RPG game for ST I was writing in the 80s

[zzip]

Back in the 80s,  I spent a lot of time working on an RPG system, that was inspired by Ultima and other tile-based games of the era.

 

I had a world exploration portion, a combat system,  a tile and map editor.

 

The idea was that it would a game system that would be extensible through story "modules".    Kind of like how D&D works.   The game here would be a sample of what the system could do, and other authors could use the system to design their own games.

 

It was ambitious, and I never finished it.    I've included the "world exploration" portion as a demo.   The doors work, but NPCs/monsters were never implemented.   If anyone is interested, I can package up the other components like the tile/map editor and the combat system.

rpggame1208.zip

[+DarkLord]

Wow, looks interesting.

 

Not interested at all in finishing it yourself?

 

Thanks.

 

[zzip]

24 minutes ago, DarkLord said:

Wow, looks interesting.

 

Not interested at all in finishing it yourself?

 

Thanks.

It's gone through many iterations,  ported to PC, updated it to True Color, converted it to isometric-style. 

But I always end up getting overwhelmed by the ambition of what I want it to be and take extended breaks from it.

 

I've started hacking at it again recently as a COVID project,  I don't know where it will end up.

 

But I probably won't do much more to the ST version.   I only have ST emulator these days and the keyboard map isn't quite right for it.  Like I can't figure out how to type an underscore, and most of my procedure names use underscores.

[+DarkLord]

Get a cheap 1040 and go to town!   

 

[calimero]

Just make third episode of Amber Star

 

It looks like game that I would definitly played back in days!! My coup of tee

[ataricrypt]

I'm with DarkLord on this, and it looks great!!

[Tillek]

It really does... I wouldn't mind seeing anything for the PC version as well.

 

I don't suppose the source code might be available?  Something like this was on my todo list as well.

What was it written in?

 

[zzip]

2 hours ago, Tillek said:

It really does... I wouldn't mind seeing anything for the PC version as well.

 

I don't suppose the source code might be available?  Something like this was on my todo list as well.

What was it written in?

 

This version is GFA Basic 2.0.   The PC version is in C using the SDL2 libraries for graphics.

 

I could make the source code available.   I am a little embarrassed by my programming techniques back then.  I tended to use horrible variable and procedure names and insufficient comments that makes debugging my own code harder than it should be.   ?   But I'll work on uploading it. 

[zzip]

17 hours ago, DarkLord said:

Get a cheap 1040 and go to town!   

 

I just sold my STe in the last year from lack of use!   I don't really have the space to have an active ST system set up.   I'd rather work on fixing the keyboard map for hatari and use that as a development environment.

[Tillek]

55 minutes ago, zzip said:

This version is GFA Basic 2.0.   The PC version is in C using the SDL2 libraries for graphics.

 

I could make the source code available.   I am a little embarrassed by my programming techniques back then.  I tended to use horrible variable and procedure names and insufficient comments that makes debugging my own code harder than it should be.   ?   But I'll work on uploading it. 

I've actually got a game I was working on from back in the day and I can tell you... I feel the same way when looking at it.  If any of my devs turned in work like that I'd chew them out mercilessly.

 

But thank you, I'd really appreciate that.

[leech]

This looks like something that would be sweet to get some collaboration on.  Like an early version of Neverwinter Nights, for the ST.

Anyone know if SDL2 works on the Falcon?  Could get it ported to that too.  They did just release a new version of SDL2 that supports OS/2.

[zzip]

1 hour ago, Tillek said:

I've actually got a game I was working on from back in the day and I can tell you... I feel the same way when looking at it.  If any of my devs turned in work like that I'd chew them out mercilessly.

Yeah, I started this game before I started college and learned about data structures and types.   Not that GFA offers much in the way of data structures, so that only helped so much.

 

1 hour ago, leech said:

This looks like something that would be sweet to get some collaboration on.  Like an early version of Neverwinter Nights, for the ST.

Anyone know if SDL2 works on the Falcon?  Could get it ported to that too

The graphics stuff is abstracted..   SDL2 isn't the first graphics library I supported, it's more like the fourth ?.    There's a platform.c file where you could put in #ifdef FALCON conditionals and provide falcon specific ways of drawing pixels, lines, boxes, blits, etc.

 

The other issue is graphics.   The earliest C version of the code still uses 16-color indexed palette on PC at 320x200, so it was a pretty straight port.   Now it uses 32-bit true-color.  That might still be portable to the Falcon, but not to the ST.

 

 

[leech]

14 minutes ago, zzip said:

Yeah, I started this game before I started college and learned about data structures and types.   Not that GFA offers much in the way of data structures, so that only helped so much.

 

The graphics stuff is abstracted..   SDL2 isn't the first graphics library I supported, it's more like the fourth ?.    There's a platform.c file where you could put in #ifdef FALCON conditionals and provide falcon specific ways of drawing pixels, lines, boxes, blits, etc.

 

The other issue is graphics.   The earliest C version of the code still uses 16-color indexed palette on PC at 320x200, so it was a pretty straight port.   Now it uses 32-bit true-color.  That might still be portable to the Falcon, but not to the ST.

 

 

Ha, yeah I mean you would have to do some sort of insane dithering conversion to go from a 24bit color palette down to 512 or 4096 colors.  And that is after dropping alpha channels.

Still would be cool to see such a project.

[Tillek]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

Yeah, I started this game before I started college and learned about data structures and types.   Not that GFA offers much in the way of data structures, so that only helped so much.

 

 

Pretty much my story too.

 

Though I know that someone came up with something for object oriented programming for it... Lonny Pursell mentioned it to me at one point... Never really looked at it yet.

 

 

[zzip]

Here is the tile/map editor for this project.   I believe most or all of the functions are complete.   Hopefully it is self-explanatory to use :)    Be aware that it uses the word "icon" instead of "tile".   To switch between tile and map edit modes,  click the button labelled "Icon" in the lower right.

It includes a couple maps and tilesets,  But you should be able to alter the maps and graphics in the demo I posted last week if you want.

 

tileedit1211.zip