A Zelda-like combat system?

Spazman · Post by **Spazman** » Tue Oct 16, 2012 12:52 pm

I've been thinking about something for a bit now, about whether or not to experiment around with the Doom RPG a little.

Since Doom was originally a fast-paced game and what-not, (and I've been getting requests for this as well), would there be any way to implement a Zelda-like system, to where you could fight on-map?

I mean, I was thinking about making the following:

-Fire a gunshot in a room (probably using the CTRL button), the monsters hear you and come running.

-If a monster sees you, it follows and attacks.

-Have imps / cacodemons / etc. fire projectiles and such at the player, which he / she would then have to dodge

-Shooting a barrel causes it to explode and potentially damage monsters (and yourself), in a radial blast.

-Arch-viles, if in their line of sight, can cast flaming elementals under you, costing the player a chunk of damage. This can be avoided if the player hides behind walls.

-Arch-viles can resurrect monsters (Except Cyberdemon lords and Spider Masterminds, and their variants.)

Since some of the key work I've been putting into the game so far has been mainly based on mapping, and the detail and such of them, I thought it interesting to place monsters in the maps themselves, and have them respawn like in Zelda when the room is entered / exited (Though, if difficulties are implemented, I'll only have this in NIGHTMARE! mode.).

HOWEVER, I don't know if we should do the same thing with items, as I don't want to encourage item spamming.

If anyone could provide some input into this and such, it'd be appreaciated! : D

BMR · Post by **BMR** » Tue Oct 16, 2012 1:05 pm

I'm pretty sure TMC (or was it James? I can't remember) has done a game with Zelda-like combat, though I can't quite remember the name of the game. From what I remember, the game was set in... a desert? Or something like that.

As for the scripting, I think it might be complicated, but certainly doable. The main issues I'd consider are:

1. Will you only be able to fire in four directions? Doom RL, which was turn-based, allowed you to fire in any direction you wanted. But as this is Doom RPG uses the OHR and is not turn-based, I'd imagine only four-directional firing. This might cause problems with monsters who are certainly within your LoS, but you won't be able to fire at them because they don't line up with your X and Y.

2. For what you're planning, I'd imagine you would need to create LoS code for each npc and the hero in order for the monsters to (1) properly track the player (2) figure out where walls are (3) figure out if the monsters can hear the player.

3. As for sound tracking, I'm assuming you'd have a global variable specifying the current noise level of the player. You could, of course, simply have this value fade gradually over a certain distance from the player. The problem with this then, is that monsters will be able to hear the player through walls that would logically not transmit sound very well. To work around this, you might need to work out a way to calculate sound values based on walls and monster distance.

...

Though now that I think about it, sound level variables could just be propagated through the player's LoS, provided that's blocked by walls. Unfortunately, that might also be unrealistic.

All in all, I think that if you're up to the coding skills (I know I'm not) this could potentially work really well. I'd caution though, that what you're trying to do might be a bit (ok, I lie, a lot) complicated so be careful that you don't get so bogged down with these new features that you don't finish the game.

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Tue Oct 16, 2012 4:41 pm

I believe you're thinking of the game by Fenrir actually.

I actually half made a game similar to what you'd be trying to do. Last Man Standing was a project I was working on with Blue Train but we kind of lost steam while making it.

Long story short, it's very possible to make a Zelda-like game on the OHR.
There's aren't many good examples though. I can suggest that game by Fenrir (Timesaga or something?) and my games Tim-Tim's Tower and the somekindaninja open-source techdemo.

BMR · Post by **BMR** » Wed Oct 17, 2012 4:31 am

Ah, yes, you're right. It was Fenrir, my bad.

Post by **TMC** » Wed Oct 17, 2012 10:28 am

I'm not going to volunteer to help with this, but I think most of that proposal isn't too difficult.

Instead of doing anything fancy with sound propagation, I would either totally ignore walls, or paint an "attentuates sounds" zone on walls as desired, and check for the zone in a straight line between source and receiver, decreasing volume by 30% per tile, for example.

Getting monsters to intelligently chase you might be the only difficult part, because "Chase" movetype NPCs are very stupid. If that's not good enough, you can hope James implements pathfinding.

I'd suggest allowing diagonal shots too. Limiting to four directions only would probably be too annoying.

If you went through with this and it worked well, would you scrap battles with the default battle system?

BMR · Post by **BMR** » Wed Oct 17, 2012 2:34 pm

Alternatively, you could do something like mouse-aim/shoot like Abuse (though that's a side-scroller), but that would certainly overcomplicate things. Still, I've seen some good top-down Flash games that use the mouse to aim and shoot, but as that's Flash, I'm not sure just how well it would work with the OHR.

Spoonweaver · Post by **Spoonweaver** » Wed Oct 17, 2012 4:16 pm

It would work great if done correctly.

Post by **TMC** » Wed Oct 17, 2012 5:56 pm

Using the mouse just for aiming and nothing else would be really bad UI.