I'm not sure if any of you used to play this Amiga BBS door game, but Hack 'n Slash was a pretty cool little text based RPG game. I've been thinking of doing a small web based game like that using flash/ASP/database in my own spare time (something to do while I'm bored I guess).. I think I can handle the code somewhat, but the game logic is what I'm pretty clueless about... say you're a level 12 warrior, with a level 5 weapon, lvl 10 armour, lvl watever skill etc, VS a lvl 14 monster with all his skill attributes, how do you go about calculating the outcome of every turn?.. this might take a long while to do, and I'm only doing it for fun, so it's probably a year off before I'll be showing anyone [;)] any tips or ideas appreciated..
The calculations are a lot more simple then you're conveying them to be. I'm a bit of a DnD fan so here's what i think
All weapons come with a few Specs:
Damage
Class
Accuracy or magic ability
Etc
The damage is done after the player successfully hits the oponent, calculated by:
(Player Skill at using that weapon + Weapon accuracy or magic ability) - (Monster dodge + Monster Armour Class, or AC)
(Don't forget that in DnD there is dice rolling to determine what happens a lot of the time, so don't forget to add a randomness factor)
AC rating is the goodness factor of their armour.
I'll have a bit more of a read of my DnD books tonite and get back to you
100% chance of PAIN, in the GLAVEN
Thanks - seems to be pretty simple so far.. what about lvl building? how much levelling would you gain by beating someone with a similar or greater level etc?.. I guess I'll have to look up some books and examples like Blitz suggested, and hopefully get some decent kind of game play happening. Never played pen and paper DnD in my life, unfortunately.
side note, one day i want to implement a robust enough GURPs engine that you can do full magical combat. (to extent of transform earth to air, air to stone etc and deform game map) and nice thing about gurps is that it tries to be ballanced~ but anyway...
if you ever have the inclination, try to find a copy of 'dork tower' comic book, they have some beautlfully balanced small scale games in the back to get some ideas (and they possibly would allow you to do an implementation if you asked)
I wouldn't suggest directly transforming a game system to the computer, since they won't work as intended or will take a lot more work to implement. What I suggest is you use your "Artistic Impression", and modify a few things, make certain things a lot simpler. I dunno maybe in future you can build upon your simple model and add a lot more features to it.
Yep, I'm going after something really simple, like Hack n Slash was. And yeh, something simple and then building upon that is definately the plan. I'm hoping for something like Hack n Slash in playing terms, and pixel art with buildings scenery from a topographic view like in Final Fantasy III on the SNES.. oh, and the battle scenes like that too. Seems very possible to do in Flash..
Sounds pretty good.
For lvl building, make all creatures have a formula for how muck XPerience you get from them. Working out how much you need to go up a level is up to you, but RPG making is a lot of number making. Look at Diablo 2. It would of taken them ages to work out all the numbers for that game.
100% chance of PAIN, in the GLAVEN
As a first step, i'd suggest getting your hands on a couple of paper&pen RPG books (Dungeons and dragons, shadowrun etc.) and check out their combat systems.
CYer, Blitz