Elderlore

Source: Rogue Wombat

Well, I’ve gotten as far as I’m really going to get this week.  I’ll be spending tomorrow making up for this evening on a term paper. Still, I at least achieved a walk-around demo and worldmap generator, but there are plenty of things yet to be done.

Download the demo. (Windows .exe + FreeBasic source)

What the demo includes:

• Walk around with the arrow keys / numpad (w/o Num Lock)
• Collect minerals from magenta % (mineral deposits)
• Deposit minerals into your Terrapack (the yellow &)
• Watch the map unveil as the Terrapack levels up

It does not include a message handler, so the flavor text that shows up when you boot is all you’ll get.  Just watch the status bar on the left to see changes as you harvest minerals and deposit them at your Terrapack.

I’m happy with the variation I’m getting as the worldmap expands, but I’m definitely going to have to work on it a bit.  You’ll notice different tiles and colors (for visited sectors) are used depending on the elevation and humidity of the sector.  However, the randomization I’m using required me to limit the ranges used for different tiles to show any variation at all.

Next on the docket, post-competition, is to clean up the code I’ve thrown together to get it to this demo state.  After that, I’ll work on changing the movement code a bit.  Right now it simply won’t do to add in monsters and their movement because of a bottleneck I created with a function that checks the tile the player is trying to move into.

I’m definitely open to ideas / feedback… I know this is pretty raw material, so no worries if nothing comes to mind.

Source: Rogue Wombat

Alrighty, the week is half way over, and I do have a little progress to report.  It turns out I had the beginnings of an engine developed for an old idea based on the Brother’s War series of Magic: The Gathering books.  (It was to be an experiment in a pure magic-user RL with an emphasis on area magic.)  This gave me a little bit of a leg up in preparing my walk-around engine, but not much more.

Since 7 days isn’t near enough for me and I have plenty of other things to do with my time, I had to intentionally narrow the focus of my RL.  I’m going for a smaller map size (25 x 25) with no dungeons.  The random map generation will be all overworld, and as long as I don’t put too many rocks on a single level, I shouldn’t have to worry about pathfinding.

Presently, I’m going to have a world map that is 21 x 21 sectors large.  You start in the center sector and will expand out from there as your Terrapack increases in power levels.  As I mentioned above, each sector will be a 25 x 25 tile map that includes terrain elements based on the elevation and humidity of the area.  These values are randomly generated as the map expands based on the elevation and humidity of surrounding tiles.  This means you could end up playing completely on mountain tops, or you might find your way into a valley full of springs and ponds.  I’d like to have unique vegetation tiles, but we’ll see how much time affords me to do.  If nothing else, I have good plans for continuing the project!

I’m going to start by simply populating maps with minerals to harvest.  I decided mining ore should wait for underground exploration in a version of Terraforma to be continued post-competition.  If I can get the distribution right, you should never get “stuck”.  There should always be enough minerals to keep your Terrapack powered up, but it could get tricky in later stages as new areas of exploration become farther and farther apart.

The game HUD is pretty simple.  I’m centering the display on a 640 x 480 screen and include three regions as pictured below, a status bar for player stats and inventory information, the main map area including your coordinates and the elevation / humidity of the current sector, and a sector map on the far right that will display a tile of all the inhabitable sectors with a different symbol for elevation and color for humidity.

I’m still excited about this project, and I’m happy mostly that I’m coming up with ideas for expansion after the competition.  That’s really what this was all about for me… preparing something I can develop over the course of the next year until the next 7DRL.  Hopefully I can still implement combat before time’s up, but I won’t hold my breath. 

Source: Rogue Wombat

I decided to throw my hat in the ring for this year’s 7DRL on a whim.  I’ve read about it in the past and played various 7DRL’s, but I’ve never considered writing one.  I have a hard enough time finishing projects when there aren’t any time limits!  As I said in my announcement post, I’m quite sure I won’t come close to finishing, but that won’t stop me from starting!

Originally, I didn’t have a name, just a vague idea that I wanted to play around with a continually expanding game map through a Terraforming theme.  I’ve scrapped the idea of a wrap-around world, as it doesn’t make sense conceptually.  Here’s the basic idea of my new work in progress, Terraforma:

Your cruiser landed on the planet Aegon weeks ago and set to terraforming almost immediately.  Within days, settlers were venturing out from the cruiser to the edges of the newly inhabitable planet surface.  They carried with them Terrapacks, experimental lightweight terraforming devices that operate remotely in tandem with a mother generator.  When placed on the edges of inhabitable land, they apply biodiversity algorithms to the forming in their particular areas.  This allows new regions to open up with unique flora and fauna.  Detached from the mother generator, Terrapacks can only operate 12 hours on battery power.  As such, they’re designed to take advantage of solar power and in the absence of light to turn the nutrient rich soil and ores of the host planet into power.

About 6 days ago, the mother generator when silent.  The Terrapacks continued in earnest but were separated from the guiding artificial and human intelligence from the cruiser.  The skies became clouded with ash, leading you to believe the worst has happened to your spaceship.  Still, you have to make your way back somehow to find out exactly what went wrong.  Unfortunately, you have to keep your Terrapack operational to stay alive and cannot venture beyond its boundary of habitable land and atmosphere.

What creatures and surprises await as you feed it the planet’s minerals and ore to stay operational?  What will an isolated Terrapack dream up to populate its new planet?  You’re about to find out…

Details on gameplay:

• You start with a single 15 x 15 map screen, your Terrapack at the center.
• You have to harvest minerals / ore and carry them to the Terrapack to keep it powered up and to expand its reach to open up new territory.  This leveling up results in new screens being opened on a random edge of the inhabitable area at the rate of one additional screen per level of your Terrapack.  (i.e. it starts at level 1, so powering it up to level 2 will result in the exposure of 2 new inhabitable areas to search.)
• Screens may include dead settlers you can loot for gear, other working Terrapacks you can network with, food and water as created by your Terrapack, and caches of minerals / ore that you have to harvest.
• The type of terrain on new screens will be random but based on the bordering screens.  I’m going to use ideas from the map generation of Realm of the Mad God and determine terrain based on elevation and humidity.
• Higher level generators populate screens with more powerful monsters. Yay!
• To that end, the gear in the game will include weapons, healing items, and technology items.  There will be nothing to wear, so I won’t have to bother with complex inventory programming or UI.
• Eventually, your cruiser will appear on a screen.  It will be randomly placed at a distance of at least 7 screens from your starting Terrapack.  I won’t give away any endings just yet, but you’ll find out what went wrong and then receive an end game score based on your performance in the game.

And now let’s see if I can’t work up a little map generation!