Design Four Against Darkness (Converting a PnP game into a Video Game)

L

LichPuppy

Guest
Hello all,

New to this community but have always been interested in game design. I had the idea to convert the Pen and Paper Dungeon Crawler game Four Against Darkness into a video game experience. For those not familiar its a turned-based party RPG dungeon crawler. You roll 2 d6's, find the corresponding dungeon tile in the book and attach it to your map. You roll d6's on everything, monsters, reactions, treasure. etc. I now have a collection of over 10 books in this game and would love to make a digital collection to play. This is a personal project for fun and learning that I don't plan on distributing for obvious copyright issues.

So my question is: How would you recommend I go about doing this? Is there a particular set of assets on the marketplace that would be best? I had a look and there are many dungeon generators but given my purposes and skill level would one be better suited than another? I learn best when taking apart assets and tinkering to my liking, but building up from scratch is something I'm prepared to do. Any help in this would be so greatly appreciated. (Not my image just a quick google image search to give you the idea.)

Cheers!
-LP
four-against-darkness-playthrough-1-e1530815772917.jpg
 

Toque

Member
If your new I would suggest just starting to learn the basics. There are tutorials to go through to get comfortable. I would argue it would be difficult to make any game without learning some basics or you will be constantly stuck and frustrated. Then you can start to focus on your game genre.

Im not sure about the assets. You could browse the asset store and see what they have.
 

ikky

Member
hello there! @LichPuppy
I dont know if this project is dead or active. i was googling, looking for some android game like 4aD , and found this thread.

I´d wish to join as graphic designer. I think we can give it a real cool pen and paper look to this project. If you are still interested in making this, please contact me. (twitter: @ikkante)
 

Xer0botXer0

Senpai
@ikky you might want to check out the Collaboration section on the forum, create a thread there according to the template provided stating you're an artist that would like to be the graphics designer for such a game.
 

ikky

Member
@ikky you might want to check out the Collaboration section on the forum, create a thread there according to the template provided stating you're an artist that would like to be the graphics designer for such a game.
Thank you for your guidance, I´m a noob in this forum and did not know exactly how to proceed.

Anyway, I will wait a couple days or so for @LichPuppy to read this thread and answer if he/she accepts my offer, and then try it on the collaboration section.

Thanks again!
 

Yal

🐧 *penguin noises*
GMC Elder
Hello all,

New to this community but have always been interested in game design. I had the idea to convert the Pen and Paper Dungeon Crawler game Four Against Darkness into a video game experience. For those not familiar its a turned-based party RPG dungeon crawler. You roll 2 d6's, find the corresponding dungeon tile in the book and attach it to your map. You roll d6's on everything, monsters, reactions, treasure. etc. I now have a collection of over 10 books in this game and would love to make a digital collection to play. This is a personal project for fun and learning that I don't plan on distributing for obvious copyright issues.

So my question is: How would you recommend I go about doing this? Is there a particular set of assets on the marketplace that would be best? I had a look and there are many dungeon generators but given my purposes and skill level would one be better suited than another? I learn best when taking apart assets and tinkering to my liking, but building up from scratch is something I'm prepared to do. Any help in this would be so greatly appreciated. (Not my image just a quick google image search to give you the idea.)

Cheers!
-LP
View attachment 29564
There's two fundamental differences between pen-and-paper RPGs and computer RPGs. The biggest is that a rule that's clear to a human might not be easy to represent digitally, especially if you add it in late in development when it might require big changes to infrastructure. For instance, if a skill "undoes half the damage you took last turn" (or buffs your attack based on it), it's easy enough for humans to keep track of, but you suddenly need to add extra code to all sources of damage to track previous values if you add it to a computer game. And if that rule was "increase damage if you attack an enemy that damaged you last turn" you suddenly need to maintain lists of who hurt who. And let's not get into cases where two rules conflict and need to be solved with precedence and human ruling, that's hard enough even IRL.

If you can turn as much of the game rules as possible into simple number crunching (e.g. ALL passives add/remove to stats, even if those stats only have "0" and "1" values) you'll have a much easier time developing it.

The second big difference is that in PnP games, RNG is a lot of work so you want to keep it to a minimum, and turn speed is very low because a lot of human communication is involved (relaying information via descriptions, discussing with party members, etc). In computer games, it's the other way around. This can affect a lot of core design things (Diablo-style loot wouldn't work in a PnP game) and might not transfer all that well to a computer game with no social aspect.

Finally, a third thing worth thinking about: if Four Against Darkness is a commercially sold thing, it might not be legal to copy its ruleset 1:1! Fallout famously was originally going to use GURPS but opted to use a new system called "SPECIAL" instead to avoid licensing costs. You should consider the same, unless you think being able to boast about being officially licensed - or boasting about using the system while technically not being allowed to, hoping you don't get caught - would be a selling point that could entice people to play.
 
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