Putting All the skills together: Dark Days RPG (Alpha Footage)

Vernon_Burt · May 16, 2021, 3:26am

After a couple of false starts and more than a few sandbox tests, I’ve finally been in a place to start showing off the initial work for Dark Days. It’s a monster-of-the-week show flavored RPG based on the Dark Days series (Link

Half of everything is placeholders at this point, especially the UI but I’ve gotten a lot of the basics working. In the video you’ll see the initial tutorial level, a short sequence of the procedurally generated city you’ll be defending, and finally a quick shot of the turn-based combat system in development.

Things have been a bit of a slog until this point, everything working in about 8 different Sandbox scenes where I tried different things out and finally was able to blend to the point of reducing things to about four: New Character Creation, The starting tutorial, the city scene (overworld) and the combat Sandbox. Nows there’s a lot of level tweaking and building going on, which UI and Level design are probably my two biggest weaknesses.

Next up is completing the tutorial mission and the various needs for the subquests as well as improving the new character creation process. I’ll also be working on the prefabs for the city, as right now most are urban buildings and I’m aiming for a more touristy-town Haven style city for the player to be hunting monsters/evil villains in.

Kevin-Brandon · May 16, 2021, 7:57pm

It’s hard to do a sandbox creation game. How are you handling the work load?

Vernon_Burt · May 17, 2021, 3:25am

In this case, when I say ‘sandboxes’, these are small test scenes in which big systems are developed before being put into (or converted into) the main levels. For example, the quest/dialog scenes just has a bunch of NPCs sitting on a plane for me to interact with.

Dark Days is more of a rogue-like in that a lot of stuff is randomized. The houses, for example, contain metadata about what kinds of quests they can be entry points for so if you get a quest to check a store robbery, you’ll be given the address of one of the random stores on the map.

Mostly it’s a matter of doing a little bit at a time. I do five new building prefabs, Map out 5 blocks of pedestrian foot traffic, reward myself by working on some dialogue related. I’m using Trello as a giant Kanban board to track all the little bits I need to do before ‘Friends and Family’ testing.