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KickStarter Monomyth - A first person action RPG/dungeon crawler - now in Beta

zwanzig_zwoelf

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In Deus Ex this kind of item highlighting was cleverly inserted into the lore and suited the game well. IMO, inserting something like this into a fantasy game without any adjustments to the style would most likely ruin it.

Nobody explained why you can see your head in Doom. It somehow managed just fine.
Reading comprehension check failed.
 

PrettyDeadman

Guest
In Deus Ex this kind of item highlighting was cleverly inserted into the lore and suited the game well. IMO, inserting something like this into a fantasy game without any adjustments to the style would most likely ruin it.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic used similar system (and it is a lot similar to Monomyth in terms of gameplay and style):

8LoBBbV.jpg


I don't think proposed highlighting is any more lore-friendly than the way it was done in Deus Ex / DOMM.

I mostly posted about this as an alternative worth considering, not necessarily because I believe it to be 100% better (though, at least it doesn't have strong association with popamole as bright yellow outlines do).
 
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zwanzig_zwoelf

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In Deus Ex this kind of item highlighting was cleverly inserted into the lore and suited the game well. IMO, inserting something like this into a fantasy game without any adjustments to the style would most likely ruin it.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic used similar system (and it is a lot similar to Monomyth in terms of gameplay and style):

8LoBBbV.jpg


I don't think proposed highlighting is any more lore-friendly than the way it was done in Deus Ex / DOMM.

I mostly posted about this as an alternative worth considering, not necessarily because I believe it to be 100% better (though, at least it doesn't have strong association with popamole as bright yellow outlines do).
Dude, I'm not a storyfaggot to reee about lore, but I do care about consistency. DMoMM example looks ok, I might've jumped to conclusions too quickly. :salute:
 
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While the Dark Messiah approach is unobtrusive and much better than A, it is never going to be as practical, for example when you have similar shaped items very close together, you'll never really know what's selected
 

RatTower

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Might still take a bit. But there has been some good progress lately.

The spell system is basically done. Level ups and magic attunement are also working.
As described earlier in the thread (?) all of that happens at the save shrine.



Next: The actual save system + level loading (streaming possibly)
After that: Fixing the tutorial & improving combat

Things I haven't touched yet are friendly NPCs as well as some forms of movement. To be more precise: Swimming and climbing. I had swimming and climbing in the earliest version of the game and I do really like the underwater sections in King's Field 4, but I have to see how well it works with the rest of the feature set. Concerning NPC dialogues I'm currently in the planning phase. At the moment I'm leaning towards a keyword based system.

Also TechRaptor wrote an article on Monomyth:

 

Thal

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Apr 4, 2015
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I like your approach to level design, very Thief-esque. Do you have any specific plans to utilize verticality and underwater areas? This is one area that added tremendously to Morrowind's exploration and magic systems, and has imo been sorely missing in arpgs ever since.

Since you've already decided to go rather stats heavy :obviously: approach, it presents a possibility have a solid climbing mechanic based on different surfaces and player character's, let's say, Strength, Dex and Stamina. Walls with protruding rocks being easiest to climb and wooden walls nigh impossible. Climbing drains your stamina until, completely depleted, would cause you to fall. While spells like levitation and certain items like climbing hooks or magic potions could be used to bypass or reduce the difficulty of these challenges.
 

SophosTheWise

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Feb 19, 2013
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Why highlight objects at all?

Probably because not having a feedback in place feels shit and having feedback adds to gratification.
__

As always, RatTower, impressed with your work. I especially like the idea of including a climbing mechanic. It seems like such an obvious thing to include in a game about adventures and dungeoneering, but for some reason almost no RPGs include it. Verticality just adds so much.
 

vlzvl

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I liked the way Morrowing displayed the items, without highlighting at all.
More realism, none shitty effects. But its my opinion and mine only.
Never liked too much glow in RPGs.

35CADC799DEB02A86F27762FED97FD4F11AF814A
 

Ash

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What? Morrowind had the box outline and item nametag. Still a form of highlight.

The two main rules for highlight implementation should be: the highlight only draws when an object is in your crosshairs and within reach. The visuals drawn are thematically appropriate and not obnoxious.
Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah, and Morrowind would be good fantasy examples. There's no reason to do it any different principally, or at least I do not see any reason to. I don't think I need to tell Rattower any of this though.

So which one? Definitely image B. It's perfect. Solid middle ground between subtle and stand-out.
 

RatTower

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I like your approach to level design, very Thief-esque. Do you have any specific plans to utilize verticality and underwater areas? This is one area that added tremendously to Morrowind's exploration and magic systems, and has imo been sorely missing in arpgs ever since.

No specific plans yet apart from a couple of design ideas.
My intention was to integrate water as an obstacle first and as a new area later (e.g. first you drown pretty quickly, later you get items/spells that let you explore underwater areas).
Much like with climbing I still have to see how well it integrates with the rest of the feature set.

Anyway, good news for Jack Dandy and everbody who asked about seamless world exploration:
I finished experimenting with level streaming.



The "little trick" is a pseudo level running in the background (which is necessary for streaming anyway). That level holds most persistent objects and is "overlayed" onto the static world. Also saves me some headaches concerning level loading.

Wrt the loading screens you can imagine Monomyth pretty much like Dark Souls or King's Field 2-4. The game only uses a loading screen for stuff like resetting the player after death, starting out or teleporting between shrines.
Even made some fog gates for testing, but you'll probably never see them, since those just block the player from entering unloaded areas and should be long gone once you arrive where they normally are.



Also reworked the main menu (as seen above), as well as saving and loading which are all related to level persistence. Added some very basic character creation too (naming only for the moment - stats are currently set to default).
 
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Ash

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I sense that overall, your primary inspiration appears to be Kings Field and not Underworld and Arx and games of that ilk. Inferior priorities, I declare!

...though of course Kings Field has plenty valid to cause inspiration, and a game with values drawn both from Underworld-type games and Kings Field would be ace. But my inspiration would be 80% Underworld style, 20% Kings Field style.

Nonetheless, I am sure the game will be great and I am very much hopeful for it.

Anyway, enough speculation. Is it true, is KF a bigger inspiration for you? I'll respect it whatever the case.
 

Jack Dandy

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Good news for both you and many other players! The game is shaping up so well. Bless you for working on it!
 

RatTower

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I sense that overall, your primary inspiration appears to be Kings Field and not Underworld and Arx and games of that ilk. Inferior priorities, I declare!

...though of course Kings Field has plenty valid to cause inspiration, and a game with values drawn both from Underworld-type games and Kings Field would be ace. But my inspiration would be 80% Underworld style, 20% Kings Field style.

Nonetheless, I am sure the game will be great and I am very much hopeful for it.

Anyway, enough speculation. Is it true, is KF a bigger inspiration for you? I'll respect it whatever the case.

Atmosphere-wise and with regard to world layout I was always more on the side of KF. I always thought that doesn't say much though. Both KF and Underworld have very similar world design, with the exception that UU stacks its heavily interwoven areas ontop of each other and separates them through loading screens. Where KF and UU are different though is how the world opens up. KF is more conservative/very japanese and slowly opens up by having the player retrieve certain key items, much like in the early Dragon Quest and Zelda (and I actually reckon the inspiration was coming from there). It's a more streamlined formula wheras UU pretty much allows you to roam freely from the very beginning, much like - well - Ultima. Of course you can't finish the game without playing the questline (or core parts of it), but technically you can go down and pound on the wizards' door from the very beginning.
Much of this is a philosophical discussion though, because one could argue that KF2/3 open up equally around mid game, so they just let you off the leash a little later and anything before that was just to get you settled in. Arx was kind of an in-between. Technically you could explore freely (after the tutorial), but there were certain limits (the most obvious one: the giant worm - but also stuff like the snake women literally telling you "You came here too early - go back")

So where is Monomyth in this whole discussion? It definitely has a "tutorial area" to learn all mechanics. That is pretty much everything before you enter Lysandria. Once you are in the fortress, the game opens up more. However some parts are closed off until you explore further. Where you explore is up to you though. This is the reason why I like to compare it to KF2 a lot. It's just the right mix between free exploration and streamlined progression.

But that alone is not the be-all end-all to the matter, because mechanics-wise I see Monomyth drifting more towards Arx/Dark Messiah/Underworld - especially Arx. For example the entire aspect of combining items and really interacting with the world is pretty much absent in KF. KF is basically a static world with keys lying around. Sometimes in the form of literal keys, sometimes in the form of items you'd trade with NPCs.



But then again, the other games aren't doing it much differently. The only real question is, what those keys are. Take Arx for example. You cannot enter the dragon's cave as long as you can't levitate over the chasm where Greu lives (or get over there in some other way). You could argue the levitation scroll is a "key" to finishing the game. The big difference between Arx and KF is: Arx often offers more than just one key.

And this is where both KF and Arx/Underworld are conceptually opposed to each other.
King's Field will always be like "You need to go to that throne room and get that moonlight sword and then you destroy that ancient evil with it. And if you want to visit place B before place A and then get the sword, that's fine - but you get that sword!"
Wheras Underworld and Arx (Arx even literally) are like "You need to go and get that magic sword to destroy that ancient evil with it. We won't tell you, but technically you can also knock that guy out by using this horribly unbalanced"

These two scenarios perfectly illustrate the difference between the two game design doctrines.
One is a streamlined experience with some freedoms but ultimately a pre-set way to achieve things.
The other one is a more open experience that leads to the same end, but through several different ways.

And even though the second concept seems superior at first glance, I think one could argue a thousand years over which feels more gratifying to the players. Because there is something satisfying about doing things your own way and yet there is also something satisfying about being the wielder of the mythological moonlight blade and the story telling us, that this is the real deal.

For Monomyth I won't rule anything out there. I enjoy having several options to solve a challenge. Even now this is a possibility with the game featuring lockpicking and smashing doors. But I also like a good, satisfying story and rewarding progression. Not every door can be smashed and not every chest can be lockpicked. There are limits to what you can do. That comes very naturally during the design process. Yet I try to keep things as free as possible.
And that's what makes it so hard to pin down the "biggest inspiration" behind Monomyth. Yes, it started out as a full blown King's Field clone. It's a solid foundation. But Arx and Underworld had so much of an impact by now that some people first and foremost see and feel that influence.
 
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Ash

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King's Field will always be like "You need to go to that throne room and get that moonlight sword and then you destroy that ancient evil with it. And if you want to visit place B before place A and then get the sword, that's fine - but you get that sword!"
Wheras Underworld and Arx (Arx even literally) are like "You need to go and get that magic sword to destroy that ancient evil with it. We won't tell you, but technically you can also knock that guy out by using this horribly unbalanced"

The idea in an underworld-like is still for all those choices to be reasonably balanced. There are definitely exceptions though. Exceptions they can get away with because they only have minor impact on the overall balance, instead of say rewarding you with 10,000 gold or letting you skip half the game. I think the major exception to this rule is the game letting you rob the two trader brothers on level 4 with next to no consequences, because they have tooons of shit. Game does need a refinement mod.

These two scenarios perfectly illustrate the difference between the two game design doctrines.
One is a streamlined experience with some freedoms but ultimately a pre-set way to achieve things.
The other one is a more open experience that leads to the same end, but through several different ways.

And even though the second concept seems superior at first glance, I think one could argue a thousand years over which feels more gratifying to the players. Because there is something satisfying about doing things your own way and yet there is also something satisfying about being the wielder of the mythological moonlight blade and the story telling us, that this is the real deal.

Well, the main positive of the more straightforward approach is optimal, focused design. It's a lot easier to get everything perfect, polished, the challenge and balance just right, when there are not multiple ways of solving most problems as in Underworld-likes.
 

RatTower

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Quick update:

Added containers+GUI



Originally I actually placed items within the chests, which was nice but rather fiddly the second you had to put in more than one (or something that's a bit bigger, like a two-handed sword).
The same menu can be used for looting bodies, trading with NPCs and perhaps even stealing from them, but I have no specific plans for that right now. I could imagine it as a dexterity check, but the consequences of being detected are a whole different problem (not so much with enemies, but with friendly NPCs).
Either way, this and perhaps next week I'll be busy with some minor stuff (I still have to bring back quickslots - also equipping alternative weapons would be nice).
Once that's all in order I'll tackle two big challenges mentioned earlier in the thread: Improving combat & fixing the tutorial.
 

RatTower

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I'm currently implementing the dialogue system.
Essentially you have a bunch of keywords you can ask an NPC about, where every keyword can potentially start a dialogue tree, in which the player can give answers to whatever is said.
The system had quite a few inspirations but it's probably closest to Morrowind. The only real difference is that there is a separation between "local" and "global" keywords. Local keywords are those that only concern things just mentioned by the NPC, wheras global keywords are things any NPC can be asked (e.g. "Tell me about ... yourself/rumors/certain items etc"). Furthermore global keywords can be collected from dialogue and notes in the world. Also, trading with NPCs should work right away through the container interface, so vendors are pretty much in the game.

I'm still trying to collect a couple of use cases for the dialogue system though, to make sure its a powerful mechanic (no matter how far I'll go with it in the end).
In the current system basically every node and link in the dialoge tree can have a post-condition. Meaning, when a node is visited (i.e. its text is displayed) certain code is executed and some switches are flipped.
That for example allows me to add experience points after dialogues, remove inventory items, trigger certain events, etc, etc.

Links (which pretty much equate to answers within a dialogue tree) additionally have a pre-condition to check whether they are available. This comes in handy if you wanna check certain requirements for an answer. For example when you are finishing a quest and the NPC goes "Have you found X?" then the pre-condition on the link saying "Yes I have!" is something along the lines of a variable in the background saying "X_found==true". That pre-condition is checked before the link/answer is made available. The same concept also works for dialogue "skills" which boil down to stat checks. E.g. imagine an NPC can be threatened, but you need 15 strength for it. Then the pre-condition for the link saying "No I haven't but you'll give me a reward anyway!" would be something like "player.getAttributeRaw(Attribute.STRENGTH)>=15".

So the system currently covers standard procedures like setting variables, altering the player state (e.g. adding items/exp) and checking some stuff. Technically one could even implement a reputation system with the link pre-conditions, but I would probably extend the whole dialogue system for convenience there. Also I haven't really planned features like that to keep the feature creep at bay.


Now I was wondering if there is anything special you can think of that might still be missing.
Is there any special dialogue option you can think of? Any dialogue-related mechanic you remember from some game that I should still cover?


 
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Jack Dandy

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Hmmm.. I'll be quite honest - for these kinda games, I think the less dialogue, the better! Think Souls.
I suppose comprehensive dialogue systems worked fine in Ultima Underworld. But I like the feeling of isolation in these kinda games, so I'm biased.
 

RatTower

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Quick update:
The heat wrecked my main cooling fan so currently I can't really code much or make meshes before my workstation overheats.
Still finished the first version of the dialogue system:



UI and layout aren't too fancy right now but you get the idea.

Also just in case you're wondering: Project backups are done both automatically and manually several times a week.

Next up: Design work while waiting for a replacement fan, then the combat rework.
 

DJOGamer PT

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Now I was wondering if there is anything special you can think of that might still be missing.
Is there any special dialogue option you can think of? Any dialogue-related mechanic you remember from some game that I should still cover?

Since you took inspiration from Morrowind (also my favorite dialog system in video games) you could put approaches like intimidation, seduction, taunting, etc.
Also aspects like reputation (including past actions), class, faction affecting the way NPC treat you and how you can talk to them.
Have some consistency like: someone who hasn't gotten to the X floor should barely know anything about it, and a scholar shouldn't be as knowledgeable in weaponry as a mercenary.
If you want even more complexity I recommend you checking out Daggerfall's dialog system, it's like Morrowind but on steroids - where you can even change the way you talk to a more polite and diversified tone (for the nobles) or to a simple and more personal one (for the peasants).

then the combat rework.

Since your game is solely is first person, check out Mordhau.
This is some explanation by the Devs:


Now just gameplay with no commentary:



I truly believe these guys are making the best first person combat of this type.
 
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Max Heap

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Jul 21, 2011
Messages
617
That might work with human enemies but what good is a realistic combat system when you have fantasy enemies like golems or dragons?
Mordhau seems cool but the first few enemies in Kings Field are some squids and a giant plant that bites you.
Same with Underworld. There are more humanoids in that game but lots of enemies are just slimes, worms and ghosts.
I don't think some "intricate sword fighting simulation" would work so well there.

Wouldn't mind anything like Vermintide though. As long as Monomyth's combat is slightly better than that of its inspirations.
 

zwanzig_zwoelf

Graverobber Foundation
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If this ends up being like King's Field (US) with some variation in attack animations and okay feedback is a deal for me.

My main interest lies in exploration / complex level design / resource management. Combat is probably the main point in Mordhau, but it was never the main point in any of the 3 games mentioned as the inspiration material.

Just my 2 cents.
 

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