The Adventures of Fred, Jane and Sexmachine #html5 #realtime

[siob]

After a period of lurking I am finally working on a project that might be to your liking. Though, I'm not sure it's a rogue (yet). You decide

This is what I aim for:

   * tactical fighting, melee & ranged
   * grand story with hand-made maps and non-interactive dialog-system
(you are setting up situations & the characters react. This is more of an atmosphere thing then a game mechanic)
   * harvesting, barricading, burning integral parts of game
   * the current, crude graphics style will probably stay and be slightly enhanced
(I want all items and concepts to be visible so either ASCII or this. All items are visibly attachable to the characters)
   * lots of fun and unique items and enemies that tie into the story
(but probably not more then say 100. I need to tune & balance them :|)
   * html5, playable in all modern browsers
(currently works best in Chrome)


Why, yes.. i have heard of the awesome http://roguesurvivor.blogspot.com/

update edit: forgot the most important link: here you can play the tech demo

As you can hopefully tell I want to work on a story game. I never did a game were the story was of any significance and this time I hope I can merge mechanics and story really tight. If necessary I'll limit the rogue-ness and do less items (I already have only a couple of maps planned and no PC what so ever).

I am think about a couple of things right now:

Does the stat system make sense? I, äh, read a lot of stuff linked from the Wikipedia RPG stat pages and this is what I came up with:

Code: [Select]

Two layered skills system
you can upgrade the base attributes once leveling up. the derived skills are, well, derived by some magic formula from the base attributes and can additionally be influenced by carried items.
base attributes
   * dexterity
   * intelligence
   * strength
   * vitality
derived skills
  * max health points (health slowly re-generates)
  * attack speed
  * attack range
  * attack damage
  * movement speed
  * item harvesting speed
  * puzzle solve speed
  * barricading speed

Should I tell the player the magic formula, how base attributes influence derived skills? The items list all the  skills they change. I have an upgrade screen, it looks like this. If he clicks on a skill i could just show with attributes it depends on (oh, and btw i want this game to continue to "work" with a touch interface. it should at least be playable, must not be pleasant).


you get 3 attribute points after surviving another level. distribute them amongst your squad.

What is missing is, I think, a world screen. A city, overview map with markers. You click the marker, your squad goes to that level. That would also give the levels and the game some background: your squad is, me thinks, usually living somewhere safe but only "deploys" to the levels when necessary. kinda like in XCom:UFO, everyone went crazy over that (I have zombies. so even cooler).

And I need inventory management. The players must be able to put the items they found into a safe in their home base. Now that I write that down, it would be pretty awesome to have all the players on the server have a market. That should be easy. Turn based bidding or just plain buy / sell prices. that would also instantly make harvesting and barricading more sensible to do and spend valuable ammo on and time on....

Awesome idea lol, now I don't want to keep writing that post.. sorry, I'll be back

ps.: update, well at least I added the images
pps.: also i found this image and it reminded me that i wanted to talk about the easy art-pipeline & general content-pipeline i have .. which i hope helps me finish this one. one image for that would have been:


different monster types. those are for a highway level.

ppps.: and to defend the strange "the story is important" notion i wanted to write more about that. I think, like everyone after minecraft, we should strengthen the user created story by providing good story possibilities and, me thinks, some stock scenes, good characters with duke nukem like rememberability (but less nude and.... more art! definitely going to put int some art. Also:


ALIEN LEGACY YEAH!

[getter77]

Slick doings with an eye-catching name---nifty.      Definitely keep at this and have it chock full of character.

[Z]

By reading the title I thought this was spam (apparently spambots have recently found a way through recaptcha and there is a new wave of them in the Internet).

[siob]

mh, i changed the title. didn't expect the nickname "sexmachine" to be so troublesome.... it's a a movie reference.

[jim]

From Dusk 'till Dawn, the first Rodriguez/Tarantino retro opus, later to be more fully explored in the magnificent Grindhouse!

[siob]

From Dusk 'till Dawn, the first Rodriguez/Tarantino retro opus, later to be more fully explored in the magnificent Grindhouse!

and back in the title it is.

SM> What's your name, girlie?
K> Kate. What's yours?
SM> Sex Machine. Pleased to meet you, Kate.

[siob]

Ok, the item trading idea was bad. Forget it. Back to singleplayer.

Yesterday, I went through the rogue definition and this gave me a hopefully better (and certainly much simpler) idea: the detailed description after a players death. What I could do is make a screenshot of how of the safe-room and the characters last looked before death. All those shots, branded with the players name, will be put onto the frontpage of the game... kind of like an abituary. Plus this makes decorating that room worthwhile for players

I'm currently thinking about that a lot. What's the minimum thing I need to add to make that game worthwhile for someone else: I think something like a high-score or some kind of persistancy is certainly needed.

Anyhow, let's go over the checklist:

High Value Factors

× Random Environment Generation
Nope, I want to tell a story and need control over what the player sees and experiences. At least to a certain extent. But: levels are built with the awesomely easy Tiled <mapeditor.org>. And the output format is easy. So procedural content is not totally out of the question. Never tried that for maps. I know you guys like PC

✓ Permafailure (including Permadeath)
Definitly. You die. You are dead. You won't even be able to re-use the nicks for your characters.

× Turn Based Interaction
Certainly not, I want some kind of twitch. Micro ftw! I've been playing a lot of Company of Heroes lately to get more inspirations. I understand now, that mouse control needs to be finer. Currently you can only move your squad to a certain tile (though it is *moving* smoothly "between" tiles). But the current fight skills (attack speed, movements speed, damage dealt) require that the player have pixel perfect control over where the character is and where he goes - else the effect of movement speed is dwarfed by the fact that the characters move on straight lines from tile center to tile center.

✓ Single command set
If you are not "outside" fighting zombies you will be in your safe-room. And that safe-room is really just a small level like all the others but without monsters (so you can store all your precious loot).

× Free form
Unfolding a story. Sorry. You don't get new abilities or anything. And you can probably visit all levels from the start but the levels change and some characters only appear after something else happened

✓ Discovery mechanics
Certainly! I can do very obscure stuff with my current setup.

Middle Value Factors
× Single player
No. We have Fred, Jane and Sexmachine. Story with only one big character would be tougher to make interesting, I figured.

✓ Plenty of content
The fine print says '24 monster and item types'.
I have 29 item types already (to my own surprise). And I have 8 base 'monster races' - so 3 each... sounds doable. I already got plenty of fitting monster graphics from opengameart!

× Complex non-trivial world and object interactions
Would love to have that. But currently don't see how. Because of another constraint: if possible the game should be a one button game: mouse clicks all the way down. Each item has one usage, maximum I can see now: 2.
And the only 'item world interaction' I have is that fire-mines set stuff on fire

Low Value Factors

× High ramped difficulty
Nope, probably not. But you must already know about RPG conventions of course.

× Monsters are players
Yes, the are player actors but the AI is so bad, currently, that I want to say: no. Will change! I got good crowd and AI life skillzzz

× Character-based display
*cough*I so hope webGL takes off*cough*

✓ Hack and Slash
Indeed. Why is that not a High Value Factor?

[jim]

Take this with a grain of salt, but I'm probably going to stay away if it's an RTS. I loved X-Com, but I feel like I'm going to have an epileptic fit whenever I see someone skilled playing starcraft. For me, turn-based, or something close, is an absolute must for strategy games and roguelikes. For twitch action, I can get a better fix (with fewer headaches) with a gamepad, console, and my used copy of Demon's Souls. Bummer for me I'm sure you'll still have a big audience without me, though

[siob]

Hehe, I get it. It's a strange combination. Twitch and tactics don't really mix. Or you don't often see them together. But tactics is certainly what makes rogues attractive.

So hm. Yeah. How I see it:

FJSM is too ugly, slow and complex for a casual game.
But might be, in parts, too twitchy and "colorful" (i'm posting in a white on black forum ) for rogue-fans.

But: You aren't fighting all the time. And it's only the fights that are stressful... and it's not like you have to build a base, while doing all this, and queue your production and all that stuff you have to do in RTS.

You need to Micro in Combat (*only* in combat): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromanagement_(computer_gaming)#Combat

[siob]

I might end up with some procedural content after all. The following is not-yet-coded brain-gooo.

Carefully modeled PC (maybe different kind/technique of PC per map(s)) to give the story an ever changing surrounding.

For the first couple of maps I'll need NPC Camps. Those have rest and harvest areas and a couple of NPCs doing the harvesting, resting and fighting (as we will see later).

Vienna, Inner City
The collectors. Harvest wood from the cathedral. They follow orders but mine not for long. They don't like being disturbed. They take food for ammo, any food!
The Voluzers. Hiding in the parks. Actively attacking the harvesters. We saw them kill. They say they defend the city. They appear... they probably *are* the actual remains of The Law in this city.
 -- SexMachine

Well and *who* harvest exactly *what* *where* ... that's up to the game.

Up to you is the part where you decide whether to protect the Harvesters, help the Revoluzzers or stay out of it. The difficulty of those paths depends a lot on who is where, having access to which items, etc.

So I hope the introduced PC should make a big difference in how the story plays out for the player (might even force a variant on you if you are not strong enough to go against the likely outcome).

Vienna, Inner City Border
I don't know why I have the weapons but... I know this parking lot?!
 -- Fred

The first map will introduce the first two of our heroes. Fred and SexMachine.

Fred is a confused kid with a bag of weapons on his back.

SexMachine gets the amnesia-treatment but it seems no mystery what his life was like. The only reason he sticks with Fred is, well, there seems to be no one else around. Like nowhere, no one.

edit: yeah and I updated the tech demo, if you haven't tired that in a while you might want to: http://gamejs.org/apps/rtsimple/