Wednesday, 2nd July 2014, 19:03 by Sjohara
I'm not certain you're approaching this from the right perspective.
Spelunky is a game about interacting with the evironment. It's a good game because the environments are good, player movement is well-tuned, and monsters and items are designed such that they make the environment more interesting to navigate. Crawl is a game about turn-based tactical combat. They don't really cross-pollinate at a mechanical level.
If one were to hypothetically take Spelunky as it currently exists and mod in bucketloads of content inspired by Crawl species, gods, and branches, the result would probably be rad as hell. Because Spelunky is already rad as hell, and adding interesting new content to an already-good game is probably going to make it more fun (provided that the new content is well-implemented and adheres to Spelunky's pre-existing design principles). But if you're making a new engine from scratch, a bunch of cute ideas for how to implement Demonspawn or Yredelemnul or the Shoals into a platformer aren't going to help you create a compelling map generator or physics system, and if your levels and player movement are no good then the entire endeavor is doomed no matter what you have for ancillary content (see: 99 Levels to Hell).
Basically, developing a Crawl-inspired Spelunky-like requires a great deal of insight into why Spelunky's design is good, but very little insight into the particulars of Crawl's design. If you already had a solid mechanical skeleton of a platformer, cherry-picking Crawl-like content that would work well in your system would be easy. The inverse isn't even remotely true.
- For this message the author Sjohara has received thanks:
- Patashu