode which might last for the duration of a number of seconds uses up one of the players 'swords'. EDIT 2 - I just played around with giving the player an additional ranged/magical attack which uses up a 'sword' powerup in the player's position - seems to work quite well. Will test more tomorrow night. |
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| Hello. Matty, I'm sure you have already but you might want to check out 'Knights' on the amiga. It sounds like, for inspiration, it has all the elements you want. Goodbye. |
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| Thanks SoggyP I'll have a look at it. I've never heard of/seen the game Knights before. EDIT - I can't seem to find a game called (on google) 'Knights', there are plenty of other games with Knights in the title - is Knights the full name of the game? |
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| Hello. Yes, it is and the only think I found was this http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/marjola/games/design.shtml It's a great game if you can find it - it was PD so is probably on aminet, http://www.angusm.demon.co.uk/AGDB/DBA1/Knights.html Oh, and here it is... http://aminet.net/search?query=knights It's called knights242, you just need a miggy or emulator to play it. Goodbye. |
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