Lennart, Dennis and Sven, the 3 brains behind TROF, kindly took the time to answer my questions.
Q: How many members does the “Dreamlight Development” team have, and what are their jobs?
A: Our team currently consists out of 3 main designers:
- Lennart Hillen: visual artist (level / model / panel design), a.k.a. "lennart_hillen" on the forum;
- Dennis van den Broek: programmer (inventory / camera / movement), a.k.a. "dennis_fantasy" on the forum”
- Sven Bolzern: programmer (dialogue system / fighting system), a.k.a. "bird" on the forum”. Besides us, we pay 3 more people to work on this project: Mike Andrews (music composer), Jeroen Hoolmans (character designer) and Samuel Anjam a.k.a. "Ambassador" (music composer).
Q: What is the name of your RPG? Please describe for us some of its original features.
A: At the moment we’re working under the working title of "the Realms of Fantasy". An example of a feature from the game that we’re really proud of is definitely our turn based battle system, which has everything you can expect from this type of game. We also try to keep the gameplay as challenging and fun as possible for an RPG. Another part worth mentioning is the music provided by Mike Andrews. He really did a great job on creating professional music for this title.
Q: What type of AI are you using for the enemies?
A: For the normal enemies you encounter during the game, we use a pretty basic AI system that randomly chooses from a variety of attacks and spells that the enemy is able to do. When doing this, the enemy will check if he has enough mana to perform the special attack or spell. When an enemy is low on hp or mp, he will try to restore this if this is within his power (by using a potion, or curing spells). At the moment we simply define whether an enemy has the ability to use potions, though we’re planning on implementing an inventory type of system for the enemies in the near future.
Q: How big (in quants) is a typical level in TRoF?
A: Hhhm… This is a pretty hard question… First of all, most of our levels consist out of several mini levels, all linked together. This is both for memory and frame rate reasons. It simply loads a lot faster this way.
Also, I don’t think it would be useful if I would tell you the size in quants, because this depends on the scale you use for the levels in a game. Instead I will tell you the size of a level in standing warlocks (scaled to the size of the player), how’s that? For example, when you look at one of the linked levels of our forest, it is 31 standing warlocks by 31 standing warlocks. Then if you calculate that our forest will have 4 - 6 levels linked together, you get a pretty big forest to explore.
Q: How does the dialog system work?
A: Ah, this is a topic I am proud to explain. Our dialogue system uses external .txt files to read the lines for the dialogues. We chose this option because it has huge advantages. It’s quite easy to edit, to read and with the help of our fully functional application (realtime dialogue-editor) incredibly easy to program dialogues! This editor can export the programmed dialogues into the .txt files, which makes it even easier to design our dialogues.
With our dialogue editor, we can define almost everything you need for the dialogues; from simple dialogues, to dialogues with questions and answers, shops, sounds, animations, battles and so on. The best part yet in my opinion, is that we can program directly into the .txt files. For example, we could basically even make a quiz where the player has to answer questions, and when he answers them correctly we could give the player items and gold for a reward, or even load a cutscene. A few other features from our great dialogue system are: the typewriter effect, speed settings, and the use of TTF fonts. Another pretty cool feature is that you can always see who you’re talking to in a small 3D window on the chat panel. The characters displayed in this window are even capable of playing emotion animations. Sven really did a great job with the dialogue system, making it very easy for us to design and program our own dialogues in a simple but efficient way. While were at it, we'd like to thank Sven for all of the wonderful things he did for us so far. He originally came to us as a freelancer, but now he is a very dedicated team member and one of our best friends.
Q: How did you create that good looking effect with the sunlight going through the trees / tree branches?
A: The sunlight-rays are made with the program photoshop as a 32bit TGA image. This image was then imported into 3DGS as a single sprite. The reason why we used 32 bits TGA sprites is because these have the ability to use alpha layers. If you then check the bright flag on this sprite, the engine will sort of blend the light rays with its background which creates a realistic light effect. Also, since we use a static camera system, it’s even easier to make these light rays look realistic since you cannot rotate the camera around it. It’s a pretty simple technique, but it certainly gets the job done.
Q: What cheap / free tools are you using for game development?
A: Of course, our best friends are Wed, Med and its little brother Sed. Apart from that, we really enjoy using the music program Winamp, which makes the game design days a lot more comfortable and fun. Those are pretty much the only good free programs we use. We think that a lot of game design programs are really expensive, and we try to keep our budget as low as possible by using the standard 3DGS programs as much as possible.
Q: When do you plan to finish the game? Did you find a publisher for it yet?
A: We haven’t even thought of a release date yet, it’s simply to early to say. What I can tell is that we have been working on this project for about 5-6 months now, and progress is going at the speed we’ve expected.
We do have contact with a publisher called Xing interactive. They offered us a contract, but we have left this topic undecided until the game is finished.
Q: Please give us a few tips for the beginners.
A: Well…We all think that planning a project before starting one is very important. Take a look at the project you want to make, what you would need for it, how long it will take to develop it and so on. Also, it’s important you choose a project you would really like to make; otherwise, you will most probably lose interest in the title and never come close to finishing it.
Thank you a lot.