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Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.

I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.

Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.

Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.

Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!

Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?

Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.

tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.

Comments
  • 3
    I’m doing the same :)
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    @Root I am starting with a Dragon Warrior type game. I practically have that game memorized from playing it so much as a kid.

    What game are you starting with?
  • 3
    @Demolishun I generally remake Asteroids for practice, but this time I’m making a tower defense game, I think. Simple to build, and adding levels is easy. Perks and heroes adds replayability. It’s also gives me practice with particle systems, which I really enjoy.

    I don’t know enough about Godot to make anything decent yet, though. Just made a really simple platformer with some enemies to avoid and items to collect. If I had more than an hour a week…
  • 2
    Once I’m confident enough in Godot, I want to make an RPG like Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger — ambitious! Maybe Secret of Mana.
  • 1
    @Root I just went and found the game I want to recreate. Gonna play through it a bit to see what kind of hell we accepted back then.
  • 1
    @Demolishun I found my 5yo trying to play Duke Nukem yesterday, speaking of…
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    @Root I only played Duke Nukem 3D. That was a fun engine make mods for.
  • 1
    Can you make a procedural Space Cadet Pinball? 😁 OK, that's kinda pointless... but maybe not.
  • 2
    speaking of game dev, i might drop an announcement on dr soon on the project, im working on. First i want make a showcase video, since i imagine that would be the best way to show it off.

    Back on topic: 2D is a cool way to be able to focus on actual gameplay instead of only on graphics or game systems. So you see actual improvement, when working on it on your own. And procedurally generating stuff sounds cool (and is a lot of fun to implement) but is very tricky to get right.
  • 2
    I was experimenting with voronoi for procedural terain generation but it was long time ago.

    I don't know if you're aware but there is also "superformula" - literally name of the algorithm that can generate any shape you want using math.

    You can easily find online supershape, superformula implementations that generate shapes.

    From my side I would love to try to feed GAN or any other modern neutral network to generate items for me. Unfortunatelly it takes a lot of time :/
  • 2
    @vintprox I played with making 3D pinball a few years back in Godot. It was a lot of fun setting up bumpers. It was interesting I had to put a glass cover on the board to keep the ball from flying out. Not sure about randomizing that though.
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    @jestdotty the gambling was in Dragon Warrior 3.

    I first tested the weapon improvement thing in Oblivion. It actually worked and I was improving it. Ran into an issue where one of the libraries I was using was bloating save files. It was a hobby project and I lost interest in dealing with libraries not really designed for what I was doing. I was storing statistic data and I think I was doing something wrong there. Something that was making the save grow too large too fast.
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    Took me a bit to comment because I was stuck at work and this stayed at the back of my head but I can honestly say that I love this idea for a 2d game. As you, some of the fondest game memories I have are from 2d games. Might think we are around the same age.

    I am currently fking myself over tutorial hell as well, and I had mentioned this a while back but I was writing my own set of libraries and components for graphics manipulation and physics. That in itself is for nothing more than my own academic research, doing it through a new language called Odin btw (you can just call in vulkan or opengl from within Odin's vendor libs and there is no additional setup, gift from code gods) and once I get them somehow semi working I use them on raylib.

    I am doing horrible on this experiment, but going at it little by little.

    Cool to know there are other gamedev enthusiasts in here :D
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