Thursday 11 August 2011

Dark gothic...

So the real problem with a game such as this is doing justice to the setting. It is not enough to have a ass-kicking player that slays everything in its sight, it has to feel like you in the warhammer 40000 world.
WH40k has a dark gothic feel to it and it has blood and guts by the Rhino load.  SO first I will look at damage and death. Death should not just be a enemy dying, it has to feel right, chaos and xenos skum deserve no less. Weapons should be able to inflict gruesome damage and space marines should be able to rips heads off as they go along. So as gruesome as it indeed sounds, I will be implementing "fatality" moves to the game. At first they will be automatic, kind of like a critical hit, but only if the hit is close to killing the enemy.
Fatalities:
  • Decapitation, and de-limbing.
  • Blood spatter and blood spurts. (corpses that continue to spurt blood for a few turns)
  • Bodies flung across rooms and smashing into walls and other bodies.
  • Wieldable body parts (not that you would want to)
  • Total corpse destruction, e.g. ash, goo etc.
Weapons will only be capable of certain fatalities, i.e a chainsword can remove a head, a powerfist can crush heads or fling bodies around and a flamer can turn bodies to ash.

This will be easy enough to do in ascii but in tiles it will provide problems. Oh well...

15 comments:

  1. What problems would it pose with tiles?

    I guess this is probably a big no, but perhaps you could, in the future, expand your engine to include some other capabilities that IVAN has?

    I'm talking of composite sprites, specifically. That way some things would be represented more faithfully, like an ork with a power klaw, and sprite variants. You could use a pool of, let's say, chaos marine heads, or marine sergeand heads, and whatnot, and build a sprite up of a random picks between each limb/character pool, then apply the color switch.

    But I guess coding that must give major headaches.

    I'm glad this is developing well, albeit at a slow pace :) no need to rush things!

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  2. Oh, and wieldable body parts, taking into account what body parts can have grafted onto them in 40k, could be very helpful in certain situations.

    Take that bloody chainfist and shove it up the dreadnoght's exhaust pipe!

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  3. I must admit I did not initially think about tiles and how body parts would work ;) It would take a lot of hard word to do cool graphics and detachable body parts (mutations, grafting tech parts, etc). Currently I am looking at having body parts detach only upon death to make it simpler.
    Wield-able body parts will be in however, but I don't know how usable they will be!

    Cheers,

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  4. As for coding body parts/weapons with a library of sprites it would be relatively easy enough. My engine already supports multiple sprites to make up a body, and spraying colours onto them. So to answer your question if it could be done, I just need the sprites ;) This would probably be built into phase 3 though.
    Phase 1 is a basic game with all the mechanic in place, and phase 2 is a content rich environment, just expanding what I have. What Phase 3 development entails, the Emperor only knows...

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  5. The independent limbs would also allow for... Power Armor marks!

    It makes no sense for a space marine to find armor in a dungeon... unless it's *older* armor pieces.

    that way you can find a beaky helm and don it :)

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  6. Maybe I might even call them beaky helms :)
    Yeah one of the fun things about roguelikes is finding random stuff lying around, that still has to be an element of the game. Antique armour will have to be scattered around. I will have to work it in the plot.

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  7. Hey, here are a couple of graphix for you, along with those old tau and salamander :)

    http://ilovemakingtiles.blogspot.com/2011/08/40k-goodness.html

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  8. Just checked it out. Awsomeness!!

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  9. Hey, give me a list of weapons you have in-game :)

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  10. hahahahah

    more goodness for ya:

    http://ilovemakingtiles.blogspot.com/2011/08/forty-key-good-good-goodness.html

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  11. Yikes, your quick. heads, and arms, now I really can have body parts flying around :) (And beaky helms.) Is that a jump pack I see? You really are going to open up a can of worms...

    Weapons (by memory) only imperial so far: bolt pistol, bolt gun, heavy bolter, las pistol, lasgun, chainsword, eviscerator, power fist, lightning claw, power sword, shock maul, flamer, heavy flamer.
    Now that I list them there are so many! Of course I am yet to add grenades, plasma and melta weapons, stubbers, crude melee weapons and xenos weapons!!

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  12. If I keep to just imperial weapons for now things will be easier. Space Marines dont want to pick them up anyway.

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  13. Okay the bolt pistol, bolt gun and and chainsword you already have.

    And yes, that's a jump pack.

    Heavy flamers did or did not have a fitting backpack right?

    I'm familiar with heavy lasers, bolters, meltas, and plasma cannons, but /not/ with heavy flamers!

    Heavy weapons will go in a new kind of both-arms subsprite.

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  14. I've got an even more kickass version in the making.

    I'll post it later.

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  15. And here it is. That should cover all your player character sprite needs for a while.

    The third backpack is the hvy wpnz backpack, you can use the crozius arcanum (last in the "melee weapons" line) as the shock maul, since I wasn't sure if you meant the Adeptus Arbites version or the Thunder Hammer. But I'll do both of them eventually.

    Also, heads galore, together with librarian and chaplain heads. I just felt like making them.

    http://ilovemakingtiles.blogspot.com/2011/08/forty-key-kick-ass-goodness.html

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