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[rszrama]

Outpost is the W.I.P. name of a project I'm speccing out for the FBGD Gameplay Combo Competition.  The parameters of the competition are simple: combine two or more styles of gameplay into a game, with higher scores awarded to games that integrate the styles instead of just providing a sequence of mini-games.  I'm currently speccing out a combination platformer / city-building strategy game, inspired a bit by BoF 2's city-building side quest and by the world of Midkemia created by Raymond Feist.

Status: Planning stages, engine development (see below)

Screenies: Obviously none yet

Programming info: FreeBasic, likely using HGE

Overview:

My working name of the game is simply "Outpost", and you will play a squire in the court of some duke.  You have previously distinguished yourself as an able administrator and adventurous spirit, so the duke sends you off to establish an outpost on his frontier. With some luck and good leadership you should be able to grow it into a bustling city of commerce / culture / whatever-fits-your-fancy in the hopes that you will be promoted to a court baron and awarded the land around your outpost as a hereditary estate.

I'm on the fence between a Metroid style world where you can explore anywhere you are able to complete missions in the platformer levels and a more linear Mario style world.  I want the missions to have some bearing on the general story of the game (i.e. go save this guy so he can help you build your outpost), but given the timeline I'm not sure I'll be able to do enough level design to make it interesting.  Definitely interested in feedback on this... one thought I had was to keep definite stages representing areas along the frontier but revisit them in later missions with differences in the level itself and in your character's physical abilities.

For the city building strategy part of the game, you'd use resources and personnel gained in the platformer levels to build up some aspect of your city.  I haven't figured out how time will progress yet, but I think it will have to do with how long it takes you to complete the platformer stages.  The personality of your various workers will affect how much work they get done while you're away, how good they are at staying on task, how much initiative they take when they've gotten to the end of your explicit instructions, etc.  I'd like to see NPCs have unique names / sprites / personalities, with attributes like Initiative, Endurance, Creativity, etc. and specialists like Soldiers, Engineers, Architects, Artists, etc.  Common laborers can perform well under different specialists, so it behooves you to assign personnel wisely to build the kind of city you want to create.  I'd like to have multiple winning scenarios for the different types of towns this can create.

Feedback on the concept, ideas for the back story, and types of specialists / influences they have on your city building would all be most welcome.  I'll keep the thread updated as I work.

Outlook: I doubt I'll accomplish a complete game by the time the competition ends on January 17th, but I should at least get a platform game engine out of this with a proof-of-concept split gameplay.  If what I get accomplished is looking half way decent, I'll keep working at it once the competition is over.

Engine status: I have a barebones platformer engine here needing some testing on various systems.  It uses HGE, so it's Windows dependent, but I'd love to see if anyone on Linux can run this in Wine and I'ma give it a shot in a VM on my MacBook later.

Download: Outpost (dev-2)

[James Edward Smith]

You talk about getting resources from levels to build your city with (materials, people, etc.), I think it would be interesting of the inverse were true too.

That is to say, development of your city gave you tools to use in levels too. Like, your city finally gets a horse stable, now you can have a horse in levels. You have a bowyer in your town now making arrows, you can shoot those arrows in levels.

Those are just two really first thing that came to mind sort of ideas stuff could be more interesting than that of course.

[rszrama]

Ahh, good call. The thought had crossed my mind in relation to using the same set of levels on multiple missions once your developed skills or something that would make new areas accessible.  Figured it could be an opportunity to bring an artificer or enchanter to town... get a pair of boots that let you jump higher or something.  I like the bow / arrow idea as well.  Not sure how easily I can find sprites riding a horse, though.

[James Edward Smith]

Well, you could do all sorts of things.

Having a school of meteromancers in your town lets you change the weather if you give them enough gold, changing stuff in levels by drying up poisonous swamps or flooding dry rivers and moving a boulder that previously blocked progress.

Building a trade depot makes traveling merchants appear in some levels when they are on their way in or out of your town allowing you to buy items in levels now.

A siege factory in town lets you call for catapult support in levels.

A library in town lets you click on creatures and other objects in levels to be given a little information panel about them.

[Bander]

Great idea! I've had thoughts about a game almost identical to yours before.
Kinda like Act Raiser done right!

Wich city-building/ strategy games inspire you?

[rszrama]

I'm anticipating city building being fairly hands off, where you're more providing direction than performing actions in real time. In that regard, I don't have a great amount of games I've played like that for inspiration, but the idea was roughly inspired by the city building side quest of Breath of Fire 2 and an awesome strategy game called Majesty (although that's more hands on). That isn't to say city building can't be beefed up once the competition ends, but I'll be working on a tight timeline until then.  

Also, fun ideas, Geo.  I was drawing up a list of specialists I'll introduce in the competition version, and the businessman was definitely one of them.  I didn't think about the idea of merchants coming to trade being visible on stage maps, but that sounds like an awesome idea.

Recruiting different types of magicians to assist in levels sounds like a plan, too, perhaps in the form of talismans or other artifacts you can use on levels.  Will tease that out some more. I'm drafting my thoughts in a Google Doc started last night. Let me know if the link doesn't work: http://bit.ly/c8k5fW

[rszrama]

Added a download link to the OP for a dev version of the platformer engine. I don't have any experience w/ HGE cross-platform, so I'm wondering how it fares on versions of Windows newer than XP and on Linux w/ Wine or other VMs.

[rszrama]

New build, Outpost (dev-2) linked in the original post.

Added a new development build with improved collision checking and more terrain tiles.  Unfortunately I don't have map layers yet, so my trees have to float on top of the grass at the moment.  I need to change the way I'm loading and storing tilesets (i.e. instead of trying to keep every tileset in memory, just use the active map's tileset) and decide what to do about the game screen.  There's too much vertical space for the tileset I have at the moment, at least.  I may end up restricting the viewport artificially and/or with a HUD.

I can slice and dice an image into any number of tiles, so the next thing will be to get a little map editor going instead of these DATA statements in my main source file.

I did include the source this time if anyone wants to poke around.

[yokomeshi]

This sounds like it'll be amazing.  An interesting twist might be that, aside from your main, central town area, your people will expand out into what used to be wilderness -- once you've done all the available missions in an area or fought a boss or something, you've driven back the monsters enough that somebody will come out and build a house or shop there.  This could be one way to help secure resources, as well as to reuse areas that would otherwise get boring.

For example, if you find a cave containing iron ore or something, at first you have to go in and get it yourself, fighting monsters the whole way. However, after you do so a couple of times (and it starts to get repetitive) you'll get a mission to go down and slay the giant purple slug demon or whatever at the bottom.  Doing that will prompt some townspeople to offer to convert the cave into a mine and provide ore (and further missions for you, of course).

[rszrama]

Oooh, interesting ideas, yoko. I like the idea of opening land for building through expanding your sovereignty... at this stage I'll probably have to make it a number (i.e. your city covers X acres with pacified lands reaching an additional X acres in any given direction), and instead of allowing for platformer exploration through the whole town perhaps incorporate outlying farms, mills, etc. into some of the levels.

I might have to include the mine adventure in the story - was kind of at a loss as my platform engine developed as to what kind of missions it'd be good for.