Brief Intro to the Verge engine (with textbox tech demo and incomplete port of Creepy Caverns)
1Back when I first discovered Verge (short for Vecna's Extraordinary Roleplaying Game Engine), the concept amazed me. A freely-available engine for making your very own Final Fantasy-style game... it's a frequent dream of video game players to become video game creators, and with Verge, it felt like the possibilities were limitless. I had all sorts of fantastic ideas about the stories I could tell, the worlds I could create...
...but nothing cohesive, and no clear idea of what I wanted to do or any specific purpose. It turns out that making a whole game pretty much from scratch takes a daunting amount of planning, time, and effort. Who knew? In the end, I never really did more than dabble with it enough to figure out the basics.
Unfortunately, that sort of thing wasn't uncommon when it came to Verge games, with quite a few started but most never making it past the demo stage, to the point that the lack of finished games was something of a running gag in the community. There was one notable exception, though... but we'll get to that later (see: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfL5ffNrH6V_-uYKra_N1nXUI0BMHVn26 ).
As far as the video content goes, the first part runs through a tech demo for a textbox function I once made that automatically resizes the text window to fit the width of the displayed text. Nothing super complicated, but it's easy to use and works well, and that's all you really want out of a utility function.
The second part is a port of the Atari 8-bit game Creepy Caverns to Verge3. I never quite finished it, with the sound effects and Megawump encounter in particular being noticeably absent, but it's otherwise functional and playable and even has a few minor enhancements, like extra checking during map generation to ensure every room is reachable, and cheat codes for testing purposes (and just playing around).
I've also determined that what I thought felt like an off-by-one error on the edges of rooms is actually just a product of processing lag on the Atari that doesn't exist to any noticeable extent in Verge3. In both, you transition between rooms upon reaching the outermost row or column. However, the Atari draws your character in that tile briefly before blanking the screen while loading the next room, whereas the Verge3 port transitions so quickly that you never see yourself reach the outer tile, so it feels like you're leaving the room a tile early. I've since added enough of a slight artificial delay on room change to see yourself move to the edge and make the transition feel more "correct".
For comparison, you can watch some gameplay of the original Creepy Caverns game here: https://youtu.be/QwdY9g87USg
And, for the record, Anthony Ramos was 16 when he wrote Creepy Caverns, not 14, and the original does have a pause function. Space to pause, Enter to resume. No indication that it's paused except for nothing moving, though.
The textbox tech demo, as well as a few other little things I made in the engine including a random sentence generator, are available on my website, at: http://kwhazit.infinityfreeapp.com/verge2/files.html
The incomplete Creepy Caverns port, with the update to make screen transitions feel more natural, has been added since I first posted this video.
Though no longer active, the Verge website remains available at: https://archive.verge-rpg.com/
On reviewing the footage, I noticed that the recording area wasn't quite where I thought it was and some of the source code I was discussing got cut off (note to self: the title bar isn't included in window recording mode, just the window content). The full map initialization function, as mentioned in the video, follows:
void start() {
int player = EntitySpawn(10, 10, "lefire.chr");
SetPlayer(player);
}
Video chapters:
00:00 - Textbox tech demo
03:45 - Creepy Caverns port
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