I’ll call it finished enough
Posted on 2010-10-10 19:17
So, this weekend I tried to create a game around that desktop picture I posted. My idea was to use a deadline to increase motivation, and I wanted to see if I could implement a nice platformer RTS mechanic, something I wasn’t able to pull out earlier when I tried. I guess I still didn’t quite manage it.
Anyway, since I have only 5 hours left and I’m quite fed up with the bugs of the engine, I’ll upload the thing here and let people see what kind of weird bugs they can exploit. I was left with the feeling that the engine is very clumsy and hard to use, what with the player having to do every little thing, starting from picking up/dropping items. Next time I try to approach this I’ll have to try to make the game action-based instead of character-based; by that I mean that instead of commanding every guy separately, the player would just make commands which the characters would try to fulfill, Dwarf Fortress-style.
worp
So, before linking I’ll make some kind of a summary of what I got working and what I didn’t, perhaps a pros and cons list.
* I got the base engine running, complete with felling trees, mining and simple building pieces. You can move the guys and perform everything there is to perform (which is not much, haha).
* The procedural generation part went really well, and I think it’s easy to get some really ace formations. I’m happy with my increased skills in PCG.
– From the things I planned beforehand, I didn’t get in enemies, swords, furnaces, ore and creating tools. Also I planned the characters to move with a balloon that you’d use in the beginning to select your starting place
– MMF’s bloom feature was seriously lacking so I left it out. Someone is looking at this, though, so perhaps I’ll eventually get a nice bloom and grain effect going.
– The thing is enormously clumsy and buggy. There are varying bugs with the characters being unable to walk to places, especially digging can break very easily, and trees/bushes can float in midair. Controlling the characters one by one gets tedious very fast, especially when the digging command can be applied to only one tile at once, per miner. Picking up items is hard because they’re so small, and it’s annoying to drop stuff.
– No effects whatsoever. Boo hoo, who cares.
So the conclusion is that if I want to continue this, I need to fix the bugs, and change the controlling system heavily. Currently the amount of choices available is so narrow that one can kinda manage with the clumsiness, but with a larger system I can merely think of the problems that would present itself.
Here’s the link
Controls:
Use left and right mouse button for everything.
-You can pick up stuff also by rightclicking straight to the object.
-Before doing any actions, you must select a character, so click or box-select them.
-You can also dig and cut trees by right-clicking, assuming you have the correct item.
-Mushrooms can be cut like trees (and they drop brown logs – herp derp).
-Remember that when building, the builder has to be close enough to the place you want to build – the range is about 3 tiles to every direction.
–In case you fall into a pit at the start, press F2 to retry!
-There’s absolutely nothing to do yet, you can just build walls and ladders and be cool. Try to dig through the bottom.
I had a lot of fun making this – hopefully I can fix the stupidities and get some real stuff going eventually!
What a great way to ignore my current, ‘proper’ projects! Hehe.
Tags: Games, Procedural generation