How difficult, or even realistic, would it be to re-create this game from the ground up by yourself...

Considering they recently took down the server, I doubt they'll ever do a re-master. They would've done it years ago while the game was still popular. And while I've never bothered looking into it, I think there are mods that improve the resolution of the game anyway.

If you're given ALL the artwork, I'd check back on you in 15-20 years earliest. Chances are, that you've given up much earlier than that. Even if you are quick with the basic implementation of all mechanics and content, bugfixing and testing will get the best of you. Diablo 2 was a job done by a number of professionals, and even they had shitloads of crunchtime.

Check out the Diablo post-mortem:
youtube.com/watch?v=VscdPA6sUkc

you would have to donate an entire quadrant of your life to it and people would still call it shit
it wouldn't be worth the effort without multiplayer, and if you did take on that heavy burden it would inevitably be ruined by hackers within the first week of even a demo being released, because almost all the best game hackers got their start by hacking Diablo II for fun and they would probably want to spend a couple weeks hacking your version just for the hobby
it's not worth the effort and you should just mod the game, but there are technical limitations such as with trying to build it around a higher resolution because of how things like monsters were designed with the limitations of 2000 era computing in mind

I said 10 years. We get remasters of all sorts of games from way back when all the time.

Who knows.

Just play the fucking game as it is if you want to play Diablo 2. It would take you more than 10 years to re-create it alone.

there's a reason that blizzard hasn't already dropped a remaster for Diablo II
it's obviously a giant pile of cash just waiting for them to grab, but it's not like StarCraft and you really do have to rebuild the entire game from the ground up for it to work right. no one person is ever going to accomplish this and it's going to take a billion dollar team a long time to get it right if they ever do.

Thanks for the input anons. In that case, what if I wanted to do something like one character, one act with 3-4 quests? Could something like that be done in under a year? Think something like ACT 1 up until tristram or something. How difficult would that be?
I really don't think the game would be as popular as it use to be back in the day. The genre in general isn't that popular and kids these days want to play shit like fortnite, destiny and minecraft.

You could speed it up a lot if you used the art assets from d2 and used some engine or gamedev library. It's still a fuckload of work to code the core mechanics for the game. If you want to get into gamedev then start with simple shit like breakout or asteroids. The smaller the project the more likely you'll be to finish it and then you can apply all that you've learned into the next one.

do it in Lisp, nigger

I see, thanks for the advice. It's more that it's really the only project I can think of that I'd want to do right now, not so much as that i want to break into gamedev. But I'll keep all of this in mind.

It really depends on how much planning you do, a lot of the slow downs in game development is when things aren’t planned out properly and getting new things to work becomes a chore.

With the right architecture, once you have the fundamentals in place adding new stuff should be easy.

In my experience, with an engine like UE4, programming the mechanics and stuff was easy and fun but the pumping out all the art is tedious and soul draining. good luck

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You're better off building a simple hack and slash framework on the level of din's curse.

Most people never get to make their "dream project" and even when they do it never turns out like they thought it would. I just the harsh reality of things. Gamedev requires practice just like any other expertise. It wouldn't be smart to start writing a 1000 page epic as your first book.

IMO if you rip assets and know what you're doing, you could have working menus and movement in 2 days. Ignore the others.

It helps if you're not a code monkey. If you know multivariable calculus, linear algebra, and algorithms then you can create reusable tools to increase the rate of your output.

Most people suck at creating tools they need to make their vision a reality. If you're not retrofitting game engines then you're doing it wrong.

>If you're not retrofitting game engines then you're doing it wrong.
A surprisingly large amount of people seem to think they need to make everything from scratch themselves and even if they start they never get past the "engine" part into actually making the game.

Diablo 2

Lamborgini

If you know what you're doing and you have the artwork and you don't care about multiplayer you can create a Diablo 2 clone in a few months
Remaking commerical games is a really dumb project for a beginner though, just make your own games

What takes the most time in video game development is the spit and polish. You don't need any formal math or CS training to make diablo 2. A person reasonably familiar with Unity or Unreal could essentially make the game in a month. Any time past that would be spent polishing it.

By yourself, very hard. I don't remember much math involved in the game, it was mostly designed as DnD with some collision checking for certain spells and effects.
Mechanically, the game was pretty simple, but there is a Lot of work to do to create such a huge game.

The basics of the game itself isn't that difficult to reproduce.
Having a player moving, monsters, managing the frames, casting spells, etc. The hitbox are basic shit too.
What can take some time : adding correctly every attributes, statistics of the game, every formula that made it a balanced game.
Then the rng for the maps can be difficult to get. iirc they had various prebuilt parts of the levels that they put together, that's why with time you could guess where to go (most of the time).
How they generated tiles for the floor might also be tricky. For the path in act1, you can easily notice the grass around the dirt road is fuzzy. And they basically had sets of tiles and filled the gaps wiht fuzzy tiles.

The game itself isn't that hard to code. If you want to achieve it in reasonable time, you should consider a few sacrifices :
>don't try too hard on the rng
>"draw" yourself the levels
>implement only one class, and a limited number of monsters
>don't even think about networking
>halve the number of attributes in the game at first.

try to post it here if you ever do it

Would be easy if you do it in unity and you dont do multiplayer. Just steal all the assets and plop them down in your game. There wont be any difficult code, except possibly random generation.

totally unrealistic, it might be feasible if you are 2-3 people with senior experiences in building games, and still you have high chances to do a boring shit full of bugs

but since you are a freshman and you are asking for CS and "math" concepts you have clearly no idea of what you're talking about.

>iirc they had various prebuilt parts of the levels that they put together, that's why with time you could guess where to go (most of the time).
I believe they had procedural generation going for each of the areas but they hand picked a few variants for each zone and then they'd randomize stuff like chests and shrines and shit. In the first game they had some problems with the procgen so that's probably why they chose to hand pick a set amount of working layouts.

The great thing about procedural generation is that you can make it as difficult as you want. It's fairly easy to do some basic bitch level generation but you choose how much effort you put into it and how complex you make it.

with premade blocks I'd use something like this
struct Rectangle{
unsigned x,y, w,h;
}
struct block{
unsigned model_id;
struct Rectangle rect;
unsigned state; #what directions this block can connect and if it is connected
}

and then run an algorithm that starts with a block connectable in all directions and just plop down blocks that connect, iterating over all the blocks each time until you can't place more or you dont want to anymore, at which point you can close up all connections that were unused. Obviously if the blocks dont all have the same size you can't use a uniform grid but unity has built in physics engine anyway that you can use to check if a block wont fit.

A more dynamic look might involve "digging" into some 2D array and then scanning each 3x3 cell area lets say and plopping something down that fits with whatever rules you want depending on what you got from the scan. That should give you something that looks more like Dungeon Keeper

harder than any other game, since it is the greatest game ever made.

I've actually made something that functions very much like your first example in Unity. And using physics to prevent blocks from overlapping.

Attached: procgen.webm (750x458, 453K)

what a great talk. least autistic talk ive ever seen from blizzard