Misty winter morning steps to work.

Arrival of the massive box for my new PC.

Because there was a video on YouTube of the PC game Witcher’s strange monkey creature, or Mamune which has subsequently been removed I decided to record my own and upload it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEQlT8WVhVs

http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Mamune

The Sony TV:

The Mutant Studio sound jam:

Short video

Powers available: The map rotator, the control inverter and blindness.

Also a shot of the arcade controller we would be using:

Also below are a couple of power up objects.

More icons

Meanwhile however here are some additional collectible/buttons/mechanics icons for the game:

In order: Blank, Gravity, Vision, Random Teleports, Jump Strength and World Flip.

Here is the game with both players fully functional and able to move around the same map independantly:

The latest demo of the game can be seen here: http://www.srjm.co.uk/i-dat/idat310/

Introduction

Dungeon Keeper was released in 1997 by Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Productions and was quickly succeeded by a Deeper Dungeons expansion and more importantly a Gold Edition that featured all of the combined previous efforts and a map editor that with a little bit of work could be installed and used to build your own levels. For me it was one of the most engaging of the early PC games owing to a number of reasons, teaching me quite a few things about how to structure a successfully enthralling Real Time Strategy game, as well as having a few quirky concepts that I have yet to see repeated since. But most of all it showed me what I look for in a game that I truly enjoy and hence influenced my own ideas for designs.

This essay intends to discuss how the game created a unique and immersive game world which translated into many, many hours of play from what was really a rather limited tile set with unassuming objectives.

The World of Dungeon Keeper

In order to study how a game world immerses a player within it there are certain aspects of the world itself that need to be investigated. Firstly there is the way in which the world is presented. Often the premise of the world is expressed through a narrative structure, beginning with the fact that computer games have translated most of their terminology and structure from cinema, a theory explored extensively by Lev Manovich. In the case of Dungeon Keeper, the three dimensional movements (and inherent freedom) of the camera dominated half of the game’s list of key features, placing emphasis on the ‘virtual camera [becoming] as important as controlling the hero’s actions’ (Manovich 2002: 91). Through a game’s camera the world is then observed in likeness to traditional cinema, with the use of characters, plots and cutscenes.

This leads neatly to the next aspect, the structure, design and aesthetic of the world itself. Different styles of world are typically dictated by genre; Real Time Strategies usually feature vast and varied landscapes but tend not to be able to focus into tiny detail where First Person Shooters spend huge volumes of processing power rendering the immediate environment and cull objects in the distance. Therefore the world is a reflection of the scope of the player’s influence on it.

And finally there is the question of how the player interacts with the world. This is often the defining factor in game immersion; no matter how well designed the world is, it cannot work without a means of not only observing, but exploring it. Dungeon Keeper arguably takes an unusual position on all of these points.

The full critique is available online here.

I started off with using a hitTest function on all the surrounding cells only (9 in total for the sake of using hardly any CPU), but this led to issues where the character would get permanently stuck a little-way into one of the walls. Not good…

Instead I’ve implemented my own system where I have a function that tests whether the target location, ie. where the player wants to go, is solid or not, and returns true or false as to whether they can move there or not.

Player One has already been blocked by Player Two and there is one route to the finish line remaining. Player Two is attempting to make it as difficult as possible for Player One to complete the level by playing competatively, so makes a dash to block off the remaining route. But in doing so, the world responds by changing both the player’s routes to allow passage to Player One and disadvantage Player 2.

In seeing the consequences of playing competatively will the players then develop more advanced strategies of playing, either by adapting their behaviour to act neutrally within the world or even come full circle and achieve levels by cooperative gameplay.

In fact what comes next is figuring out a way to make allowing the other player to win be mutually or even more beneficial for yourself.