Death House Launch

I published Death House yesterday and wanted to write up a brief devlog for anyone interested!

Manticore Games is currently running a competition to build a D&D game in their engine, Core, and I immediately knew I wanted to rebuild Death House. I decided to focus primarily on environmental design, as the atmosphere of the Domain of Dread is quite different from standard Tolkeinesque fantasy. 

I opened up my copy of Curse of Strand to the map of the house and started laying down 4x4 tiles to match the floor plan. I surrounded the tiles with a perimeter of walls, then duplicated the floor plan 3 times and hid the duplicates. The next step was to match the interior walls to the ones in the design, and put in the doors. When I started to add the stairs I ran into a problem, Core doesn't handle flipping object scales into the negative as well as other engines; it was a pretty simple solution, I just rearranged the design a bit to have the stairs on opposite walls rather than be stacked atop one another. Once the structure of the house was complete I added exterior access via the front door, and a pair of balconies. Building out the basement dungeon was Extremely easy using the vowel based terrain tools in Core, you just click to add or remove terrain, based on the shape of your selected model. I was also really impressed by the foliage scattering options the terrain system offers, I only manually placed around 30 nature props in the scene exterior.

I was almost exclusively a PC gamer when I was a teenager, and grew up playing D&D when it was owned by a company called TSR. Before Bioware started the Infinity Engine series with Baldur's Gate, there were a number of first person dungeon crawlers set in the D&D universe. It was Ravenloft: Strahd's Posession, and the sequel Stone Prophet, that inspired the gameplay. The D&D framework that Core provides uses a third person camera by default, so I changed that out for the first person perspective. The only hurdle there was updating the quest system which adjusted the camera FOV when the quest was complete; commenting out the relevant lines in the quest system lua scripts solved the problem. I didn't think to detach the camera from the player model so on first release the camera bob was a LOT. I also didn't account for some of the costume and weapons obscuring the view, so I had to adjust the camera offset and replace some costumes with variations of one that did work.

I'm pretty impressed with Core, it made building an fun little game in an interesting environment a very pain-free process. I'm going to be spending the rest of my time polishing and listening to feedback. I've also added some screen shots of the game in-editor, please hit me up with questions if you have any!