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Dungeon to Abyss [Devblog]

Peonso

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Hello OTLand, let me introduce myself, I'm Peonso, a low profile member of OpenTibia communities since 2005. I started messing around with a map editor, and ended up learning the basics of programming through those years. By touching the SimOne map editor I got motivated by dream of coming up with my own game world, to have players running through dungeons I designed myself. This dream came to reality with Guilcera, many iterations went online through the years of 2005 and 2006, once again in 2012, and one last time in 2017. Others might know me by hosting last Celestia with Kungenn in 2015. I also maintained OTHire distribution for some years. After hitting a wall on the development of Guilcera, I started the OpenTibia Sprite Pack (OTSP) project.

While managing OTSP I meet tons of new people, many being spriters, and while talking with Erick Etchebeur the inevitable idea of a custom game came up, and that was the seed that became Dungeon to Abyss. A custom game using OpenTibia resources, disassociating from Tibia and all it's mechanics. Graphics from OTSP + Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and more sprites from Etchebeur, Michael H and xmiller. Some old revisions of TFS 1.3, otclient, ZnoteAAC 1.5. Heavy usage of ObjectBuilder, ItemEditor, RME. Tons of scripts, code, maps, ideas and resources from OtLand and other related communities. Incluiding using OTBM2JSON to convert any sort of map and even rotate+mirroring. Check this exemple with Jungle Cave by Neon, after running my tool it not only became available for DtA sprite pack but on a diferent orientation.​

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Messing up with OpenTibia files still a hobby I love a lot, and I'm always thinking about removing the dust and spider webs from those files to bring them back to life again, that is what this thread is about. Trying to do it in a more rationalized way, inspired by theory from channels like Extra Credits and Core-A Gaming, I made a manifesto aiming to guide the server development, so I can more easily identify problems and goals, and also keep track of where I want to go with the server itself. What I want is to figure out the best execution possible with my limitations.

## Dungeon to Abyss Manifesto ##

# General gameplay #

Dungeon to Abyss is a 2d multiplayer online RPG, with fantasy medieval settings, tile based gameplay on 45° perspective.

Here you incarnate a brave adventurer to face dangerous monsters and quests, exploring a rich 2d open game world. After witnessing the obliteration of your home world, you start your journey in a new town, surrounded by vast lands, rich in secrets and mysteries.

Come up with your own gameplay style by choosing your ability combos, attributes progression and itemization.

Wide range of fun to use character abilities. Fun position based combat.

Craft your own equipment.

Easy to use chat system that enables good communication.

# Philosophy #

It must be enjoyable, and the content reachable to people that nowadays have busy lives and can't compromise a huge amount of time to the game. Some people that played games 10, 15 years ago, and now have jobs, families, among other responsibilities, are interested in to play but are discouraged by the gap nolifers achieve, Dungeon to Abyss casuals should be at the same peace as nolifers, at least the gap should be small regarding character power.

We want players to stick, keep hooked playing, but won't trick players through Skinner Box traps. We want meaningful content, be it narrative, lore, quests, mysteries, and a huge rich world to interact. Avoid making traps to add replayability.

Simplicity, there weren't tons of systems, menus and points to be tracked. The scaleable complexity comes from customizing your character regarding itemization, abilities and attribute progression.

Fast paced early game experience. While it can't be too complex, low level play should be rewardful and fun.

Inspired by games like Ultima, Tibia, Diablo, Path of Exile, World of Warcraft.

# Implementation

While it's aiming to be a fully and complete experience, I'm going for a minimum viable product to be ready and online to be played. That said measures to speed up development processes have been taken, placeholder sprites everywhere, client ui revamp pushed to last thing to be done. Playable areas for the first levels are the only ones being developed. Development is funelled to make it happening, instead of falling into the
Development Hell trap many insist to ignore.

If a monetization method is ever to be implemented it will be to allow players to put their own ideas into the game, either by developing an item, a spell, a zone, a npc, a quest, a building, etc. Everything gameplay-wise is free and there isn't any sort of pay2win.

## Manifesto End ##


Post is already long, I will end with a gif showing some abilities. Next time I will approach where I'm at development or how game mechanics will work.

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Thread itself is a way to motivate myself to put work on the project, I will update it as I make progress or have some thoughts to share. Feel free to follow it and share your own thoughs or ideas.
 
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I had huge fun playing Guilcera and Celestia, you ran great servers and have been a massive help to many ot players/servers. This looks amazing, I cannot wait to try it!
 
This is why I still check OTland, in hopes of seeing brilliant posts like this. The best part for me was "Inspired by games like Ultima, Tibia, Diablo, Path of Exile, World of Warcraft." Being able to still play a tile based gameplay on 45° perspective, while retaining inspirations from the mentioned games is exactly what I want and look for every single day I check OTland. Words can't express my interest for this upcoming game.
 
I couldn't bear the look of borderless roof, so yeah.. here it is.
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Before checking where development stands let's start a time travel to the past.

REALLY OLD FOOTAGE


First video I recorded back in 2017, still prototyping basic stuff. First thing you see is being able to check races and levels at character list, it's really hacky stuff (as many of the features), I'm sending level and race info with character name string and parsing that through the client. Sadly I ditched the races idea for now because of sprites constraints, basic code to handle that still there, so I can revisit the idea if sprite unavailability changes somehow. Races differences would be sprites and slight variantions on base attributes of the character.

And attributes are the next thing on the video, by that time there wasn't a UI window yet, on Dungeon to Abyss you have strenght, dexterity and wisdom attributes, each level you gain 3 points to spread as you want, they are requirement for abilities to use and gear to equip. Strenght gives you health bonuses and increase damage dealed with melee attack and related abilities. Dexterity increases your dodge chance, damage dealed with physical ranged attacks and related abilities. Lastly wisdom gives you mana bonuses and also is a parameter for formulas of related abilities. That said all combat formulas from TFS are revamped, level is not a parameter, there are no skills nor magic level.

Last but not least, containers can't be put inside other containers objects.​
 
Still on the OLD FOOTAGE train.

On this first video you can see OpenTibia Sprite Pack was implemented. There is some showoff of weapon attack speed stat, on DtA default attack speed is 1.5s, there are faster weapons, with 1s attack speed as daggers, and slow weapons, 2s attack speed as two handed swords. Last some early version of the attribute window.


This second one already has tons of sprites from @Erick Etchebeur and @Michael H. You can see that inventory is not the same from OTservers, you have 4 backpack slots, and 2 accessory slots, that can handle rings, boots, torchs, necks and gloves. Item have many stats, from critical strike chance, to attack speed, life, life regen, mana, mana regen, bonuses to armor rating, dodge rating, spell resistence and spell damage bonus. You also have idol sockets on items, idols are items that grant you abilities, so if you have the requirements you can socket a idol in an item and equip the item to be able to cast an ability.

 
Looks Amazing!
Can you can build in music too?

When did you say the test server would be online? Christmas?
 
Experience
Last week I tackled most of the changes I wanted to make regarding experience. The experience needed for each level doesn't follow default OTServ formulas, introducing the new formula is really straightfoward process, and there are minor changes in the client also, so experience bar behaves properly. Max level is 30, you need 710 experience points to get to level 2 and total 7880750 to get to level 30, that doesn't say much because you don't know how much exp each monster gives and how fast they are killed, but it is what it is. On Dungeon to Abyss monsters have levels and if you are too far away from the killed monster level you gain less experience, not sure if monster level will clutter the UI, and while I don't want to hide it, I also don't want to overwhelm the player with meaningless information. Monsters with one level difference still gives 100% exp, but with 2 levels of difference total experience lowers to 90% to the point a monster 6 levels lower gives no experience at all to the player. Death penalty plays a different role in the game also, you can't lose levels, you lose maximum of 50% of total experience needed towards the next level. Regarding party play, experience is shared by all party members, but they are distributed weighted by player levels, that way a higher level can't speed carry a lower level. Let me give an exemple, if a level 4 and a level 5 group up to play, the level 4 will wield 4/9 of the experience while the level 5 will wield 5/9 of the experience from the monsters.

Nothing is set on stone though. The whole idea is that the endgame is geared toward players at level 25-29, where leveling up starts to really get hard and that players can breeze till level 20 once they get knowledge about the game and how to play it.
 
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Sorry I lost the link to the test server, could you post it again?
 
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