The Dungeon Rebooted

  • Jeff Couch -- 27 January 2017
    Another of my early favorites was the Macintosh classic dungeon crawler "Dungeon of Doom" (aka "The Dungeon Revealed"). To be honest, I don't really remember a whole heck of a lot about the game. What I do remember is that I really enjoyed the exploration and excitement of discovering new gear and monsters. With that in mind, I have set about the adventure of recreating this game for modern computers. This is my first real foray into creating a game somewhat "from scratch." I say "somewhat" because I am utilizing SFML to handle most of the low-level stuff. Regardless, though, I expect that this is going to prove quite a challenge.

    So far, I have extracted what graphics I could find from online images, created a sprite sheet from them and am able to draw a tile map and the player to the main window. Also, I have currently set up input handling to accept key presses and move the player around the screen accordingly. I know that it isn't necessarily terribly exciting, but it is progress--visible progress--and that, in my opinion, is what keeps people motivated and moving forward. I'm sure this project would be much easier using a full-featured engine like Unity, but I am more interested in the learning aspects involved in designing and creating a game without such high-level tools.

    Jeff Couch -- 02 February 2017
    I am making progress (albiet slow progress) in the development of "Dungeon." Most recently, I spent the last couple of days trying to figure out why my level maps were being drawn upside down. Also, an even more fatal issue was present in which the dungeon tiles were being drawn, but a lot of them were returning null pointers. This was particularly problematic since the character movement checks collision against certain types of tiles based on a boolean member variable of the DungeonTile class. Now that I've got these issues sorted out and can effectively draw a rectangular level map (based on the dimensions of the window) with some randomly placed obstacle blocks, I want to move on to implementing some of the funner gameplay elements such as character creation, character classes, a stat system, enemies, and combat.

    I feel like I have done a decent job of implementing the sprite handling system so that I should be able to assign any of the available sprites to any Actor in the game with relative ease. My hope is that this should make it fairly easy to create monsters and plop them around the dungeon. I also spent quite a bit of time snipping graphical elements from the original game and adding them to the sprite sheet. It was a bit tedious, but it is pretty cool to have so many options for graphics in the game.
    To be continued...