Shandalar Clone

[DennisBergkamp]

The first time I've ever played magic was by playing this Microprose game back in '97. It's been quite awhile (coding Forge is more fun than playing Magic), but I used to play the Shandalar part of this game for hours and hours... the sheer amount of updates that have gone into Manalink (now 12+ years later) just show this game's undeniable awesomeness

Now, Forge Quest mode is a lot of fun, but I'm still missing the "running-around-doing-stuff" part which Shandalar has. So I've been thinking about adding a "Shandalar" part to Forge for a long long time now, basically right as I was adding my first card to MTGForge (as it was called back then ).
A few weeks ago, I finally got off my lazy butt and started messing around with Java 2D, and based off of code from a tutorial I found online, I now have some kind of "engine" that actually works! I have a little guy composed out of sprites (ripped from an old video game) running around the map (also blatantly stolen), running into random encounters (Final Fantasy style) of opponents and actually getting to play a game of magic against them.

There's still a lot of work to be done (and bugs to be fixed), but I thought I'd share this anyway... I'd love to hear some suggestions from you guys.
Plus, if there's any good graphic artists out there with lots of free time on their hands, I could use the help

Here's a few screenshots:

[Hellfish]

Quest for Glory!
Modern update for Shandalar... I've been hoping for/expecting it from Wizards themselves since before Y2K!

[Sloth]

This is more than I ever dreamed Forge would be! This is a really great idea.

Since I played a lot of games like these, my first thought is:

Be very careful not to force the pace of playing onto a player. That means:

- no real time map (like in Shandalar)
- no random battle encounters everywhere (like in Final Fantasy). Random battle encounters should be limited to optional regions.
- no senselessly long ways on the map.

I will make more comments later.

[Rob Cashwalker]

YOWZERS!
That's totally awesome!

[DennisBergkamp]

Well, it's not even remotely close to being done yet, I only have some of the foundations in place.

I agree with your suggestions, Sloth. The realtime map I definitely wasn't going to implement: it's not that much fun to get chased all of the time by a bunch of monsters, plus it would require a lot more work.

[Chris H.]

I like this, just wish that we had someone with commercial-grade artistic talents onboard.

[mtgrares]

It looks very, very good. (The hardest part of creating a new videogame is often the art.)

[Huggybaby]

This is clearly what the world is waiting for. If only the Wagic guys and the MagicWars guys and the Forge team could work together. There are art and interface people out there, they're just working on different projects.

[Rob Cashwalker]

We don't even have to go terribly fancy with maps... you could get away with using something generic, like a map of NYC (biased) or any local town. The sprite doesn't have to be anything fancy, it can just be a small version of the avatars for the opponents and the player. (oh yeah, let the player choose an avatar)
At this point we may want to move away from naming our opponents after commercial characters... "Bob" or "Jim" or "Jim-Bob" are perfectly fine, especially in this format where folks are presented to you along the way. There are likely a few public domain illustrations of generic people that can be assigned for this purpose.

[Sloth]

We don't even have to go terribly fancy with maps... you could get away with using something generic, like a map of NYC (biased) or any local town. The sprite doesn't have to be anything fancy, it can just be a small version of the avatars for the opponents and the player. (oh yeah, let the player choose an avatar)
At this point we may want to move away from naming our opponents after commercial characters... "Bob" or "Jim" or "Jim-Bob" are perfectly fine, especially in this format where folks are presented to you along the way. There are likely a few public domain illustrations of generic people that can be assigned for this purpose.

I would like it more, if we stick to a fantasy theme. It would always remind me of yu-gi-oh to have card battling bikers and business men.

Back in the day (like 15 years ago) I used to make sprites pixel by pixel for some home made games (example screenshots: http://www.deep.homepage.t-online.de). But I can only offer to make low resolution (or tiny) sprites this way. tell me what you need and I can make some examples.

[Chris H.]

In the past I saw an app or two which was used to create fantasy type names for RPG games. The problem is the pics. I searched for cr-free pics and found several clip art web sites that exist to "sell" us these types of pics. They suggest that the pics they have online may be cr-free. I can't say if these sites that I found can be trusted in this fashion or not.

I am all for changing over to cr-free icons and names. I do not want to devote too much time on this only to discover that the material is not as cr-free as the web site claims.

[DennisBergkamp]

Yeah exactly, fantasy opponents sound good (Elves, Trolls, Mages, Goblins, ... ), basically like Shandalar.
As for animation sprites, I think I'm alright (there's this RPG sprite website that has millions of them, for free). On top of that, I don't think I will animate that much stuff other than the hero because:

- a bunch of the fights will get generated from random encounters Final Fantasy style ("invisible" enemy on the map).
- Other enemies/dungeons/bosses could be placed as stationary sprites on the map, then once visited it would start the battle (a la Heroes of Might and Magic).

The type of images I'd be looking for is backgrounds (maybe whenever a city or store is visited) and maybe some skins for the menus. Anyway, extra graphics are not even that necessary at this point, like Rob said, there's a lot of places to just rip decent looking stuff from, free and legally.

EDIT: if it's mostly copyright issues you guys are worried about, we could always just release image packs separately (which is what we've been doing with Forge anyway - in fact, we release a product that would have almost 3600 copyrighted images ).

[DennisBergkamp]

I really like the current map I'm using, but there's also some gorgeous maps here:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/forum.php

I doubt those are available for us to use though

[Huggybaby]

Why not? Just send the creator a PM and see what happens. There are also random map makers like this: http://donjon.bin.sh/world/, or this: http://dragonempire.com/de/deciv4editor.html, NTM dungeon makers.

[Chris H.]

EDIT: if it's mostly copyright issues you guys are worried about, we could always just release image packs separately (which is what we've been doing with Forge anyway - in fact, we release a product that would have almost 3600 copyrighted images ).

`
If we had a creative type person on the project then we would have less of these add on packs. And more of this "material" could be included in the beta releases. Then again, I am not very creative. For me, the current system works OK.