Expedition v0.1.7 released!

[Slash]

Hello all!

Slashware Interactive commemorates *200 years of the Independence of Colombia* with a new release of Expedition!

Download from here: http://slashie.net/page.php?27

Youtube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WdWnlJGyqc

Version 0.1.7 brings the following changes
* You can now have audiences with the Catholic Kings, and gain titles and maravedíes from them
* Your ships now deteriorate in your trips, but you can also repair them using Carpenters
* Supplies from Spain shops have been increased to enable long term success.
* Many other small fixes!

Pictures:
About to embark: http://slashie.net/share/expedition017-1.png
Talking with the Kings: http://slashie.net/share/expedition017-2.png

Your comments are welcome!

[jim]

Holy hot damn, Slash! This looks really interesting. So this is like a Conquistador / Trading sim? What a wonderful idea. Dealing with the complex difficulties of sailing (taking measurements, tacking, buy a timepiece and check longitude) and ship maintenance (cleaning bottoms, materials used in construction, wanna sail at full speed / with all sails unfurled? hope you can afford some new spars!) would be exciting in itself, and when you add in the richness of the time period, I find myself getting really excited.

How far along with this are you?

[Slash]

Yeah, this was my entry for 2009 7DRL Challenge... I haven't worked on it for a long time until this month, when I decided it was finally time to push on...

It won the Slashie.net March Powerpoll ( http://slashie.net/powerpoll/march2010.png ) so I'm technically about 5 months late

Yes, this is a roguelike based on the ancient game, seven cities of gold. It's more of a colonization thing right now, rather than trading, but it goes along nicely. I am looking forward to team up with a java developer to take this to where it belongs

Your ideas for sailing sound nice, some of these are intrinsically implemented, for instance: Dead Reckon measurements, longitude checking, and sailing speed (which depends on having a full crew to operate your ships).

I will also release a version with Oryx graphics next weekend, probably.

Would be nice to read your comments once you have played it.

[getter77]

Indeed, nice progress is nice in terms of what's listed out and the general "flow" of the latest video.  I'd reckon the Tileset version will draw some new people into it as well.

[jim]

I have downloaded and played it a few times at this point. I've got a few general impressions.

The music is neat, the concept is neat. The word to describe all I see so far is "potential." I see the potential for a vast sim that oscillates between "pirates" and "civilization" with a little DF thrown in for good measure. With the game at its current stage of development, I'm not going to tediously describe every this and that which could possibly be changed, and instead try and focus on the two main things that occurred to me as I played.

Firstly, maybe it's just because I've been reading the Aubrey-Maturin series, but the ship travel itself would have to be fleshed out a lot before I became interested in traveling by ship. At this point, I don't see a lot of difference between navigating the ship and exploring a giant blue room with very few walls. I'm no seafarer, but I do know that there's an incredible amount of work and tweaking that goes into successful sailing. Wind, tide (near shore), storms, and a host of Oregon-Trail type of situations crop up out of nowhere, out of the caprice of the sea.

I was a little confused that I could, for instance, just move my ship around by pressing the keys. That runs counter-intuitive for me. Inertia counts, the rigging counts, and so on. In general, it just feels weird to be moving around a ship with omnidirectional keystrokes. It's not like the Millenium Falcon -- it takes a TON of people to make the ship go. And we're dealing with three ships to start!

And all of this business implies a huge scale in terms of time -- at sea, weeks might go by without any particular change in activity, and then quite suddenly several pivotal decisions might have to be made in the space of an instant; say if you caught sight of an unfamiliar sail on the horizion when you were on the lee, for instance.

So to sum up this first thought/suggestion, I guess what I'm thinking is that neither the traditional temporal, nor visual, nor spatial roguelike system lends itself particular well to sea travel - that is: one click, one move, one turn, with a generic line of sight surrounding the @. So many worthwhile aspects of the adventure to be had at sea is messed up by this approach.

Now, I have a couple of speculative ideas about what might work better, but I would like to hear what you think about that first, if anything



And the second thought, much more mellow, is that I could use a more immersive and engaging online manual. I realize that this is version .1.7, or course! But for me, the process of learning the craft is a great deal of the fun. The more there is available for the player to learn *within* the game itself, the more they'll feel like a real explorer....

And if my feelings on the game seem a little, um, excitable, it's just because I love the idea and admire the work you've put in.

[Slash]

Thank you for your feedback, it's very useful!

I will start off by saying that while I don't intent expedition to become a full fledged sailing simulator, I agree some additional things are needed for sea trips to be more interesting, here's a list I have compiled, based on your input and some external sources:
* Wind: Adding wind currents that propel/hinder your ships movement
* Landing: Should be more dangerous, there could be hidden rocks that severely damage your ship on shallow beach water. May be adding landing boats
* Tides: Random variations on the ship position, stronger when near land
* Storms: Huge random variations on the ship position, loss of control, loss of precision on the dead reckon measures, massive damage on the ships and possible man-loss (specially sailors). Those could be randomly generated and seen at a distance.
* Rigging: Simplified, you can deploy sails at the cost of time and thus be faster but more prone to damage and chaos on storms
* Ship groups: It's hard to command a group of ships as an unified unit, so there's a risk of the ships crashing between themselves on storms
* Telescope: Ability to look far away (Needs Captains)

Right now the following is implemented:
* Ship speed: If you have a full crew your ship will move much faster (IIRC 1 captain and 10 sailors per ship). This includes the crew being unarmed.
* Ship damage: Your ships will be randomly damaged while on the sea, and you have to make your crew repair it, using wood. Carpenters make much better use of wood (repairing more points for the ships)

I have discussed this issue with the roguelike cabal and they generally consider sea travel shouldn't be overly complex, you could use the "idle" travelling time to think your strategy while pressing the left or right arrow (That's how it worked in seven cities of gold ).

The key here is that I want the game to remain simple on the surface, with lots of unexpected events handled behind the scenes. I wouldn't like having the trips be so complicated that you prefer to stay in Spain

About the manual, I agree... there are a lot of mechanics which are just not documented, and it would be great to have a cool looking manual with illustrations and stuff too I guess it will come in time, for now I should start writing them out in a text file at least.

You may also want to check this out: http://slashie.net/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?1277

I'm glad you like the game and I hope you can stick around to see it develop further. Thanks.

[Cymon]

Honestly, I think this need....

Hold on, lemme get my asbestos underwear on real quick.

Okay. I think this needs to be made graphical.

Now, hold on, I'm not saying anything bad about text. You know I can tolerate text a lot. But there's so much going on in this game and it's seriously so good I think you need to widen  the audience base. I want more people playing this. Honestly, the only way you're going to do that is pretty it up with a UI that folks are more used to looking at. This reminds me a lot of civilization. If others could see that I think this game has the potential for a wide audience.

[Slash]

Slash can smell the wolf Fenrir, the destructor of graphics. He is approaching

I'm halfway into adding graphics, basically looking for the simplest way to reuse the presentation layer from CastlevaniaRL. Here's a mockup of how it may end up looking

edit: yes, there's an ugly 1px offset on the tiles

[Fenrir]

An angry snarl echos down the halls of the temple. For several minutes, the sound of lupine paws galloping along stone floors gets louder and louder. Suddenly, the massive wolf bursts into the room. Fenrir glowers at Cymon with fire in his eyes and bellows.

Needs graphics? Tolerate text? Who are you to defile this sacred place with such talk? Your fireproof pantaloons will not spare you the terror of my jaws, heretic!

Fenrir's enraged visage suddenly relaxes into a smile, and the great wolf turns his head to Slash.

Love the game, Slashie!

In another instant, he snaps his head back toward Cymon with his features contorted in a vicious scowl.

[yodhe]

.... This reminds me a lot of civilization. If others could see that I think this game has the potential for a wide audience....

It looks more like "Colonisation" (the Sid Meier's original one) than Civilisation imho.

[Darren Grey]

It's a bit too similar to Colonisation I must say - makes me want to play it more than this game.  Of course this is still early days, so there's plenty of scope for improvement and branching off into other areas (for which there are already plenty of bases).

I LOVE the graphical mock-up!  Don't get me wrong, I'm a staunch defender of ASCII, but those are some seriously awesome tiles.  The normal game looks a bit too arid in ASCII, with little going on in the centre screen at times and a lot of time spent in menus or reading details.  The pretty tiles help take this in more I think, and they'd go very nicely with the music.

Of course, removing the ASCII would bring the game even further away from links to the roguelike genre, but ultimately that's not as important as making a good game.

[Slash]

I'd say it differs a bit from colonisation in that in that one you control multiple units, and colony management is much more detailed. Also, do you directly exploit the natives on Colonisation? I haven't played it a lot (have played much more civ).

If this game makes you want to play another game, then it must be Seven Cities of Gold, not Colonisation

About walking away from the roguelike genre, I think the main roguelike feature would be the "single expedition" factor (similar to the lonely adventurer), as well as the possible interactions and the random world generation*. I dont care much about adding graphics because, in the end, I will always support ASCII as an alternative, and, as you say, the most important is to have a good game


* The random world generation feature is not available in the current version of Expedition and it was even present at 7cog and thus is not to be considered a novelty

[Ex]

Slash can smell the wolf Fenrir, the destructor of graphics. He is approaching

I'm halfway into adding graphics, basically looking for the simplest way to reuse the presentation layer from CastlevaniaRL. Here's a mockup of how it may end up looking

edit: yes, there's an ugly 1px offset on the tiles

Very nice! Great work yet again, Slashie. I love the tileset, seems just about perfect for expedition. Can't wait for the next version! The current version is pretty awesome, but tiles will be really cool

[yodhe]

Most of the Colonization game is basically from a "gringo" perspective, or rather an imperialist western headset, and mostly based on historical events as seen from a Northern American WASP/colonial descendant. For example no mention of the slave trade, though there are "indentured servants".
I think with your South American cultural and historical perspective you could offer something unique, interesting, informative and fun, rather than the usual "Veni Vici Vidi" attitude.
It would also be great if it would be possible to pursue "alternative timelines", maybe a pan southern american Bolivian empire that never was. Or maybe the natives never suffered the "small pox epidemic" and could fight off Cortez and the spanish conquerers. etc etc

[Etinarg]

Very interesting game idea I also like the tile preview.