Adventure Game Design Patterns
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. Continue reading “Adventure Game Design Patterns”
Articles, Games and so on from How to Make an RPG
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How did Rogue Generate its Random Dungeons?
How did Rogue’s generation work? I dug into the C code to find out. If you follow this article you’ll be able to build a Rogue-style dungeon generator yourself. Continue reading “How did Rogue Generate its Random Dungeons?”
Adventure Game Puzzles
The blank page can be hard - this generator will give you some ideas for puzzles. Continue reading “Adventure Game Puzzles”
Treasure of Tarmin Dungeon Generator
Dungeon generator for Dungeons and Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin (1982). Continue reading “Treasure of Tarmin Dungeon Generator”
Hack (Fenlason)
Hack is a 1982 Rogue -inspired game that Nethack is ultimately based on. Hack was primarily written by Jay Fenlason, a high-school student, after playing Rogue for a day or two. A remarkable achievement, Rogue was closed source and Fenlason recreated the game from memory. The game was built for the PDP-11/70 and as a recreation of Rogue, it shares many of it’s properties; an ASCII, top-down,…
Cyberpunk Terms
Making a game with cyberpunk elements? Get some inspiration from these randomly generated terms. Continue reading “Cyberpunk Terms”
Grammar Playground
An easy to use tool for hand-authoring procedural generators. Continue reading “Grammar Playground”
Power Progression
Players like to get more powerful. Increased power is a type of reward a game can grant the player. In RPGs the most common way to increase power is the experience-level loop;… Continue reading “Power Progression”
Hack Dungeon Generator
Hack ’s (1982) dungeon map generator. Continue reading “Hack Dungeon Generator”
Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds
Wizardry II: The Knight of Diamonds was released in 1982, less than a year after the release of its predecessor Wizardry . The game was originally sold as an additional “scenario” (today Sir-tech, the publisher, might have used the term DLC). The game engine is mostly the same but there are new maps, a new objective, tweaked spells and new monsters. The player is expected to have finished the…
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Cloudy Mountain has the player explore an overworld map and delve into dungeons to find and reunite two halves of a crown; the ultimate goal of the game. The overworld map is top down, the dungeon delving, at least for me, feels like it doesn’t really commit to any fixed perspective and is more symbolic. Continue reading “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain”
Krozair
Krozair is a lost PLATO game from 1980 written by Seth J. Sweetser. It is a first-person, multiplayer RPG similar to PLATO’s Moria . Continue reading “Krozair”
Dry Gulch
In 1980, Mark Johnson created Dry Gulch, a PLATO multiplayer RPG set in the Wild West. It drew on elements from other Dungeons and Dragons-style RPGs on the PLATO platform. Continue reading “Dry Gulch”
Dungeons and Dragons and Doors
As an adventurous, gamer you may find yourself curious to try the earliest CRPGs from the 70s . Upon playing these games they may question the obsession with breaking down doors. Continue reading “Dungeons and Dragons and Doors”
What are Character Classes?
Character classes are archetypes that modify attributes, abilities, and role of a game character. A class typically includes a thematic aspect, for instance a Demon Hunter class, suggests abilities for tracking and… Continue reading “What are Character Classes?”
CRPGs of the 1970s
The Big Bang for computer roleplaying games occurs in 1974 with the release of the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game. Almost immediately, wherever computers exist, coders started writing computer roleplaying games…. Continue reading “CRPGs of the 1970s”
The Unsimulated
RPGs are a strange conceit, a party of adventurers, usually in a fantastical but semi-medieval setting working together to fight monsters and get loot. This often involves delving into implausibly deep dungeons,… Continue reading “The Unsimulated”
Finishing a Game. Case Study: Citizen Sleeper.
Citizen Sleeper is a sci-fi, story-based game released in 2022 by developer Jump Over The Age . It manages to be an engaging narrative game with relatively little art or complicated game mechanics…. Continue reading “Finishing a Game. Case Study: Citizen Sleeper.”
Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness
Ultima is an influential RPG with a central quest, overworld map and first person dungeon crawling. It was released for the Apple II in June, 1981. Richard Garriott developed Ultima by building on the BASIC codebase of his previous game Akalabeth . He recruited the help of Ken Arnold to write a fast tilemap system in assembly language. More recent releases of the game use the title “Ultima I: The…
Rogue
Rogue aka Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom was developed first by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman at the Santa Cruz University of California in 1980 and later Ken Arnold also joined Michael Toy to continue developing the game at the Univerity of Berkeley. Continue reading “Rogue”
Dungeon of Death
Dungeon of Death was written by Gordon Walton and released on the Commodore PET in 1979. It’s based on the PLATO game dnd , that Gordon had played while serving in the army. Like dnd it’s a top-down, turned-based dungeon crawler but instead of dnd’s line based graphics it uses the ASCII-like characters available on the PET. Gordon wrote this game in his early 20s. Continue reading “Dungeon of…
Balrog Sampler
Balrog Sampler is an 1979 RPG for the TRS-80, originally published under the title “Dungeon”. It was developed by Chameleon Software, a company made up of Richard Bumgarner and two of his coworkers. The name including the word “Sampler” suggests either a demo or a selection of different experiences but it’s a fully finished game. It is considered to be the first entry in the Maces and Magic game…
Dungeon (Sawyer)
Dungeon was released in December 1979, as part of the 15th edition of a magazine called CURSOR for the Commodore PET. CURSOR was distributed as a cassette accompanied by several pages of notes. Continue reading “Dungeon (Sawyer)”
Super Dungeon
Super Dungeon is an early computer roleplaying game for the Apple II written by Rodney Nelsen. There’s little to no information about the game’s development but it is still possible to play. A copyright notice in the source code gives the release date as April 1979, so I’ve taken that to be accurate which would mean this game predates Akalabeth . Continue reading “Super Dungeon”
Temple of Apshai
Temple of Apshai was originally programmed by Jim Connelley in 1979 using a D&D inspired roleplaying system called Dunjonquest designed by Jon Freeman. The game has simple blocky graphics paired with a physical manual containing descriptions of the rooms that the player will explore. It’s notable for being one of the earliest graphical RPGs for a home computer. Temple of Apshai was a hit and gave…
Avatar
Avatar is a multiplayer RPG for the PLATO system, a kind proto-internet developed at the University of Illinois. Avatar built on Oubliette which was previously the biggest multiplayer RPG on the system. According to Designing Virtual Worlds by Richard Bartle, Avatar accounted for 6% of all the hours spent on the system between September 1978 and May 1985. Continue reading “Avatar”
The Devil's Dungeon
Devil’s Dungeon is a code listing written by Dr Charles William Engel. The code is in Basic and printed in a booklet that Engel was selling in early 1978. The user is expected to read the description and then type in the code to end-up with a playable game. Continue reading “The Devil's Dungeon”
DND (Lawrence)
DND is a game that was originally developed for the PDP-11 by Daniel Lawrence in 1976. It appears to be strongly inspired by the PLATO game of same name and shares a lot of features. The heritage of the game is covered very well in this article over at CRPG addict . Continue reading “DND (Lawrence)”
Beneath Apple Manor
Beneath Apple Manor is the first commercial, mass market CRPG. Up until this point playing a CRPG required access to either PLATO or a mainframe computer and such access was restricted to a relatively small group of people. Beneath Apple Manor was released on the Apple II, which was available to the average person willing to buy one. Continue reading “Beneath Apple Manor”
Swords and Sorcery
Swords and Sorcery is a game based on an earlier Star Trek game written for the PLATO platform in 1978. Continue reading “Swords and Sorcery”
The Pits of Baradur
Baradur is another “lost” PLATO dungeon crawler. Continue reading “The Pits of Baradur”
Dungeon (Daglow)
Don Daglow writes that he developed a game called Dungeon for the PDP-10 in 1975. Unfortunately this appears to be a lost game. Continue reading “Dungeon (Daglow)”
m199h
m199h is one of very earliest CRPGs on the PLATO system. Unfortunately it’s also a lost game, it was deleted shortly after it’s creation and there’s little information about it. Continue reading “m199h”
Dungeon Campaign
Dungeon Campaign is a top-down dungeon crawler written for the Apple II by Robert Clardy in 1987. This is another original CRPG only influenced by the Dragon Maze code example that came with the Apple II and the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game. Continue reading “Dungeon Campaign”
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is an influential first person, grid-based dungeon crawler released for the Apple II in 1981. Continue reading “Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord”
Orthanc Labyrinth
Orthanc is the black tower that the wizard Saruman controls in Lord of the Rings and part of the name Orthanc Labyrinth; an early RPG for the PLATO system. PLATO was a computer system / alt-internet, first developed in the 60s, from the Univerity of Illinois. The game was released in 1975 and was inspired by a previous PLATO came called The Dungeon , also known as pedit5. Continue reading “Orthanc…
Moria
Moria is the first, first person perspective RPG and the first multiplayer RPG. It was written by Kevet Duncombe and Jim Battin after they became interested in another Plato RPG; dnd . Developed at Iowa State University and first released in 1975 (but I’ve also seen it dated to ‘76), it was seminal for it’s time introducing a host of new innovations. Continue reading “Moria”
dnd
The Game of Dungeons, or “dnd” as it’s more commonly called, was developed by Gary Whisenhunt and Ray Wood while they were college students at Southern Illinois University. It was developed on PLATO, the University of Illinois’ proto internet / computing platform. It’s major influence is a previous PLATO game; The Dungeon aka pedit5 . The Dungeon is widely held to be the first CRPG but it was…
Oubliette
Oubliette is a multiplayer first-person RPG for the PLATO system. This an RPG that directly influences the Wizardry series which in turn provides inspiration for Dragon Warrior and the whole branch of Japanese RPGs. The word “oubliette” is a French word that describes a secret dungeon only accessible by a trap door. Continue reading “Oubliette”
The Dungeon
In the 1960s at The University of Illinois was PLATO; an operating system and proto-internet all rolled into one. This, of course, is insane. The name is an acronym that expands to Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations. These were the early days of computing. Alan Turing had died only six years earlier, and if he were still alive he’d be a young 47 years old. Yet PLATO had a…
Futurewar
Futurewar represents a change of pace from the PLATO games of the era, it’s a sci-fi entry instead of the default D&D inspired fantasy setting. Futurewar is sometimes hailed as the first, first person shooting game but it has a lot of CPRG traits. Oh, and being on PLATO, it’s multiplayer! Continue reading “Futurewar”
Akalabeth: World of Doom
Akalabeth is one of the earliest Apple II computer roleplaying games. It was developed by Richard Garriott when he was around 19 years old. Continue reading “Akalabeth: World of Doom ”
Koen Witters Interview
Koen Witters is the developer of RPG Playground , a tool that lets you create and share RPGs - no programming required. After working in the mobile games industry for several years programming… Continue reading “Koen Witters Interview”
RPG Dialog Language : Discourse
Conversation is a large part of most RPGs. Information about the game world is communicated through conversation; the progress of quests, learning about the worlds background and stories of all sorts. Most… Continue reading “RPG Dialog Language : Discourse”
Creative Constraints
Constraints encourage creativity. If you’ve never heard this expressed before you might think it sounds wrong or if you’re feeling generous; counter intuitive. But it’s true. If you feel blocked or frustrated… Continue reading “Creative Constraints”
You're Destined To Fail
I’ve seen the numbers; they tell a clear story and it doesn’t have a happy ending. The average person who wants to make a game doesn’t . Only a fraction of aspiring gamedevs… Continue reading “You're Destined To Fail”
How to Make an RPG Textbox
JRPGs communicate with the player via textboxes. From the contents of a chest at end of a dungeon to the ominious words of the games antagonist; it’s the humble textbox that delivers… Continue reading “How to Make an RPG Textbox”
JRPG Conversation Language
Writing dialog for games should be easy. Most game conversations are simple exchanges. No tricky game code is needed, it’s just two or more people speaking one at a time. By making… Continue reading “JRPG Conversation Language”
The Witcher 3: Conversation Breakdown
It’s no secret I’m interested in how games model conversation. It’s an interesting challenge on several fronts; you need to consider how content creators author conversations, how the user experience plays out… Continue reading “The Witcher 3: Conversation Breakdown”
What is an Action RPG?
Action RPGs give the player realtime control over game characters. This is most noticeable in regards to movement and combat. The term action rpg gets used more often when speaking about console… Continue reading “What is an Action RPG?”