Gruntz Universe!

[fzzr]

Some years ago, in 2014-2015 I took up the creation of modern version of Gruntz!.
I spent several months on reverse engineering of the original game and partly reimplemented render and logicz.
My aim was the creation of crossplatform game which is fully compatible with resources of the original game and existing custom levelz.
The general idea I planned is an implementation of the true working multiplayer - P2P & classic Client-Server.

Now I have resumed work on the project and working hard with love and in full-time mode. So I need a help of the community. I need you brainz!

Now I please you to answer a couple of questions about what will be most important for you in the Gruntz Universe. It will help me make plans and prioritise them in the roadmap.
There is the link to the little questionnaire - Gruntz Universe Roadmap Prioritisation.

Soon I will sum up the results and publish further plans (roadmap) here.
And very soon I will invite you to the repository of ideas and proposals - I will ask you there to describe all your brilliant ideas and choose the best of them and the most priority.

To be continued.

[Zu]

Oh, I am excited about this news!

One thing I'm wondering, since you apparently consider the possibility of releasing the game on tablets, how do you plan to implement that?

Also, there's a handful of things that I would like to see in the game that hopefully you'd be willing to consider:

- Once the game can support higher resolutions, I think that the UI should be revised to show all of its tabs at once, like so (a mockup I made a while ago): puu.sh/zKitL/6a218ffa22.png

- An option to run the game twice or half as fast, and be able to switch between these modes at any time through a single click on a button somewhere.

- An option for being able to pick the voices for the player gruntz, enemy gruntz, and the kingz.

- An option to add your own tilesets!

- For levels that are too small to fit in the screen, would a viable solution be giving them a black border with soft edges (like in the pic above)?

- Will the game include an option for switching between different languages?

[GooRoo]

Church service prevented me from going to the site for the questionaire (which I will do after I post this) ... but I firmly agree with Zu's mock-up of the User Interface ... everything in view at once. With graphics capabilities that can (seemingly easily!) expand and contract images, the UI could be tailored to remain in place for even the lowest screen resolution available.

One thing that frequently came into play (to the detriment of the solver) is the scrolling (dis?)ability, as when a very long Silver Pyramid maze (A World Of Sweetz ... vertically) and some of Gaby's (horizontally) needs to be solved. If the program could be intelligent enough to anticipate the need to move the visible display in the cardinal directions would be very nice.

[fzzr]

Mar 18, 2018 7:37:30 GMT -8 Zu said:

One thing I'm wondering, since you apparently consider the possibility of releasing the game on tablets, how do you plan to implement that?

For multitouch-devices we have to totally reinvent UI, interaction and control.You know, I have some ideas about this. I will publish them later in line with yours in the next stage - of the collecting of proposals and voting.

Mar 18, 2018 7:37:30 GMT -8 Zu said:

- Once the game can support higher resolutions, I think that the UI should be revised to show all of its tabs at once, like so (a mockup I made a while ago)…
- An option to run the game twice or half as fast…

Of course yes.

Mar 18, 2018 7:37:30 GMT -8 Zu said:

- An option for being able to pick the voices for the player gruntz, enemy gruntz, and the kingz.

Like in Worms. Fine, I like it.

Mar 18, 2018 7:37:30 GMT -8 Zu said:

- An option to add your own tilesets!

I agree, it’s really should be. Currently I can load any number of the resource-sets into the game where each next can partially override resources in the previous one. So, it’s already complete

Mar 18, 2018 7:37:30 GMT -8 Zu said:

- For levels that are too small to fit in the screen, would a viable solution be giving them a black border with soft edges (like in the pic above)?

I think black edges are a little terrible. All your ideas will be in the repo as proposals and if this feature is really needed - okay, cool, but it should be optional and disablable.

Mar 18, 2018 7:37:30 GMT -8 Zu said:

- Will the game include an option for switching between different languages?

Yes. But it requires new graphics for prerendered texts (e.g main menu items). By the way, I know Gruntz! was published in various countries with localised resource-packs where movies and prerendered texts are localised.

Mar 18, 2018 9:38:57 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

One thing that frequently came into play (to the detriment of the solver) is the scrolling (dis?)ability, as when a very long Silver Pyramid maze (A World Of Sweetz ... vertically) and some of Gaby's (horizontally) needs to be solved. If the program could be intelligent enough to anticipate the need to move the visible display in the cardinal directions would be very nice.

I agree. The feature "Intelligent Camera" is in my plan and i have ideas on how to do it. Anyway it will published in the repo with proposals and ideas.

[swietymiki]

Of course I'm looking forward to this idea but I think we need to be realistic here. We don't want to throw the project in the deep end. There were similar plans in the past and they all died out for one reason or another, generally people "come and go" on this forum all the time. I'd suggest, instead of starting to pursue multiple features at once, to at least finish the basic version of the game and then expand it with more details from here, so that there are any visible results. I think it is always good to see if you are making progress, otherwise it might get very demotivating. I'm pretty sure you'd also need more people for such a game project, very likely from outside of our community.

On another note, creating a mobile-compatible Gruntz game might reach a larger audience, but for me it feels like a completely different thing than a normal PC remake.

[Zu]

Glad to hear most of the ideas are doable. Also, one more thing I forgot to mention would be the option to zoom in and out at any point.

swietymiki, it wouldn't hurt to at least plan certain features before the game is further developed, because otherwise implementing them later on might become tricky.

[Rik]

My English are not so good to understand it , but I think its a good idea you can play it on the pc in windows 10 and on tablets ??

[powerfulmind]

Mar 18, 2018 9:38:57 GMT -8 GooRoo said:

One thing that frequently came into play (to the detriment of the solver) is the scrolling (dis?)ability, as when a very long Silver Pyramid maze (A World Of Sweetz ... vertically) and some of Gaby's (horizontally) needs to be solved. If the program could be intelligent enough to anticipate the need to move the visible display in the cardinal directions would be very nice.

I suppose, there was already such a feature in original Gruntz. I mean, you could enable the Grunt-following Camera (makes your view always centered on desired Grunt) which should do the job - and in my opinion this should be reimplemented to Gruntz Universe in exactly the same form.


About the project overall - I'm interested that you want to make the game playable via The Great Internet. If this project will end up in a success, that'll be the rebirth of Gruntz!

[fzzr]

Current state

Format support:

format	%	R/RW	comment
Package	100	R	need impl RW for res-editor
WWD	100	RW
PID	100	R
PCX	99	RW	need optimise
PAL	100	RW
ANI	99		need tests
WAV	100	R
XMI	20	R	WIP
Video	10	R	low priority

Currently I'm working on XMI playback.


The Great Plan
(general plan, platform independent)

• XMI format (read)
• XMI playback
• a little refactoring & optimisations
• impl simple render for debug purposes
• game logic:
• objects positioning
• objects logic traits
• objects logic states
• paths on grid (pathfinding, validating)
• moving objects (grunts) on grid (timed FSM)
• objects interaction (taking tools, breaking stones,..)
• ...

[li]camera logic[/li]

• viewport ctrl
• user interaction
• event-aim
• grunt-following camera

[li]visual, render (GL/GLES2.0)[/li]

• tile batching (mb. GLES3.0)
• sprite batching
• HUD
• UI, Menu

[/ul]


About proposals

I created the repository for our ideas, proposals and suggestions. Please add there all of your ideas as issues.
Please add your own ideas and vote for others.



About motivation

I (we) need a public channel where I will post possibly regular status updates and news. I have already create group in Telegram.

Because I’m working hard on this project in full-time but have no any profit I will probably need some extra motivation and compensation. It is very likely that soon I will announce the acceptance of donations. It will be very cool if you respond.

[Zu]

Very promising news!

I added everything I could think of that I haven't mentioned previously. Should I include also the suggestions from my first post?

Also, when it comes to browser-accessible chats, I think it would be a good idea to use Discord instead. It's what I use on a daily basis and it seems to be one of the most popular chat services right now.

[fzzr]

Thank you very much! 

Apr 4, 2018 8:22:24 GMT -8 Zu said:

Very promising news! Should I include also the suggestions from my first post?

It would be very cool, if it is not hard for you 

Apr 4, 2018 8:22:24 GMT -8 Zu said:

Very promising news! Also, when it comes to browser-accessible chats, I think it would be a good idea to use Discord instead. It's what I use on a daily basis and it seems to be one of the most popular chat services right now.

I know good integration-bot for bitbucket for telegram. Will be great if something similar exists in Discord. Or Gitter for example - works in browser too.

[Zu]

Any news on the project?

[Lahyme]

Any news on the project? 2

[hugheth2]

Great to see there's another attempt to make a new Gruntz implementation!

I am the original developer of Dizgruntled which was a Java clone (http://allsystemsarego.co.uk/hugh/gruntz/) which had playable version on desktop computers for all the basic levels / a custom level editor. The source is available at github.com/Hugheth/dizgruntled

Very happy to offer any help in terms of how the original file formats are designed / how to decode them.