I got a little ambitious this week, resulting in me making my upload deadline by a matter of seconds (and not giving the game a proper writeup until now). Dragondot is my take on the action-rpg/action-adventure genre, inspired by the likes of Zelda and Crystalis. (And by not being able to justify shelling out fifteen bucks for Pokemon Rumble, but I digress.) I’ve learned a lot from the making of this game (such as “don’t try writing an action RPG in a week”, and how to make circles adorable), but I think I’m going to aim for something a bit simpler next week. Preferably not involving circles, as I’m quite sick of them after yesterday’s panicked 7-hour coding spree.
Anyway. Go play Dragondot!
Game 06: Dragondot,
*points out that the controls listed on the starting screen are backwards >.>*
Fixed, thanks.
Really impressive man. The rate at which you are improving your coding knowledge is awesome.
Hahaha, this is quite addicting!
(frustratingly difficult for me, but addicting all the same!)
Keep them coming!
It’s a very enjoyable game. I loved how kobolds circle around me exclaiming ‘<3' fanatically.
Great little game Love it.
6 games in, you’re doing great, much better than some of the other folk that have tried this!!
Keep it up!
The giant is impossible.
There’s a trick to it. Attacking it all-out may not be the best approach.
Amazink! I must’ve played through this like five times already. It’s awesome how you can find cute little quirks that you don’t discover until after you play through this a couple times and experiment around.
“Experiment around” in this case being “attempt to port it to Javascript”? =D I sincerely wish you the best of luck in attempting to deal with code that wasn’t really written with portability (or indeed scrutiny) in mind. May I ask what inspired this endeavor?
Thanks! =D I’m glad you don’t mind. It’s actually pretty easy to port so far for the most part, aside from a couple things that are confusing me in the movement code (but hopefully I’ll wrap my mind around it soon). You can track my progress here: http://github.com/Skofo/Dragondot.js/
I’ve been interested in Canvas and wondered how well it could handle games for a while, and Dragondot is the perfect game to test that out. Dragondot is the most satisfying little game I have played in a very long time. The engine is remarkable; I’ve never been able to make my top-down game engines feel -that- good, so I want to study how exactly you accomplished that. On top of that, it has a pretty small codebase. So I think that Dragondot is the perfect game for me to try to port to Canvas.
Thanks a ton for making it, and making it (sort of*) open source!
* http://jay.tuley.name/archives/2006/03/27/5-reasons-not-to-choose-a-Creative-Commons-license-for-code
I realize that CC licenses aren’t ideal for code (just as GPL isn’t great for art and sound assets). CC-BY-NC-SA is the default license I use for “stuff I put out there”, and while I’m a fan of open source, Creative Commons (at least in my mind) has some somewhat different connotations that feel appropriate to me in this context. Putting the assets and code under separate licenses would to some degree detract from the “thing-ness” of the game.
(Also, I’m currently unemployed, and as much as I want to share my stuff the noncommercial provision is rather important to me personally – if someone does figure out a way to make money off my games, I want a cut of it. )
Hah, your ad money isn’t raking in enough to make a living, is it. ;P
Hypothetically, if I were to make a bigger roguelike-esque game based on this one and have an ad next to it, how big of a cut would you want?
Also, I really like the music in your games. How long have you been composing things? I see that you use PXTone, but the interface of it at first glance feels a lot clunkier and less intuitive than musagi’s. What’s your opinion on musagi vs PXTone?
I haven’t made anything appreciable from ads. Gotten over ten thousand pageviews, and only 7 ad clicks. (I think business propositions are better discussed privately – you can email me at NMcCoy @ this domain.)
Been composing for quite some time – I’ve still got some embarrassing MIDI files around from when I was 12 or so. Haven’t used musagi at all. PXTone works quite well for the purposes I use it for.
Sorry to hear that you haven’t had much luck with the ads. If you’re ever looking to mix things up: I always thought that Project Wonderful (https://www.projectwonderful.com/) looked interesting, but I don’t have any personal experience with it yet.
And email you I shallll.
Heyo! It’s taking a while getting the port done because of other things in my life, but I’m making good progress! Mind telling me the directory of the font and sound files? https://nmccoy.net/games/game06_dragondot/applet/dragondot.mp3, etc. don’t work. =<
The assets are stored in the game’s .jar file. There’s a variety of ways to extract them.
Thank yaw
Its cool that you got mentioned on gamasutra.com
your games always have a very creative flair to them. You’ve got a lot of talent, best of luck.
This is quite amazing.
However, this has a concurrent problem with all of your games (in Chrome, at least).
The sound is garbled to hell.
I can’t make much out, and the rest is all squelchy.
I’ve had several complaints about sound issues, and have had difficulty reproducing them on any of my own computers. I’d very much like to make my games work for as many people as possible, but I’m really not sure how to go about testing and fixing problems that I can’t reproduce myself.
Me and a friend liked this game, and he commented that there was no fanart for it. Even he could do it, he claimed! I decided I could too, so I went ahead and made some. Here you go!
http://patashu.deviantart.com/art/Dragondot-Fanart-159607198
That’s all kinds of awesome. XD
This is very fun, I would love to see someone port this game and make it a little longer with more monsters and more levelups. I loved figuring out the strategy to killing the wizard, ghosts and giant. This needs more areas to explore once you finish the first!
Not bad, not bad at all. I’d love to be able to play this game on my iPod touch. Have you considered making any of your games iPod-compatible?
Score: 218. Kobold swarm kept bouncing me into the next square, where the enemy would knock me right back into the first. And I was doing so well…
Hey, is there a level cap? I killed the Giant and Dire Warg after I got to level 10 and I didn’t make it to 11. I went against the Wizard with only 10 health and almost beat him…grr.
I can’t get this to work in neither Chrome nor Firefox (works in IE though, which I;m not using)… Are there some settings I’m supposed to tweak?
Oh seems I found the answer (in the text that appeared after I attempted to play another game from the site):
“Also, Chrome seems to have an issue with my games for some reason that I’m still investigating. Perhaps try Firefox in the meantime?”
Android version is here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/292449/Dragondot-debug.apk
Oh, neat! Is this just using Processing’s Android capability? (It looks like it’s having the same issues I had when I was working on a direct Processing-Android port: lack of sound, and reset on orientation change.) The way you’ve implemented the controls is an interesting approach; I hadn’t considered the sort of “imaginary joystick” model you’ve got here, though it makes sense.