Did crpgs back then really take a big team and one year to make?

>>3629335
Spiderweb games is basically 1 man. Currently one man and one femanon.
http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/come_aboard.html

He created a whole series of games. Well ,4 series of games in retro Ultima 6-like style and in 3D.

It can be done with modern tech and a little talent.

Back when? Richard Garriot made dozens of RPGs before he even left school.
Writing a script takes time, designing a varied world takes time, playtesting takes time and so on.

>>3629349
Wtf. 4chan doesn't rike underscores in links.

http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/products.html

>>3629349
What an inspiration. Looks just like Baldur's Gate in a way.

>>3629351
What if you make all of that procedural and get rid of the script? Playtesting is a given, however.

>>3629665
How do you want to be distinguished from the legions of Rogue-likes?

>>3629682
Having a party? Like Wizardy and M&M. But not FPS.

>>3629335
I wouldn't really compare those games to modern development. They were writing a lot of code from scratch that we have engines and frameworks for these days, and the developer rather than the OS and drivers had to take care of a lot of the hardware compatibility work. On top of that, they often had to develop lots of in-house tools unrelated to the actual game itself, whereas these days you can often find free applications for those purposes.

Also, a lot of that time wasn't just development of the game but also manufacturing, publication, distribution, etc... which an indie doesn't have to worry about so much these days with digital distribution.

>>3629729
Reusing engines was commonplace.

>>3629729
There was some games that still reused what they had, which was very common for the games with a lot of sequels. However, assuming this, what is a rough estimate of time to make a game like that today versus back then of those scales?

>>3629335
I've programmed small games recently and while I haven't tried CRPGs, it seems to me there's nothing about them systems-wise that would really be troubling to code, although I think they used to code those in ASM back in the day, in which case it would be much harder. Either way, I think most of the time creating those games lies in content creation.

>>3629735
I could open an engine right now and make a very basic crpg. But I wouldn't call walking around and running into enemies to kill them a proper experience

>>3629740
Exactly, which is why I said most of the time creating those games must go into content creation.

>>3629757
what's handy is that content for oldschool crpg is really mostly text. If you can resits the draw of fancy varied visuals then you can make pretty complex things pretty fast

>>3629735
Wizardry was actually written in Pascal, which probably made it way easier.

>>3629335
Depends on the year and the game. The first Might and Magic game was made by one guy but by Might and Magic 3 they already had a team working on the games. Might and Magic 6 had a development time of 3 years but they reused the engine to churn out two more games in two years so I think it's totally feasible to make a game in a year once you get all the basic systems and engine quirks down.

File: Manx-Aztec-C.jpg (19KB, 400x300px) Image search: [Google]

19KB, 400x300px

>>3629735
Mid/late 80s well into the 90s, the common (commercial) game development languages were (i think, predominantly) C (some C++ later on) and Pascal. TASM/MASM were popular assemblers for x86. The code was often a mix of HLL/ASM. ASM for interfacing OS, io devices, and critical sections of code. A lot of BBS door games and software was written in Pascal, which, at the time was competitive with C. Particularly Borlands products (for x86). Many compilers came with their own DOS libraries and extenders, but highly optimized code had to be done in assembly language, as did special code that did undocumented stuff to the hardware.

Don't know of any (commercial) games written in other languages, but would be interested to hear about it.

Actually, maybe more like late 80s, the early Ultimas (i think) where written in assembly language. I'm not sure if the Apple II, Commodore 64, and contemporaries had (very good) compilers. The choice was probably very limited. Also BITD compilers + development tools (even assemblers) could be very expensive.

I'm honestly not sure about PoR(DOS) and it's early successors. Maybe ASM. Because it was widely ported I tend to think some portion was HLL, but that's not necessarily true. The NES version (at least) is probably a total conversion.

>>3629862
>writing Ultima in assembly

Holy shit I dont even want to know how that was fucking done

>>3629864
Well, consider that entire operating systems have been written in assembly language. In fact that was standard practice before HLLs like C and it's predecessors.

>>3629886
Hats off to the fuckers who had to write in unorganized shit like assembly for something like a crpg. Thank God C came around to fix that.

>>3629734
Making it from scratch with experience then I'd say a year is perfectly reasonable. Without experience? Make something smaller first.

>>3629665
>What if you make all of that procedural and get rid of the script?
Can you write code to generate a procedural world that isn't entirely ass? Generating some simple landmass or some dungeons isn't that difficult but going into detail, tying all that content together and possibly procedurally generating NPCs on top of that adds a lot of work.

>>3629335
Get Unlimited Adventures! Build an adventure in a 30 year old AD&D 2.0 system for DOS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Realms:_Unlimited_Adventures

It's a simple to use system. You can design everything that was in something like Dark Queen of Krynn or what not. It is Forgotten Realms, though, not Dragon Lance. I mean, if you care.

>>3630015
Bard's Tale had an editor too, and there was at least one other out there. I don't know if much of anything was ever actually made with them.

>>3629665
Procedural generation isn't some magic device you can just whip up on the fly. In fact it's probably harder to make a decent engine for that than just making everything yourself because you gotta ensure the algorithm never shits itself on top of everything else.

>>3630015
I played this as a kid. it's rudimentary, but it has a fully working editor that lets you do whatever you want.
it came with a built-in adventure called heirs to skull crag. I thought the writing/story was decent, but the rest could've been constructed better.
I started making my own module all those years ago, called "the dark master" (cliche af I know). I never really got anywhere with it.
I remember just scrolling through all the art and monsters for this game. I wonder if anyone has dumped that content.
do people still make modules for this?

pardon me for rambling, I'm just reminiscing.

>>3630343
This. Wish people would learn more about procedural generation before thinking it's some sort of magical thing that can produce endless content with absolutely no effort, or spout some stupid shit like "procedural generation requires no thought", well yeah the bad ones, just like bad level design doesn't require any thought either.

>>3630343
Daggerfall was a mistake

>>3630926
Daggerfall is procedural, not random. Learn the difference, it might save your life one day.

>>3630689
what brings you back to a game for replayability? many custom options? What do you think of Diablo's way of handling procedural generation? Basically, having set pieces which are set randomly in the dungeon with everything else randomized, including items and monsters?

>>3629890
>unorganized shit like assembly

Huh? Code written in assembly is usually more tidy than in higher level languages.

>>3631024
>procedural
He said procedural. Not rogue-likes. Learn to read or goback to mexico.

>>3630358
Yes, people still make modules and chat about them. There are forums and file repos. Check Google, I'm too lazy.

>>3629731
I never said they didn't reuse in-house engines, but they still had to develop it initially. And every new game using the engine required modifying and upgrading the engine.

>>3629734
If you had an actual team who knew their roles, you could probably slap something like the early D&D games together in a week. Most of that would be designing the game, writing the text, and doing the spritework. If all the assets were in place it'd be trivial to put it together in Unity or the like if you know what you're doing.

>>3631772
I've been working on an rpg for a while but progress is very slow because I'm an idiot

>>3629349
The Exile series has no right to be as good as it is.

>>3632056
They're alright, but Geneforge is Spiderweb's Magnum Opus.

>>3629335
It'a all about art. Goldbox engine games empoyed rather competent art teams, as for coding you can scratch it together with modern tools in few days.

>>3631674
I'll look into this, thanks.

>>3629864
It's still just being broken down into small functional blocks. There would be a bit of assembler to display a sprite, one to play a sound, one to compute how many hitpoints an attack takes off, etc.

It's still just functional programming but a little harder to read.

What is a CRPG?

>>3631772
>If you had an actual team who knew their roles, you could probably slap something like the early D&D games together in a week.
>>3634173
>It'a all about art. Goldbox engine games empoyed rather competent art teams, as for coding you can scratch it together with modern tools in few days.
Every once in a while a game like the old days does get made, and even with programmer art and off-the-shelf sound effects, they're not getting done in a week, so far as I know.

I don't know anything about the development process but simply playing Ultima 7 I can imagine the insane amount of time, money and effort invested into its creation. Still feels like a "AAA" game even today.

i'm scared of playing the goldbox games

what if they became shit with time

>>3635054
They certainly can use some updating, but they'd still be somewhat still okay to play.

>>3635043
AAA means "We wasted over half the budget on ads and the other half on big names" and you know it. It's an indicator of horrible budgeting, not quality.

>>3635078
I thought it was just an informal way of saying "that's a good game".

>>3635085
Nope, it means "HEY LOOK AT OUR GAME LOOK AT IT LOOK AT ALL THE ADS WE HAVE BITCHTITS FROM THAT FUCKING MOVIE VOICING SOMEONE LOOK AT US LOOK LOOK LOOOOOOOOOOOOK WE SPENT MILLIONS ON IT AND AS EVERYONE KNOWS THE MORE MONEY YOU SPEND THE BETTER THE GAME BUT WE CAN'T TAKE RISKS SO WE MADE A SHIT PRODUCT THAT'S THE SAME AS THE LAST TEN GAMES WE PUT OUT"

Not an exaggeration.

Here's my take, at least on the programming bit. I can't speak for how much effort the artwork would take since I don't know how to draw.

If you just want to use a framework like SDL or Love and roll the rest of the game engine yourself, its dead easy. All the really hard stuff like memory management and getting things on the screen or to the speakers or from the keyboard are taken care of. You can easily code all your game mechanics and data structures at a very high level, with first class functions and really extensive standard libraries. For a turn based game using tiles, it would be incredibly easy to write the basic gameplay stuff, and then just convert things to screen coordinates and move sprites around. The libraries handle all the heavy lifting. Doing RPG mechanics and dicerolls should be trivial if you have any programming skills, and the basic skeleton of a game is gonna be a few weekends work for a beginner-intermediate programmer.

Turning that into a full game is really the hard part. Designing enemies, encounters, quests and dungeons is a lot of work, even if the individual elements aren't hard to add to the engine. Pool of Radiance wasn't even a technological showpiece in its day, but the design was so well thought out and implemented that it ends up being absolutely fantastic to play even now. Having the manpower and professional experience to make a game full of memorable quests or exciting dungeons is a luxury that classic CRPG developers had. Thats somewhat mitigated by the fact that a modern one-man developers tools can be so much better, but if you're going at it alone, it would be good to step back and seriously consider the scope of the project.

In any case, I highly recommend taking the challenge on. If you are a beginner to intermediate programmer, a game is a great opportunity to work with every part of a language. File formats, data structures, simple algorithms, program structure... its all there.

>>3635119
Not that guy but I've been meaning to get back into C/C++ (used to code simple DOS games when I was a kid and I've done some other shit like Arduino, simple Win32 apps, etc).

I tried to get my head around wxWidgets but that was a pain - would I have an easier time with SDL? Would it be easy to integrate into Code::Blocks?

Audio is something I'd like to get into as well - I've written some simple softsynths but the UIs were always shit. Is SDL suitable for doing synthesis/sampling type things?

>>3635119
What this guy said. What makes RPGs engrossing is their content, not necessarily how complex their systems are. Even the most popular and well regarded ones like Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment are very simple if you strip them to their bare mechanics.

>>3635140
I also agree with that. I have more fun in Isles of Terra than RoA's autismfests.

>>3635119
Yeah I've realized this. I use to make rpgs back in the day during my youth and the most time I spent was making all the content. RPGs are composed of multiple systems, so there's no way to make a rpg small except by cutting out a lot of these systems, but then the game becomes something else: an adventure, a statistic program, etc based on what systems you remove. A rpg is like VN, a fighting system, a resource management game, and several others all in one.

>>3635154
>RoA
What game is that?

>>3635154
>>3635161

I'm gonna guess and say Realms of Arkania. I've never played it, but from what I remember, its a very faithful implementation of a German PnP rpg system, with absurd amounts of menus and character stats.

>>3635470
>faithful implementation of a German PnP rpg system
It's not really that faithful. The rules are a mixup between the second and third edition and things like combat are handled very differently.

>>3629683
I'd be up for that, only one roguelike I know has parties, and it's Japanese.

>>3635025
I think it's a game which emulates playing a tabletop RPG, but on the computer. The game master is simulated by pre-programmed functions of the game, and the player makes characters, manages the party, and makes decisions on how to proceed.

>>3635025
A crpg generally is rpgs in the 80s and 90s made on western PCs (some went to Japanese PCs too). As such, a lot of crpgs are based off concepts of a tabletop environment where the story is told explicitly with a lot of text, but also gives you a whole bunch of options in how you approach characters and the world you're in. The reason jrpgs caught on is because they simplified the hardcore aspects of a lot of crpgs and lured in gamers with both more colorful graphics and more accesible stories. A lot of crpgs was mostly for geeks who enjoyed the tone of tabletop rpgs. Jrpgs helped bring this genre into the mainstream by toning down the difficulty and the amount of stuff you have to pay attention to for more cinematic appeal.

Diablo is good version of a game that took the crpg formula and reduced it to its more action-based components: minimal dialogue and story diversion, lots of hack n slash action, but enough variation in levels, builds, and items to keep the player engaged. They also made use of the psychology of giving microrewards, something a lot of older rpgs didn't like doing.

>>3635694
>but also gives you a whole bunch of options in how you approach characters and the world you're
Could you give some examples aside from Wasteland?

>>3635702
Pool of Radiance, Bard's Tale, a lot of the Gold Box games, Rogue and its clones, Ultima, the like. There's a whole history of crpgs that it would take probably a year or two to play them all, but probably just a year to play some of the best ones.

>>3629349
Fuck yeah, Exile

That and Mordor: Depths of Dejenol were my 90s shareware jams

>>3635709
So the option is to go left or right first?

>>3635729
The option is to go north, west, east, or south.

>>3635624
What is it? Elona?